THE ARCHIVES

SPECIAL EDITION--John-John At Bay

ALONE IN THE DARK (1982). I think I said before that this lady who’s about 100 years old baby-sits me, Mrs. Baumgarten. I mean, she doesn’t really baby-sit me, she just tells me to keep it down, then she goes into the kitchen and drinks Dad’s beer and falls asleep. But that’s okay, cause then I can watch one of Uncle Renfield’s videos when it’s isn’t like two in the morning or something and I can also turn up the sound cause Mrs. Baumgarten would sleep through a Gamma Ray concert. Well, this one time after old Mrs. Baumgarten had a few Michelobs and conked out, I popped in a horror video that had baby-sitting in it. I mean, it wasn’t about baby-sitting--it was about these three nut guys who escape from this nuthouse along with a killer nut guy whose face you never see. Two of the nuts are these real old actors…one of them played that Bela Lugosi in the movie about the guy who wore women’s dresses and made stinky movies and the other was that old guy who did the fist pushups at that film award thing. Anyway, the third nut is this fat guy and after the lights go out and all, he goes to these people’s house and tells them he’s the baby-sitter. Right. He looks like a baby-sitter like my Cousin Mar-goat looks like Brittany Spears. Even I would take Mrs. Baumgarten over that porky guy.   See, the nuts think the doctor whose family they visit got his job running the nuthouse cause he killed the old doctor running the place and they liked the old doctor so they want revenge—they’re nuts, like I said. Well, anyway this little girl who’s about as dumb as Mar-goat lets the fat nut in and the other two nuts, too, but nothing happens until the real babysitter and her boyfriend show up and do naughty stuff on a bed and have knives shoved through the bed and into them. That was kind of cool but it took a long time to happen. The other people in the family aren’t much smarter than the kid, cause they’re off protesting nuclear power when there isn’t any power at all! The three nuts kill other folks, like one guy by snapping his back and that was okay, but it was real short. Mostly, the three nuts just gab between themselves and then we see the doctor at work and talking to the police and it’s really kind of boring. That killer nut whose face we don’t get to see just kind of disappears somewhere in the movie, which kind of sucks. Anyway, the three nuts are about the chop up the doctor and his family and I thought I was gonna finally see something but then the stupid power comes on and the TV is on and the three nuts find out from the TV news that the old doctor is alive and all and they don’t wanna chop nobody anymore. Lame! So it’s a movie that needs a lot of fast-forwarding and the ending bites the big one. I don’t think it could have been much lamer even if old Mrs. Baumgarten had been the third nut.  

ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE (1963). Uncle Renfield has this pal, named Ron (whom everyone calls "Rondo"), who doesn't have a real job, he sells scary videos to people, which is kinda cool.  He also does some sort of "mash" or "bash" thing.  Anyway, I heard him and Uncle Renfield talking about some movie where the Japanese guys who made Godzilla also made a movie about a monster mushroom.  I thought they were kidding, but one night, when Mom and Dad went to the study and spent hours working on that income tax thing that makes Dad cuss a whole bunch, I found this tape and popped it in.  I was really burned--at first this video had a bunch of Japanese people acting like they were from Gilligan's Island, wearing those sailor caps and running this boat in the ocean.  There was lots of talky stuff, with the Japanese people moving their mouths and the words not fitting their mouths--Uncle Renfield calls this "dubbing" but I call it "dumbing"!  A lot of those Japanese guys were dorky enough to be Gilligan and one of them was mean and kinda fat like the Skipper, but none of the Japanese girls looked anything like Ginger or Mary Ann.  Anyway, they get lost on this island nobody knows about, got real hungry, and ate this mushroom stuff--the same cruddy stuff that I always pick off my pizza.  I was waiting for a monster, and all that happens is that the people get mushroom stuff on their faces, and one dorky guy who escapes tells some doctors that he ate his   mushroomy friends, and he had the stuff growing on him, too.  That was it!   I was so mad, I kicked the VCR, and the tape popped out and the TV news came on, just as Mom and Dad left the study, so I didn't get caught.  Dad was real upset about the tax thing and said the tax people are a bunch of leeches--I told him they were probably like mushroom people and he thought that was pretty good.  Anyway, unless you like eating and watching icky mushroom stuff, you ought to skip this video.

BEAST OF THE YELLOW NIGHT (1971). A long, long time ago there was this war where we fought the Japanese--you know, the people who make PlayStation and stuff, and we won but we didn’t rub their noses in it ‘cause we wanted them to sell cars and cool video games to us. One of the places where we fought was the Philippines, which is a bunch of islands where they make the bushy stuff Mom buys at Pier One. Well, they make monster movies there, too, or they used to, cause I saw one. It was the night Dad yelled at me for playing a copy of Twisted Metal that Jimmy Johnston got from Lemmy, an older kid who burns CDs for five bucks apiece, and it crashed Dad’s computer and everything. I got sent to my room where I played with my old Gameboy, so no big deal. Anyway, I felt like seeing a real gut-muncher after Mom and Dad fell asleep and I sneaked downstairs to watch one of Uncle Renfield’s videos. One of the videos had "beast" in the name so I thought I’d give it a shot. It was that monster movie from that Philippines place. It had some Americans in it but also lots of people who look kinda like Chinese but aren't, but they all spoke real good English and none of that dubbing stuff, so that was all right. In the movie, this American guy is a real jerk who doesn’t want to fight in that war I told you about, and so he’s gonna die, but the Devil pops up and says he can live and be young forever, but there’s a catch. See, this guy has to turn into this puke-faced monster and pull guts out of people and all every so often. So this was my kinda movie from the get-go. He also goes around being mean to folks and ruins their lives and is just rotten. But he likes this lady who’s married to another guy and he kinda gets fed up with being rotten and the Devil doesn’t like that. So that’s when the Devil makes the guy become the monster and he goes out and rips people up. He even turned into the monster when he was doing naughty stuff with that lady! Cool! The gore is pretty good and there’s enough that I didn’t fall asleep this time even once. It gets kinda talky when everyone is slamming the one guy for being a creep, and sometimes the Devil pops up and yaks with the guy about stuff that isn’t interesting, and some of the gore stuff is a little fakey, you know, the blood and guts sometimes look kinda like they came from a old burrito. But it’s got decent gore and lots of dead bodies and a monster that looks like a monster so overall I can say you ought to see it. Back on that war thing—in class, our teacher, Ms Fridley, said a few days later that some American general guy who she called a "fast-shist" really ran the Philippines worse than the Japanese did and when he returned to the Philippines it was bad for the people there. I asked her if the Japanese would’ve let those people make gory monster movies if they still ran things there. She made me take another one of those notes home to Mom and Dad and it was Gameboy time again. But, anyway, I’m kinda glad that general came back.

BEAST Of YUCCA FLATS, THE (1961).  Some of the guys at school really like that wrestling stuff, where men looking like they eat a couple dozen Pop-Tarts for breakfast put on dumb-looking masks and costumes and stuff and jump around like they're really fighting, only they're making it all up...though you can't tell some of the guys that cause they think its real.  I told Uncle Renfield about it once and he said one wrestler who was a real wrestler even made monster movies!  Uncle Renfield named the movies, one of which was called "Yucky Flats" or something.  One night, when I sneaked downstairs to look at one of Uncle Renfield's videos, I saw one that looked like that "Yucky Flats" movie only it was called "Yucca Flats" (why would they call a place that?).   So I popped it in the VCR.  Boy, I was right the first time...it was "Yucky Flats."  It started off with this creepy scene of this woman being treated real mean, then the whole movie changed and it's this dusty looking place, like a desert.  There's a car chase and this big old guy (he's huge!) who's also bald and looks even meaner than Mr. Fridley who's the vice principal at school and married to my teacher gets stuck in this atomic blast or something, then he's got this goop all over him and he's a monster...I think.  It's hard to tell, cause he just wanders all over this scruffy looking place, and holes up in a cave and shakes his fist a lot.  He beats up a guy and this airplane flies around chasing him, and then these two dopey kids get lost from their parents and he chases them and the dumb kids are all scared, probably cause they think the big guy's gonna eat them or something.  Everybody's chasing everybody else and it was hard to follow.  I could tell someone was talking all through the movie but I couldn't turn up the sound enough to hear it or Mom and Dad might have woken up.   I almost fell asleep myself cause there was lots of boring stuff of people climbing up and down hills and that plane flying around, and almost no killing or anything worth watching.  The kid's Dad gets shot from that plane and that was all right, but he didn't die or anything.  But, mostly, I was watching a couple people running around and not finding each other.  Finally, the two dopey kids get found and the big monster man gets killed and that was it.  After all that boring chase stuff, and there's no blood or guts or anything!  I mean, if those stupid kids could have gotten ripped apart, that would have been something at least.  I seen more blood and stuff in those wrestling shows, even if it is fakey.  This is about the lamest movie I ever saw, and although that big guy was kinda creepy looking, it wouldn't scare even my little cousins Amy and Sarah who got scared watching Sleeping Beauty that one time.  Those wrestler guys should stick to hitting referees with chairs and stuff and stay out of the movies.

BEING, THE (1983). Uncle Renfield was in the Air Force, which is kind of scary if you think about it, except that he didn’t fly any planes or anything, so it’s no too scary, I guess. Anyway, he told me once that he went on a mission or something way up North where the folks have to wear real thick clothes like on that old show, Northern Exposure, and he said he was up there once when it was always night…I mean, he said there was nothing but night. That sounds pretty sucky to me, but he said folks up there partied all the time so it didn’t make any difference. Well, I saw this video one night after Mom and Dad went to bed and it looked like it was made up North when it was always night. I mean, it really wasn’t, cause the people in the movie wore regular clothes and all, but everything was so dark you couldn’t see what was going on most of the time! I turned up the brightness on the TV and it just washed out the dark. It was just dark, period, even when things were sposed to be happening during the day! The movie is about this stupid kid who stumbles into some toxic waste at the landfill, which means he was where he shouldn’t of been, the little creep, and turns into this monster. This might have been kind of cool, except he’s about the lamest looking monster I’ve seen and he only kills people when everything is so dark you can’t hardly see any gore or guts or nothing. What’s wrong with the people who made this movie, anyway? I mean, didn’t they notice it was dark when they were making it? What’s the good of ripping people up and stuff if it’s too darned dark to even see the gore? The stuff you do see if this idiot police chief and this dopey scientist (he was played by that guy who did that Bela Lugosi thing in that Ed Wood movie) running around yakking and yakking and being too dense to figure out they’re dealing with a monster—the kind of stuff I always fast-forward through. The worst was this dumb deputy who throws fish on the sheriff’s desk and acts like that Barney Fife on that old TV show, only this guy isn’t funny and it’s about the only good thing in the movie when the monster kills him. There’s this one scene where the monster is attacking folks at this drive-in and he’s popping in and out of cars without opening the doors or nothing—how did he get that power? Or did the dummies who made this movie just forget to show him opening the doors? That’s how lame this movie is. I fast-forwarded so much in this movie and with the rest of it was so dark that when the writing at the end came up on the screen, it was like I hadn’t seen the movie at all. So I can’t recommend this movie cause you can’t hardly see anything, especially any blood or gore or rolling eyeballs and all you’ll do is probably wear out the batteries on the remote control, like I just about did.

BLACKENSTEIN (1973).  My teacher, Ms. Fridley, always sticks in the “African-American” and The Black Experience stuff in class even when the subject isn’t about black people.  The only guy who’s an “African-American” in my class, Rakeesh, hates that and he keeps telling Ms. Fridley he gets enough of The Black Experience at home and please knock it off already.  But she doesn’t.  Anyway, Rakeesh likes horror movies, too, and he asked me if there were any “African American” monsters in movies—he wanted to toss that at Ms. Fridley the next time she brought up that cultural diversity junk.  I asked Uncle Renfield, and he said sure.  He said Blacula and Blackenstein were full of The Black Experience.  So, that night I snuck downstairs and found that movie, Blackenstein.  I popped it into the VCR to get some cultural diversity.  What I got was a movie that sucked big time!  It’s one of those movies where the guy behind the movie camera can’t work the “light” button or something cause it’s real dark and murky.  And the sound was like it came from Dad’s computer when the stereo speakers blew (and I didn’t do it, either!) and he had to use that crummy speaker on the computer to hear stuff for a while.  Anyway, this crazy doc has this clinic in his basement or something and he does weird stuff like putting animal legs on people.  But this dumb woman thinks the doc is just the guy to help her boyfriend!  Even my cousin Margot (that I call Mar-goat, but not when she’s around cause she hits real hard) isn’t that stupid!  This boyfriend, who is “African-American,” don’t have no arms or legs cause of some war or something and so I guess he had to take what he could get for a doc.  Ms. Fridley says that happens to “African Americans” a lot.   The crazy doc did good at first, sticking all the arms and legs back on the poor “African American” guy, but the doc’s helper wanted the guy’s girlfriend for himself and he shot the “African American” guy full of some bad stuff.  So now the poor guy has a square head and he’s Blackenstein!  He kills this mean guy who messed with him in the hospital.  Then he goes around killing other folks for no reason except cause I guess he doesn’t like having a square head.  There’s some blood and gore, but it’s real fakey…you know, just innards plopping from folk’s clothes and stuff.  And there’s a lot of talking and talking between the gore scenes, so I just about fell asleep, which is bad cause Mom and Dad might have caught me.  I fast-forwarded the rest and it was pretty lame, the square head gets killed and all, big deal.  So, I told Rakeesh all about it and he said it just showed that cultural diversity don’t mean squat when it comes to stinky horror movies.  The next time Ms. Fridley brought up cultural diversity again, Rakeesh suggested we all watch an “African American” movie and Ms. Fridley got all excited and she asked him which one and he said Blackenstein.  Then Ms. Fridley gave me that look, and I hadn’t said nothing!  But I still got another note to take home!  Anyway, you’ll think Blackenstein sucks too, even if you’re “African American”--they need to come up with better monsters for black people, that’s for sure!

BLOOD AND LACE (1971). I don’t know about you, but I think it’s kinda creepy to see people from TV shows in scary movies, like Mary Ann From Gilligan's Island being in that movie about the town that had that killer who never got caught. It’s like, why are they there? If they wanna do scary movies, then why did they do those TV shows? Like this movie, which I watched one night after Mom and Dad got in a big argument over some girl on that Survivor show who got kicked off because she’s kind of a dummy and Mom said the men ganged up against her and Dad said she was still a dummy, anyway, and they went to bed still arguing, but finally conked out and I knew it was safe to sneak downstairs and watch a scary movie. This movie has a cop who’s that greasy guy who cooked stuff in that old show, Alice. He’s still kinda greasy in this movie cause he’s sposed to be looking for a guy who kills people with a hammer and instead he’s sniffing around this girl who Uncle Renfield said used to be on that real old show, F Troop. (What’s an F Troop?) Anyway, the girl, whose mother was killed and nobody knows who did it and she doesn’t know who her father was, gets sent to this crummy home run by this old lady who Uncle Renfield said used to be a big Hollywood actress but in this movie she looks pretty ratty. It turns out there’s this guy, some handyman, who works at the home who chases the kids when they run away from the home and chops them up and he even cuts this one kid’s hand off and that was cool, except not much blood spray. Then the dead kid’s bodies are brought back to the home and put in this freezer room, which is neat, except that they still bleed a little when they get taken out of the freezer, and some inspector guy nearly catches the old lady at it. Aside from that kid killing, though, like I said, there isn’t hardly any gore in the movie…mostly, it’s kinda creepy with the old lady storing kids in the freezer, and the girl acting weird, and the cop acting weirder. And there’s this guy with a real messed-up face sneaking around, too. It’s just all more weird than I can say, really. The girl in the movie kept wanting to run away and find her Dad and you can’t blame her. That home in the movie really sucked…you had to work like crazy there to get fed and everything in it was old and nasty. Kind of like the grade school I went to until it burned down and everyone cheered about it, even the teachers. In the home, the girl finds another girl in the cellar all tied up cause she broke a rule or something, so it’s all pretty hard core, getting tied up if you act wrong and chopping you up if you run away. It gets worse for the girl when the handyman locks her in the freezer and uses the chopper on that inspector guy. But then the guy with the messed-up face shows up and fights with the handyman and the girl gets away and the handyman and the old lady end up getting locked in the freezer and the guy with the messed-up face turns out to be the cop wearing a mask and the girl suddenly remembers it was she who killed her Mom, and then she find out the cop is her Dad…like I said, just weird. I can’t say to see this movie for the gore but if you like getting creeped out, this movie should do it. 

BLOOD FREAK (1972). One Halloween, me and Jimmy Johnston got suckered into this crummy haunted house that had some guys wandering about in phony masks trying to scare us and then we got sat down and preached a sermon on drugs. What a rip-off! This video reminded me of that when I watched it after Mom and Dad conked out early trying to watch Titanic on cable. There's this muscley guy with Elvis sideburns who rides one of those funny stretched-out motorcycles who get mixed up with two sisters--one's a Bible-thumper and the other's a druggie. The druggie gets him to smoke pot, he works for this turkey ranch (do they have turkey roundups?) where he eats this special turkey meat, and then he turns into a monster with a turkey head who hangs girls upside down and cuts their throats and drinks their blood. There's also this guy who shows up and talks about the movie from time to time--he smokes like a chimney and coughs real bad during one of his speeches. Halfway through, I figured out this was a preachy Christian movie pretending to be a monster movie. Ripped off again! They must've paid for this movie from some collection plate because it's real cheap. The gore ain't bad--lots of blood and the Big Turkey cuts off one guy's leg with a buzz saw, even. But they started preaching again at the end and ruined it all. Besides, the turkey monster head looks like something they wear on one of those crummy kiddie cable shows. When Ms. Fridley, my teacher, had a drug talk, she asked us for a good reason not to do drugs and I told her I wouldn't do drugs cause I don't want to become a turkey monster. She gave me one of those looks and a note to take home, but I kinda lost it when I went to the bathroom afterwards.

BLOODSUCKING FREAKS (1975). First off, this is no vampire movie, although I thought it was. The only sucking is where some doctor sucks a girl’s brains through a straw, but it looks like milk, and the head looks real rubbery. I didn’t get a bit scared by this movie. This crazy guy’s got a play where he does bad things to women and then does other bad things to women after the show. It’s all pretty fakey. He cuts off one woman’s fingers, only it looks like he’s cutting off a department store dummy’s fingers. He plays darts on a woman’s bottom, only the darts droop down like they’re glued there. The police and good guy are really dumb and just get killed, mostly by a bunch of naked women in a cage who eat people. I watched this while Marcie Lawson, who was baby-sitting me, yaked on the phone with her old boyfriend in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. She uses the phone so much when she’s baby-sitting me that Mom and Dad had to get call waiting just so they could check on me. They got through, finally, and I had to punch off the VCR when Marcie came in to see if I was still breathing. She looked a little suspicious that I was watching The Weather Channel but she went back to yakking on the phone and I watched the rest of this video. There was more fakey blood and stuff with the cannibal girls in the cage and then they got free. That was it. This video kinda sucks. Even The Weather Channel is better.

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR (1965).  I noticed that lots of scary movies have ladies in them and sometimes the ladies are real nice and have their clothes on, and sometimes the ladies are not very nice and don't have much clothes on, and then sometimes the ladies don't have much clothes on and they're not treated very nice.  I mean, like they're whipped and cut up and they didn't do anything, except maybe walk down a dark street or something.  Like in this movie I watch on the VCR late one night after the company finally went home and Mom and Dad got tired of saying funny things about them in their bedroom and went to sleep.  In this movie, these camera guys who want to take lots of pictures of ladies wearing weird clothes got to this castle and talk this big husky guy into let them use it.  So the guys take the pictures and the girls just pose and stuff and then the husky guts puts on this red mask and he think he's some kind of superhero or something and he just goes around doing bad things to the other people, but mainly the ladies.  Like he puts one in this box shaped like a woman with spikes in it so she gets all filled with holes, and then in this place with a big spider web, he has another lady get bitten by this real slow toy spider.   And other ladies get set on fire and have to spin like a top with knives cutting them and one lady gets smashed with chains and another gets an arrow stuck in her.  I mean, the guys get killed, too, but somehow it's like the ladies get most of the chopping and stuff and all they did was wear those weird clothes, like I said.  So, even though this movies had some blood and kinda cool and creepy things happen in it (like this dead guy driving this car in circles with an arrow in his neck and this real whiny guy who gets made into a bonfire), I felt funny watching it.  I asked Uncle Renfield and he told me the movie was for people who wanted to watch that stuff and I was too young to understand and I should be more careful what I picked next time.  I guess I will, but you can't tell much from titles, you know?  Anyway, maybe you shouldn't watch this movie unless you're a grownup and even then it might make you feel kinda funny, too.         

BEWARE! THE BLOB! (1972). When I was a real little kid and I had to go to this lame Nursery School so Mom could work at that job where she was an "executive secretary" she said but Dad says she was a "gopher," they kept pushing this modeling clay stuff at me and tried to make me make stuff out of it. I got so sick and tired of that stuff, that I’d get some big wads of that goopy stuff and use it to attack those stupid-looking Playskool wooden "people," pretending that the modeling clay was a monster that ate them up. Well, they gave me low marks at that lame place, but later I found out that I was just doing what they do in those "Blob" movies. Anyway, I came across this video in Uncle Renfield’s collection one night after Mom and Dad went to sleep after arguing about which side of the family I’m most like. I thought it would be cool to see someone use modeling clay to eat people and make a movie out of it. Wrong! Maybe the first Blob movie that Uncle Renfield talks about sometimes was okay, but this one bit. I mean, filming me attacking Playskool people with modeling clay would have been better than this movie. In it, stupid people grab the Blob where it was frozen and everything and where it couldn’t eat people no more (North Pole, I think) and bring it back here where it could get all warm and start eating people again. That makes a lot of sense. It eats this nosy kitten first and then it starts grabbing people. Some kids who aren’t as dumb as the grownups try to tell everyone that the Blob is out and gobbling folks up. No one believes them, naturally, so all these people, some of them from TV a long time ago, get glopped over and eaten by the Blob. This would be kinda cool, except the actual people-eating is lamer than Nursery School was—it’s just a bunch of red glop that covers folks and that’s it. No blood, no gore, not even a body part or nothing. There was a kinda cool part where this guy who’s a pastor or something in a wheelchair gets eaten (it’d be cool if the Blob would come to our Sunday School and eat old Pastor Wurster so we could get out early), but that’s ruined by these bunch of punk Boy Scouts who don’t get eaten. I was praying that the old Blob would swallow those creepy little punks, but no. It all ends up in a crummy bowling alley and by that time, I was hoping the Blob would eat everyone up and end the movie. The movie was made back when people wore really lousy looking clothes and did lots of drugs and mostly looked like they just got out of bed, which just made watching it worse. I know they did a blob movie later, one with pretty cool blob attack scenes, but this movie just had a bunch of red Jell-O rolling around. So, if you want to see a blob movie, go with that other one. This one isn’t even good enough for Nursery School.

CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1970). Mom and Dad don’t like to take me places cause they say I make trouble and get lost and stuff. That’s not true, but that’s what they say. Like the last time we went to Toys ‘R’ Us, I just went to the video game section like I always do and played games until the clerks kicked me out and then I tried to find Mom and Dad and they were trying to find me and they blamed me for it! So anything outdoors with rides and corn dogs and neat stuff is out cause Mom and Dad say that’s too much space for me to get lost in, which is a big rip! Anyway, other kids tell me about the carnivals they go to--riding neat rides and eating corn dogs and elephant ears and watching fat old men hurl their lunches after they ride the Big Twister and it all sounds cool. And that’s why one night real late when I sneaked downstairs and found this video in Uncle Renfield’s collection, I decided to watch it. I thought it would be fun and cool…carnivals and blood and guts! But it was really kinda cruddy, like the prize Jimmy Johnston won at a carnival that was sposed to be a real cell phone but only made cell phone sounds when you pushed its buttons. Anyway, the movie starts out okay with this lady and a guy getting on this mushy Tunnel of Love ride and someone cuts her head off and it fall off and there’s blood everywhere! That’s they way to start a movie! Even though the head is kinda fakey and the movie only shows the good gory stuff for about one second. At least it gets the gore going early. But then the movie gets into this boring stuff about this girl and her boyfriend who’s some kind of cop or something and he wants to go to the carnival to check out the killings and she doesn’t. Then there’s this guy who owns this real lame carnival game where people win crummy looking teddy bears and he has this helper whose face looks like pepperoni pizza and who whines a lot. Just like this lady who whines and whines to her boyfriend and finally gets ripped open and nice gooey guts are pulled out. It’s an okay gore scene, but you just wish it happened a lot sooner. I was fast-forwarding like crazy and finding only a few good gore scenes, like when this real mean and ugly fat lady has her tongue torn out and stuff and the pizza-face guys gets stabbed. It’s the kind of movie where you’re glad to see the people get hacked and you wish everyone in the movie got hacked cause of all the talking and yelling and boring stuff they do, like walk and walk and then walk somewhere else. Even the carnival in the movie is boring and slow. This movie would’ve been better if it was only 10 minutes, but that’s not enough time to even eat the smallest bucket of popcorn they sell at the theaters so they couldn’t do that. I guess that’s why they have fast-forward buttons. Anyway, the movie ends with the guy you thought was the killer being the killer and he dies kinda gory, but not gory enough after all the boring stuff. So this movie is no carnival and there’s not much blood and I can’t say you should see it. Instead, you oughta go to a real carnival and have a better time, which I can’t. Maybe I can get Uncle Renfield to take me to one. Do they sell beer at carnivals?

CENTIPEDE HORROR (1989). I knowed the Japanese had monsters, like Godzilla, and that rocket turtle and that big moth. But I didn’t know the Chinese had monsters til I watched this video after old Mrs. Baumgarten fell asleep one night when she was baby-sitting me. (If I get real quiet, Mrs. Baumgarten, who’s about 100 years old, always falls asleep.) Anyway, while she’s sawing logs as my Dad puts it, I turn the TV volume real low and pop in this tape. I thought it was about some giant bug, but instead it’s about a bunch of these centipedes, who get in people and the people have to barf them out. This Chinese girl goes to some place she’s not supposed to go (Uncle Renfield says it’s Tie-land), then this evil wizard sees her and puts a curse on her and she dies with centipedes crawling out of her. Her brother and a good wizard fight back and then there’s a lot of centipede-barfing and this good wizard and bad wizard whumping each other, only with magic. I kind liked it, except Mom had that spinach quiche thing for supper with the green stuff in it and when I saw all that centipede barfing, I had to go to the bathroom. I cleaned up just before Mom and Dad got back but Dad must of smelled something in the bathroom, cause he said "I don’t think John-John likes your quiche, dear." I would say what Mom told him, but I’m not supposed to use words like that. I spent about a week checking under the bed for centipedes after that movie.

CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS (1972). The title of this video really got to me when I saw it in Uncle Renfield's collection, so I watched it the next time Mom and Dad went out all dressed up and hired that gooney Marcie Lawson to baby-sit me. Her idea of baby-sitting is yakking on the phone with her dumb girlfriends, leaving me alone to watch this video. The dead things are these zombies who rise from their graves and chow down on some hippies. Some of the zombies look pretty cool, but a lot of them are just people shuffling along with white stuff on their faces--there's better makeup at the hokey haunted house they have at the American Legion every Halloween. Also, there's a lot of just talking by the hippies who are some crummy theater group or something--they think it's cool to go to a graveyard and pretend to raise dead people. Not cool, 'cause they make it happen, somehow. Watching those hippies in their stupid-looking hippie clothes (why did people dress like that back then--was it the drugs?) making corny speeches and stuff ain't my idea of a horror film--I about broke the remote control fast-forwarding through all that junk. But, finally, the zombies pop up from the dirt and have those hippies for supper. This is like a lotta zombie films I seen--you get so you root for the zombies 'cause the people are such jerks. I was hoping for some real gory gut-chomping, but there wasn't any more of that in this flick than in that old black-and-white zombie film that Uncle Renfield says is a classic for some reason. At least this flick is in color. Uncle Renfield says the guy that directed this also made Porky's--well, you couldn't tell it from this film. Anyway, if you like seeing hippies getting chomped on, this is okay to watch, I guess. I just got one question--who are the "children" in this film? It can't be the hippies...all of them are lots older than Marcie and she keeps telling me she's a grown-up, even though she's only in the tenth grade.

CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIETOWN (1989). All of a sudden, there’s all these shows on TV about fat guys building motorcycles and stuff and yelling at each other on those cable channels where they used to have boring stuff like how old some trees are and junk. My Dad watches those shows and also the ones about how guys build hot rods by ragging on the help a lot. Mon doesn’t like those shows at all and she lets Dad know it by getting up from the couch and disappearing for a long time when those shows are on TV. I think they’re kind of cool, especially when they rag on each other, and the bikes and cars are okay, too. So when I saw this video in Uncle Renfield’s collection, I watched it one night after Mom and Dad decided to go to bed mad at each other for once and finish yelling at each other in the morning. They still did some yelling after their bedroom door closed, so I had to wait a while before I could sneak downstairs and pop this video into the VCR. The movie’s about these biker women who like to ride motorcycles and wear tattoos and act tough and just hang around each other. I don’t know if they’re like that "L word" show, but I wouldn’t be surprised, even those they hit on some guys, too. Anyway, they come to this crummy little town where the folks for some reason are making their dead relatives live again with some stuff they get from a mine—only, the dead relatives are now zombies and they want to eat their live relatives. So when the zombie relatives march into the town, the biker women join up with these blind orphans who live in town, too, and they do some serious damage on those zombies. What I like about this movie is that the biker women attack those zombie with cool weapons I’d use myself if I had to take on a zombie—clubs, and machine guns, and dynamite, and they even use a staple gun! What’s weird is that this normal guy wants these zombies around and even gives the zombies guns…but the zombies are lousy shots, so the biker women don’t have much to worry about. In the end, the biker women and the blind orphans get the zombies trapped in the church and blow it and the zombies into dust—that’s about the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. There’s some stuff I didn’t like, though—the zombies looked pretty raggedly, like they were made up in about two minutes apiece and they kept playing this retarded music, trying to make it all funny when it wasn’t. But there’s lots of good blood and gore, with lots of heads and arms getting ripped off and bullets tearing up bodies and real entertaining stuff. So I can recommend this movie. And if you like motorcycles without fat guys around, you’ll really like this movie.

C.H.U.D. (1984). I got creeped out one time when I started the shower going in the bathroom and stepped in without any clothes on and all, and this stupid old spider jumps out of the drain and Mom still says I screamed, but that’s a lie, but it did kinda scare me, like I said. I remembered that when I picked this funny title for a movie from Uncle Renfield’s collection of videotapes he keeps here cause he has no room in that firetrap (that’s what Dad calls it) he lives in and popped it into the VCR after Mom and Dad finally went to bed one night. In this movie, this girl takes a shower and sees that the drain isn’t working and she pokes into it and a lot of blood flies everywhere. That’s kind of yucky, but nothing compared to a spider coming at you, boy. Anyway, this is a movie about a bunch of bums who live in a sewer and become these mutant zombies who run around and chop up people and eat them, which is cool, cause it means blood and gore. The government is dumping this toxic waste in the sewers, see, and it’s what makes the bums go ballistic and eat people. That C.H.U.D. thing means "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers," which really means bums who eat people raw. The cops are all mixed up about what’s happening, of course, they always are in these movies. So this one cop that the other cops won’t listen to, and a nosy photographer, and one of the bums with an attitude (well, he hands out soup to the other bums) go out and scope out the thing. A lot of the movie takes place in the sewers, which is okay, but it does get kinda dark sometimes and you can’t see all the good gore and stuff. One cool thing is that when the normal bums get sick and tired of being eaten by the mutant zombie buns, they go and arm themselves, which is what I would do but you almost never see people do this in horror movies. But those mutant zombie bums are pretty powerful and they even get out of the sewer to munch on people on the streets and they get blown up and stuff and it’s pretty cool. The best part is that this movie has plenty of blood and guts being pulled out and all the neat things that horror movie should have in them—heads get ripped off, this one bum gets torn in two with all the guts dripping and dangling and legs and arms get pulled out—you know, a real quality film. There were parts of this movie where people just sat around and talked and talked, which I hate, but I just used the fast-forward button. One cop who gets killed was played by the fat guy who played the father in that old Roseanne TV show, but I didn’t know anyone else who was in the film. So I definitely can say to see this movie and if that shower thing creeps you out, just remember to turn the shower on first and wait to see if anything crawls out and then step in. It works for me.

CORPSE GRINDERS, THE (1971). My Aunt Cloris lives by herself in a place called Fee-nix, which is out in the desert somewhere, cause of her sinuses, or something.   Anyway, she's kinda funny in the head and she keep around a million cats.  Mom and Dad just hate to visit her, cause of the smell and everything...Mom says even the dry cleaners can't get the cat hair our of her clothes afterwards.  So it was really kinda creepy when I sneaked downstairs to watch this tape late one night just after we visited Aunt Cloris.  In this movie, these creepy guys make cat food by putting dead people in this painted cardboard box with a bunch of flashing lights and they get all ground up to pieces and the pieces are the cat food.  It's sposed to be cheaper than horse meat or something.  Anyway, the cats eat the corpse-food and they go crazy and begin attacking people!  Man, I just thought about all of Aunt Cloris' cats eating that stuff and going for Aunt Cloris.  She wouldn't last a minute--she's got one old gray Tabby who inhales a whole can just by himself. Anyway, that would have been neater than anything in this movie.  The corpse grinding box looks like the phony computer we made for science class (and got graded a "D" cause it was just Jimmy Johnston inside, working the lights), and the glop that comes piling out of the grinder looks like hamburger and catsup (get it--"cat"sup?), and the cats look like they're being thrown on folks with some phoney looking blood tossed in, too.  There's a lot of talky scenes between this doctor and nurse (fast forward time) and all the scenes look like they were made in someone's house and basement.  Even the bad guys going to a graveyard to dig up more cat food isn't scary.  So I can't say you should see this, unless you got an Aunt Cloris too, who you don't like very much.  Cool title, though.  

CREEPING TERROR (1964).  You know, sometimes I think I can make as good a movie as some of those Hollywood guys...just with me and Jimmy Johnston and his Dad's camcorder. This movie convinced me I could!  The title sounded good, so I stuck it in the old Sony one night when Mom and Dad went to bed early cause they tried to paint the kitchen.   They won't let me help cause they say I'll get paint all over myself, but when they got done, they looked like they painted themselves instead of the kitchen.  Dad says it's time to try wallpaper.  Anyway, this is one of those old black-and-white movies before there was color TV.  That's bad enough, but it's got this guy talking through most of it--I gotta turn the volume low anyway cause Mom and Dad might hear, so I couldn't hear most of it.  This crummy looking spaceship lands, kind of like a tin plate that someone dropped, and this monster crawls out--and it looks like that old shag carpet Mom made Dad rip out of the family room.  They got people under the carpet, pushing it around--you can even see their shoes and all!  Didn't the camera guy notice this?   The carpet thing moves around in the woods and gobbles people up--but it moves so slow that people have to just lay there and wait for it to gobble them up.  I bet one lady waited five minutes to get eaten!  The rug crashes this party with music like they had on that old Happy Days show, and guys with haircuts like Richie in the show--I didn't see the Fonz anywhere, though.  The monster gets them to lie on the floor and get gobbled up, too--you can see one lady's stockings and all when she gets dragged into the carpet thing.  Some scientist guy who's always in these movies and a sheriff guy kill the monster and blow up the tin spaceship.  I fast-forwarded a lot and this movie still made me sleepy--maybe it was paint fumes from the kitchen.  I can't say to watch this movie unless you want to watch people push an old carpet around.   Me, I'd rather paint the kitchen.

CURIOUS DR. HUMPP, THE (1967). I really don’t get all this stuff about sex. To me, girls are just a pain, mainly, they don’t wanna do what you wanna do and then tell on you when you do what you wanna do. So who needs them? I mean, I know they gotta be Moms someday and stuff, but they keep popping up everywhere. Like, how come all these horror movies got to have all these girls and sex and stuff? Isn’t some cool blood and gore and poking out eyeballs enough for people? I’m asking this cause a few nights ago, I sneaked downstairs after Mom and Dad went to bed and watched this video from Uncle Renfield’s collection. It coulda been an okay horror movie, but it keep sticking in all these naked girls and people doing sex and stuff. It’s started out okay with this creepy guy snatching some folks, but when he snatched these two girls, first they gotta be slobbering over each other (it really makes me feel creepy to see that). Then he snatched these longhaired gooney-looking people and they gotta go slobbering over each other first—and when he snatches a lady and she has to take her clothes off first. For a horror movie, this video is full of folks slobbering over each other and taking their clothes off. The monsters that’s snatching all these folks looks pretty cool and creepy, except that’s he’s got some dorky light blinking in his head. So all these people get snatched away and the cops can’t figure out what’s going on (they never can). But some newspaper guys somehow gets a clue and finds out about this mad doctor. Well, that’s cool, a mad doctor--except his experiments are all about naked ladies and sex and stuff! What’s that got to do with monsters and gore and the stuff that oughta be in a horror film? I don’t know. I never figured out what was going on in this film. Like the Doc’s got this lady assistant like a nurse who says to him to take her body to help him, then she goes around and helps the kidnapped people escape and all. The monster guy mainly just sits around and plays this guitar thing like that creepy kid in the Seventh Grade who does that stuff at recess and the girls all think he’s hot. I mean, a monster oughta be out ripping out guts and stuff. And nobody in the movie has a hump, not even the Doc! I got so fed up with all the naked bodies and no gore that I fast-forwarded most of the movie. I complained about it to Uncle Renfield and he wasn’t much help, as always. He said there wasn’t sposed to be any humps in the movie, that it was a "play on words," but I didn’t get it. He also said this movie was made in South America, although no one spoke any Spanish in it, and he also said most of the undressing and sex stuff was added later. I guess they added that stuff cause this sure isn’t much of a monster movie. Even at the end, when the cops shoot up just about everyone and the Doc gets acid in his face and some brain in a jar blows up, it’s all kinda lame. Maybe all that sex stuff is lame, too, but I guess I’m too young to know that. What I do know is they you need to make a monster movie or a take-off-your-clothes movie, but not one that’s both. So, I can’t recommend this movie, unless you like all that sex stuff. Uncle Renfield says I will some day but somehow I don’t think this movie will look any better to me even then.

CURSE OF THE CANNIBAL CONFEDERATES (1982). I don’t like school much, especially when Ms. Fridley, our teacher, starts yakking about history—she always makes it sound real boring and somehow we’re all supposed to feel guilty or something about what happened a long time before we were even born. Well, one time she got on about the Civil War, when people in the North wore blue and people in the South wore gray and they shot each other over black people picking cotton…or something. Even though there was a lot of shooting and killing in the Civil War, Ms Fridley made it all sound real stuffy and dull. Anyway, it was right after that when I sneaked downstairs late one night to look at a horror movie from the video collection that Uncle Renfield has stashed at our place. I noticed this video and figured if there were cannibal Confederates, then maybe the Civil War wasn’t as boring as Ms. Fridley’s lectures made it seem to be. So I popped the video into the VCR and watched it. Well, this video must have been made during the Civil War—it looked worse than the old home movies of Mom and Dad wearing bell-bottoms and stuff. I mean, this movie was like almost black and white, the color was almost gone from it, with big blotches showing up like someone sneezed on it—and most of it was so dark than you could hardly tell what was happening and the movie sounded scratchy like that old stuff they play at the church sometimes…you know, those big old CDs they call records. It was sposed to be about these people who are sposed to be hunting or something in the woods but instead do a lot of talking outside of their camper or go walking in the scrubby woods and do some more talking—a lot of talking, so much that I think I fast-forwarded almost the whole movie. Finally, they find this old church and graveyard and then a box with a Confederate flag and a book in it. They read out of the book and then these zombies who are sposed to be Civil War soldiers but look like live people smeared with pancake batter rise from the ground and go for the people with the camper. That should have brought on some good blood and gore and pulled-out intestines and stuff, but, instead, we get lame junk like phony zombie heads popping open like those piņata things when the camper people shoot them (but when the zombies get shot somewhere else, nothing happens). The only good thing was some decent gut munching by the zombies at the end of the movie, but there’s hardly enough of it to make up for all that yakking. Besides, the people gave the book back to the zombies and the zombies stopped killing them, which was a real crummy ending. So it looks like the Civil War even with cannibals is pretty dull. I guess you shouldn’t mix history with horror movies or, if you do, you should at least get some better-looking zombies and lots more gore.

DARK, THE (1979). My Uncle Renfield, who keeps that stash of scary movie videos at our house ‘cause he’s got some much junk in that crummy little townhouse of his he can barely move around as it is, took me once to this eating place that’s called Dick Clark’s because it’s got something to do with that old guy who had something to do with rock music a long time ago, or something. It was a pretty lame place (okay burgers, though) with old guys like Uncle Renfield showing off their old cars that no one really cares about except them, although Uncle Renfield’s car has flames painted on it, which is kind of cool. Anyway, on the way back, Uncle Renfield told me this Dick Clark guy made a scary movie once about an alien who chops off people’s head with his eyes that are laser beams and stuff. That sounded pretty cool for an old guy who plays a bunch of lame old songs on the radio, so one night after Mom and Dad finally stopped yakking in their bedroom and went to sleep, I sneaked downstairs and found that movie in Uncle Renfield’s stash and popped it in the old VCR. Well, I shoulda known—even for a movie about laser-beam-eye head chopping, it was lame. You couldn’t tell half the time what was going on, and the places where the alien shoots his laser eyes and someone’s head rolls were over real quick and didn’t have much blood or brains splattering at all. It had that old guy who used to do "American Top 40" on the radio in the movie and I guess that’s another reason why it sucked. It was full of that talk and talk that just about puts me to sleep in five minutes, boy, and I had to fast-forward the video plenty of times. It’s about this one guy, who’s daughter gets her head zapped off…he wants to catch the alien, but all his does is drive his car around the city, look at other dead bodies, and fuss at this cop who fusses back at him. Then there’s this is lady TV news person who’s going after the alien, too, and she just yaks and yaks with her boss who thinks she’s doing something wrong by going after the alien (I didn’t understand that part at all). Anyway, the first guy and the lady meet and then they yak it up together and go wandering around the city…I caught myself snoozing twice without even knowing it. I mean, you have a cool alien who shoots rays from his eyes and people heads pop off, and it almost never shows up—just these boring people doing boring stuff. Finally, this weird person who predicts the future gives the guy and the lady a clue and then the cops take on the alien. So, finally, there’s something the movie worth watching, but, boy, do you have to fast-forward about forever to get to it. Anyway, the fight with the cops is kind of cool, and the alien gets toasted, and then the movie ended, which was okay with me. If you don’t mind fast-forwarding half your life away, the head-chopping stuff and the final battle in this movie are decent. But be ready to replace the batteries in the remote, which is what I had to do or Mom and Dad would have found me out.

DERANGED (1974). It’s one thing to have creepy people in your school, like Preston Slocum, who wears sandals all the time, even in winter, and collects bugs like butterflies, and just grins at you when you call him a dork. I mean, that’s kind of bad, but it’s not like they live with you or anything. Creepy relatives are a lot worse, boy. Like one of Mom’s old aunts who used to visit us. She never looked at you when she talked to you and brought her own organic honey to use cause she said sugar was processed poison or something and told Dad our charcoal grill was killing the planet and stuff like that. Well, anyway, this movie, which has some gore in it, but not much, is about a creepy relative, this farmer guy, only his relatives are all dead, including his Mom, who died while he tried to shove soup into her (kind of a yucky scene). He got so lonely that he dug her up. Then he dug up other dead ladies and cut them up and used their skin and bones and stuff for…well, like I said, he’s creepy. The stuff he did to those dead old ladies made me kinda sick to watch. And he didn’t just mess around with already dead ladies, either. He killed this one fat lady who got sweet on him for some reason, and then he killed this bar lady cause she didn’t get sweet on him, and then he went and killed some girl and strung her up and kinda butchered her, although all you see is some blood running down her. Then the cops finally put him away. The gore in the movie is pretty much body parts and human skin and stuff and like I said you’re probably not gonna want to eat or stuff after you watch this movie—I sure didn’t, and Mom and Dad thought I had come down with the stomach flu, or something. So it’s really kind of an icky movie, really, and the gore and blood isn’t much and that creepy farmer guy…he kinda gets to you after a while, if you know what I mean. Uncle Renfield said this movie was based on a true story, so I guess some farmer guy really did dig up all those old ladies and hack up their bodies and used pieces of them for…well, I don’t want to talk about that or I won’t be able to eat supper tonight, probably. Anyway, I really can’t say you should see this movie, unless you don’t get queasy about some of that playing-with-dead-bodies stuff. Uncle Renfield said the real farmer guy who did all that bad stuff died in a mental hospital years ago. Sometimes I wonder what he thought about organic honey.

DEVIL’S RAIN, THE (1975). Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me watch that old movie Pulp Fiction ‘cause in it that Bruce Willis guy gets bad stuff done to him by some creepy guys that I don’t even like to think about, so it was only when there was that movie about the angel that smelled like brownies or something that I finally saw that actor guy, John Travolta. He’s kind of goofy looking but my Mom thinks he’s hot (even though he’s so old, even older than Mom even.) Anyway, Mom mentioned him once when Uncle Renfield was over and Uncle Renfield said Travolta was real good in this movie called The Devil’s Rain and Dad laughed but Mom told Uncle Renfield to dry up (they also talked about something called "cotton" or "cotter" or something—I didn’t catch it all). Anyone, Uncle Renfield said that the best part of the movie was where Travolta and other devil people melt into goopy messes! So I knew I had to see it. That night, after Mom and Dad stopped arguing about that "cotter" thing or whatever and went to sleep, I sneaked downstairs and dug through Uncle Renfield’s video collection and that movie was there! So I popped it in the VCR and watched it. At first it was kind of boring and stupid, with that guy from the old Star Trek, you know, the guy everyone says is a hambone and does commercials now, and that old guys who was in a lot of old movies and TV shows and got eaten by rats in Willard, and the guy who had to put up with Arnold the pig in that Green Acres show and wore a suit to weed the vegetables, and other actors you see a million times on old TV shows, they all came from Devil people and some of them want to have the devil’s power again or something and that old guy from Willard wears this goofy horns and all, and I didn’t really know what was going on. Lots of yak-yakking and people attacking each other, but no gore or hardly nay blood…kind of lame. And the devil guys are looking for this book, that’s not hid real well and all, which makes you think they’re pretty stupid devil guys. Anyway, you hardly see that Travolta guy anywhere and he’s so young back then that he really doesn’t look like Travolta, besides. Uncle Renfield later told me that the guy who plays his big important devil guy was a real devil guy, but he looked more like a school principal to me. Finally, though, there’s this big rain and the devil guys start melting, including Travolta! It takes about forever to happen, but it does happen, and the melting devil guy stuff is cool, although they could have had some eyeballs pop out and some guts spew out, you know, good stuff, but there’s none of that. But that’s okay, cause there’s lots and lots of gooey melting and puddles of slimy flesh and stuff everywhere and it’s really pretty neat even for such an old movie. So I can say you ought to see this movie if you get the chance but if you’re like my Mom and think John Travolta is hot and all, maybe you shouldn’t ‘cause all he does in wear a hood and melt and stuff.

DOCTOR GORE (1968). Uncle Renfield’s told me about a thousand times that the good and gory horror films I like (the ones he won’t review in his crummy website, that is) started ‘way back in the 1960’s, when people were hippies and carried flowers and stuff. When I told him that was a crock, he showed me some videos made by this guy Lewis and this guy Friedman, which were in color, at least, and did have some gore, except it looked pretty fakey. I mean, if that’s where gore started in movies then it’s gotten a whole lot better since then. For one thing, today in movies they don’t chop off arms and legs that look like they’re made of plastic. Anyway, one night when Mom and Dad both went to bed early because they planned to get up real early the next morning to watch some lame meteor shower (big deal), I tiptoed downstairs to watch one of the videos Uncle Renfield keeps stashed here and I found what I thought was the real deal…I mean, it even had "gore" on the title and I thought it would be like that cool "Dr. Butcher" movie. But when I popped it in to the VCR and watched it, I saw I was screwed again! This was another one of those Lewis and Friedman movies, almost. In the movie, this scientist guy and his raggedy assistant who has one of those humps in his back like in those old movies that Uncle Renfield and Dad like to watch just gets women to come to their lab somehow and the scientist guy cuts them up. That would be okay, but there were those plastic arms and legs again! It looked like someone robbed some department store of those mannequins they use to show clothes with. The cut-up women were lying on this table where you can see the holes where they’re sticking their real arms and legs through. And the gore was just this bright red goop with some pieces of meat or something added…I mean, Rob Zombie would have laughed his head off over this crud. In one place, the scientist guy was sposed to be electrocuting this woman and all he did was cover her with tin foil! Me and the guys could have done better with five bucks and Jimmy Johnston’s Dad’s Sony camcorder. I had to use the fast-forward button a lot with this movie—in one part, the whole movie just stops being a horror movie and becomes Country Music Television and plays this cruddy country song. But I don’t think those even guys who like Larry, the Cable Guy, would think much of this movie. I said something about this movie to Uncle Renfield later and he said the guy who made it also did lots of lame gore for that Lewis guy. Which just makes me glad I’m around now when gore is good in movies.

DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE (1979). I guess I gotta stop believing video titles. I thought this was a spook-house movie but instead it’s about this creepy guy who goes around burning people up. He works in some sort of furnace place and his friend gets burned and he likes it. His Mom, who’s dead, used to burn him for being bad. And I thought my Mom was tough for taking away my Playstation when I mess up! Anyway, he grabs this woman, dumps gas on her, and lights her up with a flame-thrower like you see in those old war movies. Then he does it again and again. The burning scenes are real-looking, really kinda sickening. This one guy tries to be friends with the creepy guy and takes him to a disco, but a girl gets her hair set on fire there. Uncle Renfield told me how bad discos were but I didn’t know how bad until I saw this movie. The creepy guy dreams that his burned women that he keeps around the house are alive and after him. Finally, they do go after him and I was rooting for them. This is a kinda creepy film and I didn’t like it much. I’m sure not going to mess with Dad’s cigarette lighter anymore, that’s for sure.

DON’T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT (1973).  I seen a lot of scary movies and lots of them have the scariest stuff happen in a place like a basement or an attic.  Well, that don’t work around my house.  Dad spent lots of money to “fix up” our basement, so it has a carpet and phony wooden walls and a bathroom and a bar where Mom is always counting the bottles, specially when Dad has his friends over.  So it’s not scary at all, except when Mom took a shower down there and a big old spider crawled out of the drain, which I thought was cool but Mom didn’t and she practically ripped the shower curtain to shreds getting out of there.  Now, Floyd Reed, he has a real scary basement, all dark and smelly and stuff and full of old junk.  Anyway, I thought of Floyd’s basement when I sneaked downstairs one night and popped this video into the VCR.  It really wasn’t about a basement, though—it was all about this place where crazy people go to get cured or something and one patient cures the head doctor with a axe.  That’s in the start of the movie, so it seemed like it would be cool.  There was some neat gore, like where this nurse is looking at a note on a desk and a hand slams her head down so her eyeball get stuck on a spike, and where an old lady’s tongue is pulled out.   But even with all this good stuff, this movie kinda sucked.  There was lots of talking and people trying to act (the crazy patients, mainly) and the picture was kinda dark and nothing much happened between the gore.  It’s sposed to be a in a hospital, but it’s really just some old house, which is sorta dumb, really.  Then there’s this doctor lady who’s supposed to take care of business, but she’s more stupid than the nutty patients, even.  I really had to fast-forward to keep from conking out and maybe getting caught by Mom and Dad.   The last part of the movie was kinda creepy and there was a final bunch of gore, so the ending was good—but why do they make you sit for all the boring stuff first?  Why don’t they make the movie all good?  And why do they make people act so stupid?  It’s no fun if everyone in the movie is stupid.  And the gore is so fakey, it looked like they got their stuff from Wal-Mart.  But at least there’s a basement at the end, so the movie’s name made sense.  If you can stay awake during the boring parts, you might like this movie for the gory ending.  But I bet I could make a scarier movie in Floyd’s basement.    

DRACULA, THE DIRTY OLD MAN (1969). I felt like a vampire film, so when Mom and Dad went to something called a "parenting" class—do parents really have to go to those?--I dug this one out from way back in the cabinet. I liked it cause instead of the people in the film talking, there was this guy saying funny stuff in a voice like Grandpa Munster. Dracula wears this rented tuxedo like Uncle Renfield wore when Aunt Yolanda got married again and he grabs these almost naked women and ties them up in his cave and bites them on the neck. Dracula doesn’t tie them up very tight, though—I don’t know why the women didn’t just walk out of that old cave, except maybe because they hardly had any clothes on. He also gets this guy to turn into kind of a werewolf and kill people. That werewolf mask the werewolf wore isn’t half a good as the one Jimmy Johnston wore at the class Halloween party that fell off when he bobbed for apples, and when the werewolf kills this woman the blood looks like that watered catsup they have at the school cafeteria. And when Dracula becomes a bat, you can see the wires and all. But I kinda liked it even though I fell asleep and Mom and Dad nearly catched me up past my bedtime.

DR. BUTCHER, M.D. (MEDICAL DEVIATE) (1980). I don't like going to the doctor, specially that Doctor Tolson that Mom makes me go to...he always makes me wait in this medicine-smelling little room with a steel bed and icky doctor stuff all piled up, then he comes in and tells me I'm doing great--then on the way out his nurse sticks me with a needle! And no candy, either! So when I snuck downstairs one night to watch a good movie, I grabbed this. No surprises--a creepy doctor mutilates people and experiments with them, seeing what happens when he hacks the top of their heads off and cuts their vocal cords, and stuff. Heck, I knew they'd croak when he did that, and I'm not even a doctor. Anyway, after we first see some crummy-looking zombies, we go into the real film where this man and woman travel to an island to see why some folks are chomping down on each other back home and they run into this doctor. Course, they don't know he's a butcher for a while, so we can see these natives cutting one guy's throat to drink his blood and gouging this other guy's eyes out and eating them, too. When the zombies attack (they're really eaten up-looking), the man smashes one's head with an outboard motor! Now this is a movie! This sick doctor even scalps people! Really! I guess there's not much of what Uncle Renfield calls a plot, and the people are pretty stupid--the first sign of a zombie and I'm outta there, period. But the gore and blood are way cool...I don't like most of the stuff on the menu at the Olive Garden or anything--that pasta stuff is just macaroni if you ask me--but the Italians really know their guts and gore and stuff. After that movie, which I watched all the way through, even the writing stuff at the end, and nearly waked up Mom and Dad when I tripped going back up the stairs, I told Dr. Tolson the next time Mom dragged me to see him that he was a "medical deviate." I still got a shot and no candy, but I sure felt better about it.

EATEN ALIVE (1976). You know, it’s kinda neat to look at real old movies--you know, the kind that your Mom and Dad watch and make a big fuss over, and see someone that’s gonna be cool someday, like that guy who plays Freddy on the Elm Street movies, in a movie that sucks but they had to do it ‘cause they weren’t cool and rich back then. That’s about the only good thing about this movie that I grabbed real late one night from Uncle Renfield’s video stash and popped into the VCR after Mom and Dad went to bed early cause Mom had a headache and wanted Dad to share it with her, or something. I mean, it ought to of been cool with this crazy guy played by someone that Uncle Renfield said played Al Capone except that Al Capone was like those guys on The Spranos and they dress real neat, and don’t go around in a dirty tee shirt like this guy did in the movie. Anyway, this guy’s got a motel in a swamp and he feeds people to this alligator, so, like I said, this oughta be a neat gory film. And it’s got Freddy before he got to be Freddy and slash people with his razor gloves. Even though he’s British or something, Freddy plays this hick who tries to be cool with this lady, but the lady isn’t having any, so she leaves him and goes to the motel in the swamp. The crazy guy who runs the motel pokes her with a pitchfork and feeds her to the alligator, which is pretty neat, except there isn’t much blood or gore—that alligator eats even more prissy and neat than my stuck-up older cousin, Margot, who I call Mar-goat when she isn’t around cause if she is around and I call her that she punches me in the arm and I can’t hit her back cause she’s a girl and she’s bigger than me, too. Anyway, when an alligator chomps you, there’s sposed to be lots of blood gushing, and arms ripped out, and guts and stuff flying. Not in this movie, boy. And the alligator looks so fakey that the little bit of gore looks fakey, too. Anyway, some other folks get fed to the alligator, but when they have the chance to have this snotty little girl made into alligator food, the makers of this movie let her live. Rip-off! And then her Dad goes as crazy as the guy in the dirty tee shirt, which doesn’t make sense cause the Dad doesn’t have an alligator or anything. And I had to use the fast-forward a lot cause lots of the movie is just the people yak-yakking and being "colorful," as Uncle Renfield says. The ending has some action, but there’s still not much blood, or intestines, or eyeballs, or anything cool. I mean, if I made a movie with a alligator that eats people, there’s be lots of blood shooting out and organs ripped out and, you know, stuff you want to watch. So they messed up big time with this movie and it’s probably cause it was made by the guy who made the first Leatherface movie, which hardly has any good gore, either. It’s lucky that Freddy was able to make good movies later after being in something this lame.

EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE, THE (1964). I got in trouble with some guys who read Uncle Renfield’s Website (shows you what kind of dummies they are, anyway) cause of what I said about Japanese monster movies being pretty lame, what with some guy in a rubber suit stomping on cardboard buildings and kicking toy cars and all. Well, they sent letters to Uncle Renfield, saying I was a little creep and I never even saw any good Japanese monster movies, which is what I was saying all along. Uncle Renfield told me I should watch something Japanese that doesn’t have guys in rubber suits swatting at toy planes on wires just to be fair. Okay, so I found this video in Uncle Renfield’s stash at the house and watched it one night when Mom and Dad went to bed early because they wanted to watch something real boring on the Sundance Channel on the TV in their bedroom. Once their old movie made them start snoring, I sneaked downstairs and watched this movie. Well…it didn’t have any giant monsters or toy tanks, but it was still lame! It’s about this superhero who’s called Starman and he’s Japanese but he’s really from some planet where guys wearing funny costumes sit around and watch the Earth and send him in where things get messed up. Starman can fly and breathe in space, which I learned in school you can’t do, but you can in the movies. He wears this costume with pantyhose like my Mom wears and has a watch that can detect bad stuff, so he can destroy it before it hurts people. But he can’t find stuff unless some creepy little kid shows him where it is, which means Starman isn’t no Spiderman, boy. Anyway, he fights this goofy bad guy who wears this rubber-looking alien head—which proved there’s got to be some rubber somewhere when the Japanese make monster movies. And this Starman runs and leaps around and punches the bad guys who just stand around and let him punch them and even make way so he can punch one and then punch the other. Feeble! The main bad guy sits in this wheelchair and has some big bird sit on his shoulder and all…it’s just as dorky as it can be. This stuff makes even guys stomping around in rubber suits seem cool (which they’re not). So that’s what I found out when I looked at a Japanese monster movie without the big rubber-suit monster and if you don’t like it, go on and send your crummy letters to Uncle Renfield and see if I care, anyway.

FIVE BLOODY GRAVES (1970). My Dad and Uncle Renfield might have a clue when it comes to monster moves, although they like those black-and-white ones that don’t have any blood or stuff a lot more than I do, but they get really retarded about Westerns. I don’t get what people like about Westerns—all they have is guys riding horses (big deal), shooting each other (nothing special) and drinking and messing with Indians that my teacher, Ms. Fridley, makes us call native Americans (who cares). I’d almost rather watch one of those lame kiddie shows on PBS than watch a Western. Uncle Renfield heard me say that once and he told me he had a tape in the collection he stashes at our house that is a horror-gore Western! I said, no way, and he said, way, go watch it. So that night, after Mom and Dad finally got quiet in their bedroom, I tiptoed downstairs and stuck the tape of this movie in the VCR and turned on the TV. Well, it was a Western, all right, and it looked like it was made for about $1.80. There’s this gunman and also this guy who talks through the movie and called himself Death (so the movie’s really lame already). The Death guys said that this gunman is out to kill people who killed his family or something like that. Only, he somehow gets lots of people killed who have nothing to do with him or his family. That’s kind of dumb, but, okay, there’s room for some cool gouts of blood and flying intestines and good stuff like that…I thought. Well, I thought wrong. Just about everyone gets killed in this movie, except some native Americans and the gunman…but they all get killed with about two teaspoons of blood, no gore, nothing! Rip-off! Like where this grizzly old bum and his retard son tie up this native American lady and do some bad stuff to her and then they shoot her up—but the camera isn’t even where she is, so you can’t see the bullets ripping into her body! What’s that all about? And in the end, the gunman and this bad Native American guy fight all over the place, and the gunman sticks this big old knife into the native American…and there no blood at all! Not a drop! It was almost like watching one of those lame PBS shows, except that the Teletubbies never get knifed or gunned down. Mainly, the people in the movie fight each other and then kill each other and it’s all real boring. It’s not a horror-gore Western, it’s a feeble-bore Western! And the movie is full of dumb stuff like this creepy guy hitting this lady and this other guy hits the creepy guy’s head with some vase and it breaks—I’ve only seen that about a hundred million times, but this crummy movies treats it like some new big joke. There’s a joke here al right and it was Uncle Renfield having a joke on me, but I’ll get back at him, no problem. Anyway, even if you like Westerns, you won’t like this movie, I’ll bet.

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965). Uncle Renfield is always harping on how you should call the big scary guy "Frankenstein's Monster" and not "Frankenstein" cause the doctor who pasted the monster together is "Frankenstein." Well, a lotta movies make the same mistake and this is one of them. There's no Frankenstein in this movie, except maybe the man and lady scientists who putt-putt on a scooter around some island (Uncle Renfield says its Port Of Reeko) looking for this robot astronaut who crashed his rocket and is all banged up with pieces of electronic junk sticking out of him, like that Walkman I dropped two Christmases ago, but they're not named "Frankenstein"--the banged-up robot is. Anyway, this robot goes postal and chops up people with axes and stuff, but he's a good guy sorta cause he takes on this kinda cool-looking space monster and defeats a bunch of aliens with real phony-looking bald head caps and pointed ears and their sleazy-looking Queen, too. These aliens steal a bunch of ladies in bikinis for some reason and shoot these flashlight things at guys and make them disappear. It's not Star Wars, not even close, even though the Queen is almost as snooty as that Princess Leia was in that movie. I kinda liked Frankie the Robot even though he killed people for no reason. The scenes where the Army guys start blasting look like they came from other films and there's way too much talking between that Queen and her assistant who looks like Uncle Fester from The Addam's Family with pointy ears, but at least this movie puts out what it says its gonna put out, and that's a lot when you've watched a lotta videos late at night trying not to get caught and the movies don't deliver. So you oughta watch this movie--just fast-forward through all the talky parts like I did.

FROGS (1972).  Our teacher, Ms. Fridley, has really been yakking about the environment lately.  She told us in class the other day that big businessmen were out to ruin the planet and all, and we gotta do something about it.  Well, I asked her if the big businessmen were ruining the planet, weren't they ruining it for themselves, too, and besides what can we do if the big buisnessmen get away with stuff like that?  She gave me one of those looks and told me that if the environment was a scary movie, maybe I'd understand--and then she told me I had to write an essay on the environment!  She sure has it in for me, boy!  So I asked Uncle Renfield if there was a scary movie about rich guys ruining the planet and he told me I oughta watch this one called Frogs.  So, I did the night when I was supposed to write that essay for Ms. Fridley.  I waited until Mom and Dad got quiet in their bedroom, and I snuck downstairs to do my research.  The movie's not about giant frogs like I thought at first, but regular old frogs, and also about these grownups  and kids who come to this rich old guy's house.  The rich guy made his money by ruining the environment just like Ms. Fridley talked about.  Well, the animals don't like that one bit, so they get back at the people and kill them!  It was cool when this bald guy got eaten by alligators, but it was kinda sickening to see another guy all spun up in a web by spiders and bit to death--one spider even fell in his mouth.  Yech!  They couldn't pay me to do that even for a movie!  I wanted the whiny kids to get eaten up and killed too, but they got away, of course, but not before one old lady got snakebit to death and another lady, a kinda nice one, got drownded somehow by a turtle...I used the remote control to watch that scene again a few times and I still don't see how the turtle did it.  Anyway, the frogs just hopped around, mainly, and really didn't do much.  They were supposed to be scary, but I saw all those Budweiser commercials, so I sure didn't get scared by them.  So when the frogs hopped around the old man and he keeled over, I thought it was kind of a gyp...they should have had a real gory end for him.  Anyway, I wrote my essay on how to stop the rich guys from ruining the planet by siccing the animals on them, except the frogs (they were pretty lame, really).  I turned it in to Ms. Fridley and she gave me a big fat "F" on my paper and made me stay after school, too!  Now I gotta write an essay on recycling!  Uncle Renfield said I oughta watch Frankenstein again and take notes, but I guess I better not.  Anyway, this is a good movie if you want to see animals kill people in some cool ways.  Just fast-forward through the froggy parts, like I did.     

GATES OF HELL, THE (1983). We don’t have any people from Italy in our family. I think Dad said Mom’s family is a bunch of stuck-up "Brits" (he never says that when Mom’s around, though) and Mom says Dad’s family came to America from Europe before the laws here got too strict. Anyway, no Italians, and that’s kind of bad cause the Italians make great movies! They know what gore is and when one of their zombies pull open a chest, lots of guts and blood and stuff falls out like it ought to, and they’ll poke out an eyeball or tear off an ear so the movie doesn’t get boring. Like in this movie, where people just get eaten by zombies all the time and ministers hang themselves instead of messing up the action and guys run power drills through creep kid’s heads and folks go down to hell so that zombies can crack open their skulls so their brains can shoot out and—this is gotta be like art or something—a lady pukes up her own guts! See? The Italians just make real good movies and they gotta be cool people anyway cause they invented pizza. Anyway, in this movie, some creepy stuff happens in this town where they’re burning leaves or it’s foggy all the time, like that minister hanging herself and some pretty lady almost get buried alive (she croaked while doing some of the stuff that those creepy women on TV charge for—that psychic stuff) and the hero nearly brains her trying to get her out of her coffin and everyone finds out that hell’s popping open and zombies go around visiting places like this tavern where they eats up a bunch of rednecks (although they’re Italians, really). Also, there’s none of that stupid love junk and folks are too busy getting eaten by zombies to take their clothes off, so there none of that boring stuff, either. I mean, the other horror movie people should watch this movie and take notes or something and make more movies like this. Blood even glops out of the walls in this movie! And any movie that shoots a bunch of worms in people’s faces is one I’ll watch more than once, boy. The night when I sneaked downstairs and watched this, I liked it so much that I watched it twice (I watched the girl barf up her insides four times) and nearly got caught by Mom and Dad cause I fell asleep and only woke up about a second before Dad did. It would have been worth getting caught and maybe having my X-Box locked up for another week just to see this movie. Heck, if I find more movies like this in Uncle Renfield’s collection, I won’t even need my X-Box anymore! (Well, then again, I guess maybe I will.)

GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS (1973).  Mom makes me go to church where I get to learn about God.  I learned a lot about God, like how He's always watching us and all, but I never learned He was a monster.  So when I saw this video in Uncle Renfield's collection, I just had to see it.  I snuck downstairs a few nights later and popped this in the old VCR.  Well, this crummy film has a monster in it, but it isn't God at all--it's a sheep!  You know, one of those woolly things that go around baaaing all the time.  In this movie, which looked like some grownups were trying to promote their old fakey Western town, this dopey guy loses money at a gambling place (like that place Uncle Renfield calls "Lost Wages" where Dad said he lost his shirt once, only he wasn't naked at all when he came back), and the guy whines about it and gets beat up and this Professor guy drives him home and then the loser sleeps with his sheep (weird!).  During the night, some lights flash or something, and this one sheep has this gooey looking blob come out that's sposed to be a baby sheep--a lamb, I mean.   The Professor gets all excited when he sees the lamb-blob and takes it to his lab and the lamb-blob gets all big and busts out and becomes a sheep-monster, only he looks like a big woolly McNugget with stuff dangling down.  This sheep-monster-McNugget kills one guy and scares some kids in a park and the folks in the town who all dress like cowboys and talk like they're chewing something all the time get together and kill the thing.  After seeing this movie, I got one question--aren't monsters sposed to be scary?  Then why would anyone use a sheep monster in a movie?  That's as bad as that bunny rabbit monster movie I saw awhile back.  I asked the guys in my class and they said it sounded pretty dumb.   I even asked some little kids in the second grade and they thought it was pretty dumb and they think Pokemon is scary!  So I complained to Uncle Renfield and he just shrugged and said, "It's not only a bad movie, it's a ba-aa-aa-aa-ad movie!"  I think he was trying to be funny again.  Anyway, don't bother with this movie, specially if you like to eat McNuggets.

GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER (1966). I think I wrote before that I think the big rubber monsters in the Japanese movies are pretty lame—you can tell it’s a guy in there, walking like my Dad does after ho goes to a party where Mom tells him not to drink so much but he does, anyway. Well, even lamer are some of the other monsters that get to fight the guys in the rubber suits—big old turtles and funny looking birds and stuff. Well, one night when I had to really keep quiet ‘cause Mom and Dad were discussing (arguing) about something to do with my grades real late and I didn’t want them to hear me tiptoeing downstairs to watch a good monster video, I wasn’t careful and I accidentally popped this into the VCR. This was about the lamest Japanese monster movie ever—this time, the rubber suit guy fights a shrimp! You know, those crunchy things you get at Red Lobster. Some monster--they might as well have fish sticks fight or something. Anyway, it’s about these three dopey guys who are Japanese and move their mouths and words come out only you know they didn’t say them who get one this boat for some reasons and another guy pulls a gun on them and then lets them stay and they get in a storm at sea that looks like a real crummy toy getting splashed in someone’s tub and they end up on this island. That’s where they meet the rubber suit guy called Godzilla and that hokey giant shrimp. Some kind of Giant Bird gets after Godzilla, but he just roasts him with his breath. There’s some guys who are building a bomb for what, I don’t know, and a girl who’s got friends on another island including two tiny girls who sing to this Giant Moth (another lame monster) who flies over after Godzilla and the Giant Shrimp fight and Godzilla pulls off the Giant Shrimp‘s claw and plays with it (no blood at all--really, really feeble) and the Giant Moth lifts the good people off the island that explodes and Godzilla gets away, too. Even though Godzilla wanted to kill everyone, the people are happy when he got away, so he can go stomp Tokyo again. I just don’t understand Japanese people. I mean, Giant Shrimps and Giant Moths are stupid, not scary, and if Godzilla’s a good guy, then what’s the fun of watching him? And Godzilla makes dopey moves and looks like a dork and he’s sposed to be really tough and all. It’s crummy enough that he’s just a rubber suit but they got to make him act like that old kid guy, Pee-Wee Herman, too. Well, after sitting through that, I was glad to go to bed. I don’t think I can say you should watch this movie unless you’ve having seafood for dinner and then it might be okay. Maybe Godzilla and the Giant Shrimp ought to make a Red Lobster commercial.

GOKE, THE BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL (1968).   At my school, we kinda like those Japanese cartoons that everyone calls anime (although I don't know why they don't just call them cartoons, cause that's what they are).  The girls like that dumb soppy Sailor Moon but we guys like this cartoon about Tenchi cause he's a guy who has all these alien girls hanging around him and he fights with a light stick like they did on Star Wars.  (The girls at school don't like Tenchi cause they say they can't see why he's so hot, but then again they're not alien girls.)  Anyway, one thing I noticed that's not good about these cartoons is that the monsters are kinda lame...either some kind of ghost or stupid stuff like a monster cell phone (no kidding).  With that, and those guys pounding toy houses in those rubber suits, I got so I thought the Japanese couldn't come up with a cool monster.  Then, one night, Mom and Dad went out to eat with those people Mom says are cretins but Dad says are clients, and that old Mrs. Baumgarten, who's about 100 years old, baby-sat me, and she fell asleep at the kitchen table after making me some hot chocolate, so I sneaked into the living room and watched this video from Uncle Renfield's collection about body snatchers from hell.  Well, they're not really body snatchers, but that's okay, cause they were vampires!  Japanese vampires!   Japanese space vampires!  After I sat through this long part with a lot of Japanese people in an airplane (there was one American lady with them), the plane goes down, and everyone starts arguing, saying Japanese stuff with American words coming out of their mouths.  They start looking around where they crashed and it's a pretty rotten place.  Then this one Japanese guy sees a spaceship (I think) and he falls down and knocks himself out and this green stuff crawls into his nose!  It was real gross and cool!  So then he becomes this vampire and goes around catching the other Japanese people and even the American lady and biting their necks.  They became vampires too, so soon, hardly anyone normal was left.  It was really creepy to see the vampires attack the people who weren't vampires...I didn't fast forward the VCR once.   (Some of the people in this movie started going postal even before they got bit.)  Finally, only this Japanese man and woman manage to get away, and they run and reach this town, so I thought that was the end.  But I was wrong!  The man and woman look up and there's more of the space vampire ships coming in, and then from space there's a whole bunch more space vampire ships!  And that was the end.  It was really scary.  I heard a noise and about jumped a mile, but it wasn't space vampires, just old Mrs. Baumgarten letting out a snore from the kitchen.  Well, anyway, that's what I call cool monsters and the Japanese came up with them, so they can do cool monsters.  I told Jimmy Johnston and Floyd Reed about old Goke and they thought it was cool too, and we think that Tenchi and the alien girls should fight those space vampires next.  Anyway, if you like cool monsters and don't mind seeing stuff go up people's noses, you should see Goke.  (I kinda wonder how you pronounce "Goke"...does it rhyme with Coke?)

GORE-MET ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL (1987). I’ve heard Mom and her friends talk about a movie being in "bad taste"—that means it’s probably a real cool movie with some gore and bodies and all, the kind that Moms don’t like. So when I saw this movie in Uncle Renfield’s old video collection that he keeps here ‘cause he doesn’t have room for all his junk at that dump he lives in, I thought it was kind a joke—you know, a "bad taste" movie about stuff that’s sposed to taste good. See? Well, when I got to watch it one night after Mom and Dad finally got tired of watching Leno and Letterman (Dad likes Letterman and Mom like Leno and they switch channels during commercials) and went to bed, I find out the movie was a joke all right—it was a joke about the gore. I mean, there’s lot of guts and blood spurting around and body parts rolling when this guy who runs this restaurant goes postal and starts hacking people up, but it’s done so crummy that I wonder if the folks who made it even watched what they were doing. Like when this cop sposedly gets his head cut off, it was so obvious that it was some fake head on a fake body that even Mrs. Baumgartner, who used to baby-sit for me and is about a hundred years old, would’ve seen through it. Anyway, in the movie, the psycho restaurant guy—he’s also the chef--was a holy guy back in the old days and the Devil got a hold of him and made him live forever—and probably made this movie, too, cause it seemed to run forever (even though it’s really kinda short), with lots of talking and really bad jokes, and crummy music by this rotten band, and half of it is the restaurant guy mixing drinks and saying weird stuff. I guess the Devil made the restaurant guy need to eat people, or something—it wasn’t clear to me why the guy went chopping up everyone, not that that’s a big deal anyway. What is a big deal is how lousy the gore stuff was—I mean, me and the guys could do cheap stuff like that all day and we’d know it was lame and we sure wouldn’t make a movie out of it. And the movie itself is real cheap--half the time you can’t understand what’s being said and its so fuzzy in places that I tried to use the remote to make the picture better a couple of times but it only got worse. Uncle Renfield later told me the movie was made with "super 8," whatever that is, and that’s why it looks like someone sneezed on it. Anyway, at the end of the movie, the restaurant guy has a duel or something with someone in the park and it’s supposed to be a big deal but it’s just dumb as dirt and I didn’t care by that time, anyway. All I can say about this lame movie is that it sure wasted a cool title. And there’s no zombies anywhere. What a ripoff!

GRUESOME TWOSOME, THE (1967). Ms. Fridley, my teacher, is always telling us how you learn about history by reading old stuff. Well, I told her in class that I learn about scary movie history by watching the old stuff in Uncle Renfield's video library. She just gave me that look again and handed me a note to take home to Mom and Dad, which I kind of lost on the way home. Anyway, that night when everything was real quiet, I snuck down and popped this tape in the VCR. Uncle Renfield said this guy who made it, Hershey Goredon Lewis, pioneered gore films, so I figured this was history I was watching. It was really kinda dull history though. It's about this old woman and her geek son who run this hair salon, only they use real hair they cut off people's heads while they're still alive. They also cut people's throats with the same kind of electric knife that Dad blames when he messes up carving the turkey at Thanksgiving. The blood and gore and stuff is real fake-looking--just a lot of stuff glopped on people acting like they're dead and all. The rest of the movie is boring and talky--they even have this dumb "talking wigs" part at the beginning--I thought I had accidentally picked a Disney film! It's also real cheap looking, which Uncle Renfield says is always the case with this Hershey guy. Well, history stuff is usually boring to sit through and this film is sure like history in that way. I can't say it's worth watching, unless you like talking wigs.

GURU, THE MAD MONK (1970). I used to think that when we went to other people’s houses and they brought out their family videotapes and we had to watch them, I was watching the worst stuff ever. I mean, who wants to see the dorky neighbors walk around some boring place like Silver Dollar City or watch their creepy nephew graduate from high school? I never ever thought the (mostly) cool horror movie videos Uncle Renfield stashes at our place and those crummy home videos were anything alike. But I finally saw one of Uncle Renfield’s videos that looked like a home video, sounded like a home video, and sucked like a home video. It’s about this monk or priest in this church that’s sposed to be in the old times, but the church is just like the one Mom and Dad drag me to every Easter. This monk looks like a homeless person wearing some cheap costume—in fact, all the people in this movie look that way. It usually so dark and the camera’s aimed so funny that you can’t tell what’s going on half the time—and the sound really reminded me of those home videos. Anyway, this monk is an evil guy and he treats ladies real nasty and chops up some guys—but it’s about the hokiest blood and gore I ever saw, with real fakey blood and body parts that look like they were sawed off a statue or something. Then there’s this woman who’s a vampire and she hypnotizes this girl and bites her neck (and her dumb plastic fangs almost fall out of her mouth) and then the monk decides he doesn’t like her anymore and he kills her (no gore either time)—big deal. There’s this hunchback guy who whines around and get whipped, or was it one of the guys standing around—I forget. And those are the only things in this lousy video that’s even worth a look. It’s real short, too—when I fast-forwarded through the boring parts, it was over real quick. Which is the one good thing about this video, believe me. It should been shorter. The guy who made this movie was a real spaz, according to Uncle Renfield, and I believe it. So if you ever see this movie for rent, forget it, and just watch the neighbor’s video about their trip to Gatlinburg or whatever—it’s won’t hurt half so bad.

HOLLYWOOD STRANGLER MEETS THE SKID ROW SLASHER, THE (1979).  My pal, Jimmy Johnston, got a video camera for Christmas and right away he became a big Hollywood director.  He carried that camera around for a while and talked about stuff like "medium shot" and "deep focus."  I got so p.o.'ed at him that I told him I'd give him a "medium shot" in the mouth if he didn't cut it out.  Anyway, he'd show these videos he made and they were really herky-jerky looking stuff about people and things (most of them blurry) and with him talking all the time through it.  It was really crummy, and we all made Jimmy give our fifty cents back.  Well, one night I sneaked downstairs after things finally got quiet in Mom and Dad's bedroom and I saw this video in Uncle Renfield's pile and it sounded gory and cool and so I popped it in the Sony.  I couldn't believe it--it looked just like one of Jimmy Johnston's crappy videos!  I'm not kidding!  There's all this talk, talk, talk during the whole movie, and the people and places are blurry, and the movie really jerks around like it has the hiccups.  There's this creepy guy and he takes pictures of ladies and then he chokes them.  Then there's this woman who sells the kind of magazines Dad hides from me, and she goes out once in a while and sticks knives in guys who don't shave or anything...I think they're sposed to be the homeless people I heard about in school (Dad calls them "bums").  All the talk is from the strangler guy who's looking for the right woman or something.  I don't know what the woman is looking for, except more homeless guys to stick a knife in.  I got so bored with this movie that I kinda dozed off and then I figured I missed a stabbing or two and had to fast forward back.   The film was better on fast forward, but not much.  Anyway, at the end, the strangler guy meets the knife lady and they kiss and then he chokes her and she stabs him and that's the end of the movie.  Even Jimmy Johnston's videos didn't end this lame.   I asked Uncle Renfield about this movie and he said some folks actually paid money in a movie theater to see it.  So I went and told Jimmy Johnston if he could put some strangling and stabbing in one of his videos we wouldn't ask for our fifty cent back the next time.  But he said that his parents took his video camera away after he shot a video of them yelling at each other and showed it at a family reunion.  Well, it's too bad someone didn't take the director of this crummy movie's camera away from him before he made it.

HUMONGOUS (1982). Uncle Renfield says that most of the real gory movies that everyone but him likes are no good because the people in them are so stupid. Well, I say that the people being so stupid in those movies makes seeing them hacked and slashed and their guts pulled out and their eyeballs squished and stuff even cooler. The only bad thing in scary movies like these, where at least you get the blood and gore, is either there isn’t enough of it or the sucky film is so dark that you can’t see the good gory stuff (or both, and those films really suck). That’s the problem with this movie, being so dark, I mean, which I saw one night after Mom and Dad finished fighting about the way the new SUV sucks gas and they went to bed where they could argue about it some more but not in front of me. When the light finally went out in their room, I sneaked downstairs and popped this movie into the VCR. (I wish Uncle Renfield would keep a few DVDs stored here and not just these old tapes, boy.) Anyway, this movie started okay, with some dumb kids on this big boat going somewhere, but one of the jerky guys steering the boat got lost and crashed the boat, so they had to get off of it. Then they got slaughtered by this big monster guy (he’s not all that big, though, so I don’t know why the movie called him "humongous"). Not too much yakking, either, until the gore started, although the dumb kids in this movie were pretty whiney, especially this one girl who nobody liked and she wah-wah’ed about it, and you wanted her to get killed right away. The monster guy finally grabs her and squeezes both side of her head until her skull cracks or something—problem is her eyeballs didn’t shoot out like they should’ve done, which is what Uncle Renfield calls a "missed opportunity." Some of the other murders were a little more gory, I think…but you could hardly tell because it was so darned dark all the time! I mean, why can’t these people who make these films turn on some lights or something? What good is tongue-ripping and gut-munching when you can’t see it? I just don’t understand this. There’s this big fire at the end when this building (I think Uncle Renfield said it was a "boathouse") got on fire, but even that didn’t help light up stuff very much. At least the reason the monster guy was around made sense—his Dad was a creep who did bad things to a girl and her dogs ripped him up pretty good, but she had a baby by him and it became the monster guy. If only the monster guy ripped up people during the day, I could recommend this movie. But it’s just too stinking dark and I don’t mean the story or any of that stuff.

I BOUGHT A VAMPIRE MOTORCYCLE (1990). When old Mrs. Baumgarten fell asleep baby-sitting me again, I thought I'd watch this cause I thought it may have a motorcycle with a cape and fangs and all. But it’s a move with people all talking with these funny British voices, and the motorcycle is cursed by some gooney guy doing some sort of black mass when some bikers roar in and kill everybody. The motorcycle gets some of the gooney guy’s blood on it and it kills people too, and won’t run except at night, and doesn’t like garlic or the cross or anything like that, just like Dracula. This vampire bike kills a lot of people, with a lot of blood and guts and stuff. There’s a priest in it who sounds like the snooty robot in Star Wars. I laughed at it a lot, almost waking Mrs. Baumgarten. It was pretty funny though I’m not sure it was meant to be. It also gave me an idea for a movie-- a vampire computer, one that only works at night, and hypnotizes people with the computer screen, and drinks blood through fangs in the mouse. I told Uncle Renfield about my idea and he told me to call Fred Olen Ray, whoever he is.

I DISMEMBER MAMA (1974).  My Mom is pretty cool, really, except that she doesn't like scary movies, she doesn't like those Japanese cartoons called anime, she doesn't like Playstation games, and she picks the good stuff off the pizza before she eats it.  And she thinks Uncle Renfield should stop "wasting time" doing that horror movie site on the Net.  (She also thinks Uncle Renfield oughta get married, but who'd marry him?)  But, except for all that, she's a good Mom.  She works at this place where she has to put up with idiots who would run the company into the ground if she wasn't around to stop them, she says, so she's got it kinda rough.  So I wasn't mad at Mom or anything when I happened to watch this movie late one night--I just pulled it out of the video stash Uncle Renfield keeps at our place.  But I was sure mad at this movie!  I thought it'd have some good gore and blood and stuff and maybe someone's Mom would get chopped up, but instead it's about this crazy guy who's in some sort of place for crazy people and he thinks about his Mom a lot, only it's not very nice what he thinks, and he escapes by showing a guy who works at the place a dirty movie and then croaks him.  Next, he goes home and the cops are waiting for him, cause they know he wants to slice and dice his Mom--he called her up and told her, so he really is crazy.  But he gets away somehow and kills again, but you don't see him do it!  He's sposed to hate women for some reason, but he kills guys, too, so I guess he hates everybody.  But then he falls in love (I think) with this little girl, so maybe he just hates grownups...it's kinda confusing.   Then he pretends he's kidnapped her and the police are after him again.  I couldn't figure out what what going on and I didn't care either--there was hardly any blood, no gore, and the crazy guy starts playing records at the end!  What kind of scary movie is that?  It was fast-forward city for this video.  And the crazy guy doesn't even do anything to his mother, so I can't figure out the title, either.   It's one of those movies where I wonder if they knew what they were going to do before they turned the camera on.  But I'm glad his mother in the movie came out okay, really.  Moms don't belong in scary movies anyway.  I told Mom the next morning that I thought she was okay and she felt my forehead to see if I was sick.   Anyway, don't even bother with this movie.  I'd sit through a whole hour of Blue's Clues, even, before I'd watch this movie again.                

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD (1971). This is another movie that sounds like a vampire movie, but it ain't. Nobody drinks anyone's blood in this movie--why'd they use this title? Anyway, I couldn't sleep one night after Mom served her Swedish meatballs, so I snuck downstairs, turned on the TV and VCR, tuned the sound down real low, and found this video in Uncle Renfield's collection. Not only did I get mad that it's not a vampire film, but also cause there's this kid around my age who stupidly puts dog rabies-blood in meat pies (Who puts meat in pies? Yech!). These scruffy looking people Uncle Renfield says are hippies (Is that like Mormons?) eat those nasty old pies and become monsters who drool a lot like that St. Bernard down the street and kill people. Some construction workers mess with one of the hippie girls and become droolers too. There's some bloody stuff, and even a head cut off and waved around, and I found out that rabies-people don't like water. That makes sense cause those hippies look like they never wash. The dumbest part is that the kid who causes all this trouble never gets punished. Yeah, right! I get punished even for stuff I didn't do. Just as the writing at the end of the film began, I heard Dad stomp to the upstairs bathroom--he has problems with Mom's meatballs, too. If you can't sleep or nothing, I guess this film is all right, but if you have a choice, I'd try to find a real vampire film. I just hope Mom never gets the idea of having meat pies for supper!

I EAT YOUR SKIN (1964).  You know, it doesn't pay to tick off Uncle Renfield.  Like when he was over at our house showing my Dad this big old dorky looking robot thing called "Robot Commando" that he got on eBay.  He and Dad had this lame toy when they were kids (about a hundred years ago) and they were all excited and Uncle Renfield was saying how the feeble thing could shoot cannon balls and missiles and stuff and so I asked, "Can it swim?" and I dunked it in the fish tank.  Boy, did Dad and Uncle Renfield get mad even though it was just an old toy.  Anyway, some time after that, I was going to have to stay overnight with my Aunt Cecelia cause Mom and Dad were going on a trip to help Mom's friend's daughter get married and not mess it up like she done before (she hurled all over the minister and they had to call it off).  I was lucky 'cause Aunt Cecelia's daughter, my creepy cousin Margot (I called her Mar-goat except when she's around cause she hits real hard) was gonna be at a slumber party that night.  I had to sleep in her icky girl's room, but she had her own TV and VCR!  So I asked Uncle Renfield what would be a good gut-munching zombie flick, cause I knew I'd need lots of blood and gore to get through spending the night at Aunt Cecelia's place.  So he recommended this movie, and said it had really nasty looking zombies who even ate the scenery.  Cool!  Well, not cool!  I popped this movie into Mar-goat's video machine after I escaped Aunt Cecelia who wanted to read to me from the Mother Earth News and it came up on Mar-goat's TV and--it was in black and white!  It was all about this dorky guy who thinks he's cool (he's a writer or something) going to this island with palm trees and stuff with this couple who kinda reminded me of Mr. and Mrs. Bushman from down the street who are always wearing sunglasses and clothes from Banana Republic even though they're older than Mom and Dad, even.  Well, these people get to the island--I think it's called Voodoo Island, which is about the last island I'd want to go to--and they run into zombies...ugly zombies...yeah, right.  Zombies with old oatmeal smeared on their faces!  It was the lamest thing I've seen since Zombie Lake.  And these zombies just shuffle around like Dad in the morning before he's had his coffee.  They don't eat nothing!  No guts, no intestines, no liver-chomping, almost no blood.  Why did they call it I Eat Your Skin, when they don't eat any skin?  Rip off!  What kind of zombie movie was this, anyway?   I wondered how could Uncle Renfield think this crummy old stinky movie was good.   Then I remembered Robot Commando.  Yup, Uncle Renfield got me good all right.   It's getting pretty bad when you can't trust your own relatives, boy.  The only good thing that happened was that for breakfast the next morning, Aunt Cecelia served me that cereal that you chew for five years and it still won't go down and when she wasn't looking I dumped it in Mar-goat's gym bag.  Anyway, the only way I could recommend this lame movie is if you want to get back at someone good.  This movie will do it.

ILSA, SHE-WOLF OF THE S.S. (1974). Uncle Renfield told me that Hogan’s Heroes was a lot of made-up stuff, that army guys didn’t have much fun in those camps. Well, I thought it was just those pills they make him take, but then I sneaked downstairs when Mom and Dad went to the party the people Dad calls "yuppie puppies" threw, and watched this tape. I was p.o.ed cause I thought it was gonna be a werewolf film or something, but instead there’s this big blonde lady wearing one of those Nazi uniforms like Sgt. Shultz wore, only she wasn’t stupid and funny like Sgt. Schultz is—she was just mean and did awesome bad stuff like cut off a guy’s "family jewels"—that’s what Dad calls them—and hanging a naked girl on a block of ice and even wee-weeing on a guy—no kidding. I kinda liked it until she gets hot over some dork and then practically everybody gets killed. It looked like it happened at the same place Hogan was at, but I didn’t see him or that guy from Family Feud anywhere. I guess Uncle Renfield was right, but I’m not telling him so. Maybe they had different camps back then, like one for Hogan and Sgt. Schultz and one for Ilsa. I’d ask my teacher, Ms. Fridley, about it, but she looks at me funny when I mention Uncle Renfield’s videos.

I’LL KILL YOU, I’LL BURY YOU, AND I’LL SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, TOO (1995). I think I said before that I’ve thought about making my own gory movie after seeing so many crummy videos that Uncle Renfield stashes at our house. I mean, Jimmy Johnston’s Dad has this awesome video camera that he uses to film lame family trips to places like the Ozarks and then bores Mom and Dad and the other parents out of their gourds showing them at parties. We could kind of borrow it if Jimmy’s Dad didn’t know about it and then make our own movie with lots of blood and guts and people getting their eyeballs poked out—you know, good movie stuff. It wouldn’t be on film, though, which wouldn’t make it a real movie, I guess, through. Well, I sure found out that was true when I watched this video one night after Mom and Dad got tried of discussing my grades and stuff in their bedroom and finally conked out. I sneaked downstairs and this video had enough cool words in the title for three movies, so I popped it in the VCR. Well, I got skunked! This movie looked like me and Jimmy could of made it, cause it was shot on someone’s video camera (maybe not even as good a camera as Mr. Johnston’s) and it looked like everyone was making everything up as they did the movie—I don’t know nothing about acting, but this video’s acting was just rank! People even just stopped talking in it and looked around like they didn’t know what to do next. Heck, I would’ve just told them to chop someone else or something, but they couldn’t even figure that out. Anyway, the video starts with this man and women in this trailer home and they get undressed and do that sex stuff that I’m not supposed to know about yet and a guy with a chainsaw comes in and saws them up, which was an okay beginning, only the chopping up was just dumping red paint on places. Then these scientists are messing around out in the woods for some reason (I never understood what they were sposed to be looking for) and some of them get ripped up every so often. They do have kind of a cool wood chipper thing, but you have to use the fast-forward a lot between all the talk and talk to find anything worth looking at. The ending is kinda stupid and there’s this one girl whose a real pain but she doesn’t get chopped which is about the only reason I watched this video all the way through, to see her get sawed or something—rip off! And the people all talk like we do in class when Mrs. Fridley makes us read stuff from those dopey plays she likes. (Some of those dopey plays could sure use a wood chipper in them.) Anyway, not much gore, and fakey blood, and lots of girls without clothes which older kids would like, I guess, and just about the most rotten acting I ever saw, and all of it looking like some losers just went around town and the woods with someone’s video camera and made a movie instead of going bowling or something. Instead of wasting time watching this video, you’d be better off bowling, even if you throw most of the balls in the gutter like I do cause I don’t keep my wrist straight or something. Still has a cool title, though.

INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT, THE (1971).  Mom and Dad don't want me watching Uncle Renfield's videos or anything else scary or good, and that means most cable TV now, too.  I was watching boring old Discovery Channel cause Mom made me while she was putting dishes in the dishwasher and there was something about medical stuff and then there was this baby cow with two heads on the screen!  It was cool even though it was in a bottle.  But Mom walked in then and saw it and yelled at Dad who was in the garage and he came in and they decided I had to watch Family Channel from now on!  What a rip-off!  Well, that night, when Mom and Dad were asleep, I snuck downstairs and found this video in Uncle Renfield's stuff.  Since two-headed baby cows was cool, I thought this movie would be cool.   It was lame!  There's this jerky science guy and he messes around and ends up putting this bad guy's head on this big dumb guy.  This bad guy killed some people so I can't figure why that science guy wanted to put his head on anything.   I'd of just let it rot or something.  Well, now the big dumb guy has this bad guy's head stuck next to his and the bad guy pushes the dumb guy around (he doesn't push him, I mean, cause they both got the same arms, but yells at him and stuff) and makes him go around and kill people which the dumb guy doesn't want to do and cries a lot like a big baby...kinda like Chucky Breeden when his Mom won't let him play with us guys cause she says we make Chucky act up (Chucky doesn't need any help in acting up, though).  The bad guy even killed the big dumb guy's Dad and then the big dumb guy really bawled.  Anyway, the scientist and his friend (who sounds a lot like that guy on the radio who plays all the songs you already heard all week long again on Sunday) get together to try to save the science guy's wife who got grabbed by the two-headed thing.  Everybody runs around and the two-headed thing kinda stumbles around, and they kinda kill it, and that was it.  Almost no blood, no guts, or anything, and you could tell the two-headed thing was just one guy standing really close behind another guy.   Big deal!  If a kid tried to pull something like that at Halloween, he'd get no candy at all.  Still, though, it was kinda neat after getting yelled at by Mom for watching a two-headed baby cow to sneak out and watch a two-headed guy movie, even if it was all fakey.  Maybe they oughta make a scary movie about it, like The Attack Of The Two Headed Baby Cow...only the cow wouldn't be in a bottle and he's have four horns and all.  It'd be a lot better than this movie.  This movie is almost as bad as having to watch the Family Channel.

INVASION OF THE BLOOD FARMERS (1972). My Dad's older brother, Wilton, is supposed to be a farmer, but I always kinda doubted it, cause he never wears those bib over-hauls or a straw hat or talks like those people on Green Acres, except maybe like Mr. Kimball, only Uncle Wilton doesn't correct himself all the time.  Dad says Uncle Wilton gets paid not to grow soybeans, which makes sense to me, cause soybeans sound real nasty anyhow.  One thing, Uncle Wilton doesn't act like the farmers in this video that I watched after the Superbowl on TV got Mom and Dad to go to bed early cause Dad said it wasn't any contest, more like the "Superbore."  I sneaked downstairs and this was the first tape that I found that I hadn't seen already, so I popped it in.  Well, this video wasn't "super," but it sure was a "bore."  It's about these nutty farmer types, some of them wear those bib over-hauls and straw hats and others wear capes and hoods and they're supposed to be Drew-its or something, and they have this woman in a glass coffin (she's like their Queen) and they grab people and drain their blood to make her live again.  I think that's it...it's hard to tell with this movie.  The only good parts are where the people get hoses stuck in them and have their blood sucked out.  But most of this movie has some cruddy-looking men sitting around and talking in this bar or a guy and a girl and an old man talking in some basement with a lab in it that must of cost five bucks, or the Drew-its dancing and chanting weird stuff.  This one sissy guy, the Queen's main man, just keep yakking about the Drew-its and rolling his eyes and stuff--it never seems to end.  The old fast-forward button really got a workout, I can tell you.  Then at the end, something happened but you can't tell what cause it just kind of ends in the middle of a fight--I think it was a fight. If Uncle Wilton really gets paid not to grow soybeans, then the makers of this film shoulda been paid not to make it.  Arnold the Pig coulda made a better movie.

INVASION OF THE FLESH HUNTERS (1980). I think I said before what a crummy rip-off it is to pick a movie cause it has a sick title and then find out it’s nothing but crud. Well, this isn’t one of those. This is one of those films made by Italians who know when a zombie or a cannibal munches someone, blood needs to spray and guts need to splatter, and there’s got to be gore. I was kind of ticked off when I popped this video into the VCR one night after Mom and Dad went to sleep, cause Mom caught me renting Fooley Cooley at Blockbuster when I was sposed to rent The Incredibles instead and she locked up my PlayStation II again. But I forgot all about that stuff when this movie began. It started good, with some guys in some prison camp getting so hungry that they even ate each other! See, this is like a zombie movie where the zombies aren’t zombies but cannibals--just people who got to eating other people and ended up liking it. One of the guys who became a cannibal prisoner lives in this regular neighborhood with a creepy kid and his sister who really likes the guy and kinda teases him and gets bit by him. Another of the cannibal prisoners is in this hospital, where they’re trying to figure him out, but no luck. The cool thing about this movie is that this is pretty much all the plot there is—both the guts go nuts and start munching on people and the people they bite but don’t eat up start eating people, too (it’s sposed to be virus, like the flu), and there’s some of the sickest and coolest gore and guts I’ve seen in a movie in a while. The Italians know how to make movies! One guys bites this one bloody chunk off a woman’s neck with blood spurting everywhere, this nurse bites off this guy’s tongue with lots of gore, and, in the best scene, one of the cannibals gets a shotgun blast and you can see this big old hole right through him! That should have won some sort of award. Uncle Renfield told me that there aren’t any awards for good gore, though, which is probably why we keep getting lame movies. The scene where the cannibals chop up this guy’s leg for yummy tidbits is better than anything I saw in Freddy Vs. Jason, that’s for sure. There’s also this cop who cusses more than Dad and Uncle Renfield put together and he’s pretty funny, so you get some laughs along with all the cool gore. Even though it’s an Italian movie, you almost think it’s really in America, which just shows you that the guys who made this movie knew what they were doing. This is a great movie and I recommend it to everyone who likes spurting intestines and ripped-open chests done the Italian way—which is the right way, as far as I’m concerned.

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1977). I guess I gotta start listening to Uncle Renfield at least once in a while.  He told me not to ever watch this movie cause it would scare me out of taking a bath and I don't take enough baths already (that's him being funny, I guess).   Well, I didn't like the way he recommended some videos that just about ruined the sleep-over I had with my pals Jimmy and Floyd, so I thought I'd fix him and watch this video anyway.  He was right!  Mom and Dad were conked out good one night (I could hear Dad "not snoring") and so I sneaked downstairs and stuck this video in the machine.  It's about this dumb old girl who goes to live in some country place all by herself and runs into these creepy guys who do awful bad things to her...I'm not sposed to talk about stuff like that, but anyway, they did those things to her twice.  So she went after them, hanging one guy who blubbered like Philip Simpson does when his Mom catches him surfing to dirty places on the Web (which is just about every night), and using an outboard motor to chop up another guy.  But the worst part was when she got one guy to take a bath with her (yuck!) and she slips this big knife under the suds and...I won't say what she does to him--I don't even want to think about what she does to him--it hurt just about as much to watch it as it did to the guy in the movie...well, almost.  I was so creeped out, I wouldn't take a bath or anything, and Mom and Dad had to let me use the shower in that little bathroom place next to their bedroom.  Even then, I locked the door good and tight!  I never want to see anything like that ever again!  Anyway, after she hacks up those guys and stuff, she just leaves and that's the end of the movie.  So, they don't kill her and she gets back at them by killing them...what's that mean?  Like I said, Uncle Renfield was right about this move and I told him so.  He said showers were better for me anyway, and he then told me about a much better scary movie to watch, so you can bet I'll listen to him now.  It's a movie called Psycho and I'll watch that next chance I get. As far as that other movie goes, I spit on it and you will, too--just don't watch it.

IT'S ALIVE! (1968). When I sneak down late at night to watch Uncle Renfield's videos, the biggest hassle I got is the sound--I have to turn it 'way down, or Mom or Dad might catch me.  Well, when I shoved this sucker into the VCR after Mom and Dad conked out early from watching some boring show on public TV with lots of those funny British accents, I didn't have that problem.  The first part of the movie hasn't any sound at all--just lots of boring driving around some ugly country.  Then, this guy who kinda looks like he was in one of those Disney videos Mom's always buying me even though I tell her not to, goes to this place like a farm.  This fat guy wants to show his animals and the first guy gets tossed into into some pit or something.  There's a monster in the pit--some monster!  It's just some man in a rubbery suit with zippers and ping-pong eyes--I could do better with what Mom tosses to Goodwill.  You don't see the monster really eat anyone, and there's another whole part of the move that's also got no sound--it's about some woman being snatched, or something.  The Disney guy looked pretty p.o.ed about being in the movie and I couldn't blame him--I was p.o.ed just watching it.  It's like watching some cruddy school play that someone filmed.  I don't know if the Disney guy got away or not cause I conked out and woke up only when the fuzzy sound from the TV at the end of the tape came on.  I griped to Uncle Renfield about it and he told me that the guy who made it, Larry Bu-cannon, got a rotten deal and had to make the movie for about ten cents.  I said the guy's name oughta be P.U.-cannon and I would of kept the ten cents and played ping pong with those monster eyes.  If you gotta watch this movie, you should turn down the sound and the picture.

KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE (1988). I don’t like clowns and I don’t like circuses, probably cause Dad took me to one when I was little and these old guy dressed up in a clown suit spit tobacco juice on my St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap—I guess he was a Cubs fan. So a movie about bad clowns suits me fine. These clowns are real bad—they’re aliens and they invade earth hidden in a circus tent (it’s really an alien space ship) and kill people and drink their blood through straws and put the bodies in cotton candy. I don’t think I’ll eat cotton candy any more after seeing that. It’s got all the clown acts that I didn’t think were very funny anyway…I wish Dad would see it so he won’t take me to any more circuses, but he won’t even watch the Sci-Fi channel. Speaking of that, I think this is one the dopey blonde guy and the robots on that Mystery Science show should watch. So I think this is pretty good, but if you like clowns and circuses, you’d better not watch it.

LAKE OF DRACULA (1971). I’m not real big on Dracula movies, ‘cause usually they try to make Drac this big lover who all the stupid girls want real bad so he can bite their neck and stuff and except for sometimes a stake in a chest there’s not much good gore. Guess that kinda is how I feel about most vampire films, a lot of dull neck biting and not much spewing guts and poked-out eyeballs or anything…it’s just that Drac films also have that gooey romance stuff that makes them really lame. So I wasn’t expecting much when I popped this video in the VCR one Saturday night after Mom and Day conked out after spending the day making me work like a slave on the stupid lawn pulling weeds and stuff and then welshing out on their promise to take me to Chucky Cheese just ‘cause I pulled out some weeds that turned out to be Mom’s dopey radish plants. Well, I sure didn’t get much from the movie, either. This is a Japanese Drac movie with no big rubber-suit monsters and no Drac! Just this gooney girl who gets scared once at a creepy old house by what I guess is a vampire, but he isn’t Drac. Then we get lots and lots of talk from the girl who’s older now (lots of that funny talking where she moves her mouth and the words come from somewhere else) and her sister and her guy, who’s a doctor. Finally, a coffin pops up and a vampire starts biting people’s necks and the girl’s sister turns into a vampire and her boyfriend, the doc, doesn’t believe there’s any vampires around, just a lot of folks turning pale and biting at necks—the usual stuff. The thing is, writing it makes it sound loads more interesting than it is—it is boring! Lots of talking, lots of people getting together and blabbering about stuff that’s got nothing to do with vampires or anything, and there’s about as much blood as in those black-and-white Drac movies where Drac wears a cape and talks real funny. I always said the Japanese can’t make a good scary movie, except for that Goke movie, and this movie just proves it again. It’s like a real feeble American vampire movie only with Japanese people in it, so we don’t even get to see all those cool but weird Japanese things like grownups walking around in bathrobes and everyone taking a bath together. You can fast-forward this movie all the way to the end and still not want to stop anywhere, it’s so dull and the action’s so lame. If you want to see Japanese people getting bit on the neck and not fall asleep, go watch that Goke move and leave this one on the shelf. 

MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY (1983). My Dad says (when Mom's not around) that women will be the ruin of him. I know what he means. My cousin Margot (don't call her Mar-goat around her unless you want a fat lip), who's three years older than me and a teenager (big deal), begged me to show her one of Uncle Renfield's videos someday. I said okay to get her off my case and, besides, I thought it'd never happen. Well, it happened. When none of my regular baby-sitters was available one time, Mar-goat's mom, Aunt Cecelia, volunteered her and my parents thought it was a great idea. Not! I picked this one cause Uncle Renfield said it was a real gut-buster. It's about a bunch of people who go into this real sweaty jungle place for some reason and run into these midget natives. It's full of real gross stuff, like a native eating a bunch of wormy things, a guy getting cut open and his insides eaten by the natives, a guy's head getting chopped open and the natives eating the gooey brains--well, Mar-goat lasted until the gut-munching part and she ran for the bathroom. She missed the part when this guy got his Willie (that's what Dad calls it) cut off, and came back in time for the brain-munching--and back to the bathroom for her. She's been holding it over my head ever since, threatening to tell my folks. It was worth it in a way, though. At least she won't baby-sit me again. Anyway, unless you got a real strong stomach (stronger than Mar-goat's anyway), you better not watch this movie.

MANIAC (1934). The bad thing about having to sneak downstairs when it’s late to watch Uncle Renfield’s videos while Mom and Dad are snoozing is that I have to keep the living room real dark. So I can’t see the video boxes real well. I was wanting to see that movie Maniac where some greasy guy chops up people and shoots them in the face with a shotgun and neat stuff like that. My pal, Floyd Reed, told me all about it and I was sure Uncle Renfield had a copy of it. Well, I pulled out this video called Maniac and popped it in the VCR. Rip off! It’s not about a guy who scalps people at all. This was one of those movies that don’t have no color and are real jerky and splotchy looking so it had to be real old. And it was dumb as dirt, too. It was about this crazy guy and this hairy doctor who grab this lady’s dead body from the cops and make her walk around like she’s high, or something. Then they argue and the crazy guy kills the hairy doctor who was trying to kill the crazy guy so he could bring him back to life…I think. The sound was real crummy. Anyway, the doc’s dead and the crazy guy makes himself to look like the doc and then he shots another crazy guy full of some juice and the guy really goes postal and drags off the dead girl who’s still walking around and these ladies grab flu shots and go at it in the basement and…like I said, dumb. All through the movie, there’s this writing that tells about crazy people, which makes sense cause whoever made this movie had to be crazy. The only gore is where the crazy guy cuts out this cat’s eyeball and eats it! No kidding! And this other guy has these cats that eat these rats the guy has and the guy feeds the cats to the rats and sells the fur--can you really do that? There's also some parts where ladies take off their clothes—I didn’t know they did stuff like that in old movies. Anyway, I was steamed and told Uncle Renfield about it. He said it was a "cult classic." Well, it’s a "crud classic," and the only reason anyone would wanta watch it would be to see a guy eat a cat’s eyeball. And Mom and Dad talk about how sick movies are these days! 

MANSTER, THE (1959).  I gotta take back what I said before about the Japanese.  I said once that they only made those crummy rubber-suit monster films and then I saw Goke about vampires that crawl up your nose.  That movie was kinda cool and not a rubber suit anywhere.  Then, one night, I sneaked downstairs and I popped in this video.  I thought at first that Uncle Renfield had misspelled "Monster" when he did the label, but no, the movie had the same name--Manster.  I'm not sure what that's sposed to mean, but this movie's about this American guy who is a reporter and he's in Japan.  He's supposed to do some reporting stuff, so he goes and sees this Japanese scientist.  This scientist is crazy and he injects the reporter with some stuff and right away the reporter starts acting weird.  He disses his wife and plays around with some Japanese lady--no, that's not what's weird, though.  Funny stuff happens to his body and he takes off his shirt and he's got an eyeball in his shoulder!  Cool!  Not only that, but he grows another head and runs around killing people, mainly Japanese.   Now, that's a monster movie!  He knows that crazy scientist did something to him so he goes and sees him.  It turns out this scientist used that stuff on his wife and she's a mutant.  Two monsters!  But the coolest part is where the Manster splits into two!  I liked that part so much, I ran it twice and I ended up staying up so late that Mom said she practically had to pull me out of bed to get me up.  So, even though it's usually cardboard buildings and Tonka toy cars and rubber-suit monsters, the Japanese can do some cool monster flicks.  I told that to Uncle Renfield and he said that I was showing signs of true cultural diversity.  I don't know what that means, but any place that can turn out a decent monster movie like this and cool stuff like Tenchi Muyo and Gundam Wing is okay as far as I'm concerned.   I still don't know about that sushi stuff, though.

MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1952).  One thing that kinda ticks me off about Dad and Uncle Renfield is the way they talk about old shows and movies like they're special or something.  I was asking about something I saw on The Addams Family on Fox TV the other night, and Uncle Renfield says, no, that's not the real Addams Family.  And Dad agreed with him.  I asked what was the real Addams family and they both said it was this old TV show...one that isn't in color or anything.  They're always talking about old stuff I almost never get to see, so I don't know if they're making it up or not.  Well, I finally saw that old show on cable and it was okay, sorta...I kinda liked Lurch better on that show than the new one, and I really liked that old Uncle Fester...that thing about turning on a light bulb in his mouth is cool.  He was cool.  Uncle Renfield let it slip that the guy who played Uncle Fester was in a movie about spider women, so I knew I had to watch it.   So the next time old Mrs. Baumgarten came to baby-sit me and conked out on the kitchen table cause she's so old and all, I found the movie in Uncle Renfield's stash and watched it.  Well, that actor guy should have stuck to The Addams Family!   This movie was lame.  In it, he's sposed  be a mad scientist but he just stands around and rolls his eyes like he got hit on his head and talks a lot.  He doesn't make any monsters or anything...just talks about doing it.  This is one of those talky movies, where nothing much happens and you just about use the fast-forward button all the time.  Anyway, these people crash in a plane and argue a lot and then get captured in the desert by the mad scientist and his creepy girls and guys and get taken to a lab that looked like Jimmy Johnston's cheapo chemistry set in his basement.   There, they talk some more and argue and that's just about the whole movie right there.  All through the movie, this guys keeps playing a guitar real bad like he didn't know they were recording him or something--that was the music.  There's this real creepy girl who's got real long fingernails that are sposed to be poison and she kills people with them...she's sposed to be the spider woman only she never turns into a spider.  Ripoff!  There's a giant spider that looks like a puppet from that crummy old Barney show...really lame and it hides behind some furniture anyway, so you couldn't see the guys working it, I guess.  When the monster is that crummy, I always know the movie will bite.  At the end, two people escape and nearly croak in the desert but are rescued and everyone else gets killed and I'm still not sure how all that happened.  All I'm sure of is that the new Addams Family may not be better than the old Addams Family but both of them are way better than this movie.  

MR. VAMPIRE (1985). Our teacher, Ms. Fridley, is always harping about how we gotta get lots of cultural awareness, which to her means we gotta spend time seeing how other countries do stuff and not to laugh even if they do things goofy. That’s hard to do, cause some of these foreign people do lots of goofy stuff. Like, in India, they worship cows! I mean, I could see eating them but no bowing to them or nothing. Anyway, that’s what I thought of after I sneaked downstairs one night when Mom and Dad were asleep and got a video from Uncle Renfield’s collection and popped it into our VCR. The title was Mr. Vampire, which I thought was a typo or something. I found out that the whole movie was a typo! It all takes place in China and practically all the guys wear clothes that look like dresses and funny hats and bow a lot and everything something happens, they yell or jump. That’s okay for those kung-fu movies cause they’re supposed to be spastic but this was a horror movie. Well, some really dopey-acting guys mess up and somehow get a bunch of sleeping vampires awake, and—I still don’t believe this—those vampires start hopping! Like the Easter Bunny or something! I just about spazzed out when I saw that. These are vampires? Even worse, it didn’t look like they were after anyone’s neck and they were stopped by—this was really retarded—pieces of paper stuck on their heads! Really! I mean, when you stick a stake in a vampire or burn up a vampire or the sun makes him curdle up, you can understand that. But some stupid pieces of paper? So the vampires were stupid and they people fighting them were stupid and this whole movie was stupid. If you can’t even get the vampires right, forget it! I asked Uncle Renfield about it, and he said in Asia, the vampires are the living dead and cause they’re dead, their joints are all rusty and so they have to hop. Well, I said, if that’s why, how come they can move at all? Uncle Renfield just gave me that look. Then he told me those dopey pieces of paper were holy writings. I asked him if that was like holy water and he said, yeah, kinda. So I told him that holy water just hurts a vampire, it doesn’t stop him. Then Uncle Renfield told me to go home. Anyway, a few weeks later, we had "Asian Studies" in class and Ms Fridley caught me dozing through it and so she asked me real nasty what impressed me most about "Asian Studies" and I said, "Hopping vampires." Well, I got another note to take home and no Playstation for a whole month! I wish I had a holy piece of paper that would fix some people, boy. Anyway, don’t bother with this movie unless you like vampires that wouldn’t even scare a baby and couldn’t even catch one.

MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970). Mom and Dad wouldn't let me see Freddy slicing and dicing on cable TV the other night, so I sneaked down when they were snoring away and popped this tape in. I thought it'd be like Freddy and Jason and stupid older kids getting their guts ripped out. Boy, was I wrong! This looked liked some creepy grownups got a move camera and decided to make a movie with their pocket change. There was this big, fat lady with lotsa makeup who ran a show where people did disgusting stuff like eating vomit and sniffing bike seats (?) and then killed the people they charged to watch this stuff. Only, this fat lady wasn't a lady, not really--she was some fat guy in a wig and a dress--I figured this out about halfway through. The stuff about killing the customers was okay, except the blood and gore wasn't any better than what me and Jimmy Johnston did last Halloween to scare old Mar-goat, my snooty cousin, only she didn't get scared and told my Mom and Dad instead. Uncle Renfield told me this had something to do with Sharon Tate, whoever she was. Anyway, it was pretty stupid and pretty crummy even for one of Uncle Renfield's videos, and I was about to turn it off and get back to bed, when this giant lobster attacks the big fat guy-woman. That would be pretty cool, except the lobster is pretty fakey overall--I know the bad guys are supposed to get it at the end of these movies, but I never saw anyone get it that way before. So, if you can sit through all the nasty, sick stuff to get to the lobster part, this video is worth watching, I guess. I heard the sicko who made this movie also made something called Pink Flamingos, about lawn ornaments, but I can't recommend that unless the lawn ornaments get real big and kill people, which I hear they don't. I prefer my maniacs to wear a hockey mask, not a wig and a dress, anyway.

MUNSTER, GO HOME! (1966). You know, I think that old TV shows and movies without color in them are mostly pretty crummy, but there are a few that rock. Like that movie where all those brains attack folks and the guys shoot them with guns and the blood just spews out of them—now, that’s cool! And like that old TV show, The Addams Family, where they blow up toy trains and have this plant that strangles people—again, ‘way cool. But at the same time they had the Addam’s family on TV, back when Uncle Renfield was my age and probably really creepy then, too, there was this TV show called The Munsters, where the people wore costumes and stuff to look like that Frankenstein Monster and a lady vampire and a werewolf punk kid and a vampire grandpa and one pretty lady who stood around and didn’t do anything. The costumes were cool and the house and cars were cool, but the show just sucked big time! It coulda been some lame family show with folks wearing costumes, although the vampire grandpa did blow up stuff in his lab and hang upside down, so that was kinda cool. Anyway, when I heard they made a movie of this show, I sneaked downstairs one night after Mom and Dad went to bed and finally stopped "debating" (they say they aren’t arguing when they yell at each other, just debating) and popped this video into the VCR. Well…the movie of The Munsters sucked big time, too. It was in color and all and had that cool Munsters car, but the story bit. Instead of them doing some real monster stuff, the Munsters find out they’re English lords or something and go off to England and live in this big house with servants and all. Big deal! These normal people want to kill the Munsters to get some money or something—I wasn’t sure about that part. But, duh! Here the monsters are being threatened by the normal people…what’s fun or scary about that? Nothing! In fact, the whole movie is a lot of nothing, with some guy making phony money and using the Munsters to keep folks away, and a stupid race with that cool Munster car I mentioned with real retarded stuff happening in it that wouldn’t even make it in a kiddie cartoon, and a dopey love thing between this guy who later rode a motorcycle on that old Chips show and the blonde lady. I fast-forwarded through most of it and it still seemed to drag on. I told Uncle Renfield about it and he told me the guys who made that show about the Beaver also made this Munsters show, too. Well, they sure screwed up this time. I mean, at least even that dorky Beaver show had Eddie Haskell. Unless you’re real old like Uncle Renfield and want to see the Munsters again, stay away from this movie—or maybe just catch the scenes with the cool Munster car.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981). One of the dumber things they do at school is have this party on Valentine’s Day. We’re supposed to eat cake and drink milk (that’s okay, except the cake is heart shaped, real hokey) and give everyone a Valentine card (that bites). Used to be (Dad says) that you only gave a Valentine card to someone you liked, and that made sense. But Ms Fridley says we have to give everyone a Valentine so no one will feel bad. She said she’d check so we were stuck with having to do it. Well, I forgot about Valentine’s Day and having to get the cards until the night before Valentine’s Day so it was too late and I was bummed out about it. I looked through Uncle Renfield’s stash of scary videos after Mom and Dad started snoring in their bedroom and I found this video! Just in time for Valentine’s Day! I popped it in the VCR and for once I wasn’t ripped off. Lots of good gory killings with lots of blood, and pipes smashed through heads and pickaxes through chests, and nails fired into heads…a real good movie. It’s about these guys who go down in mines to do mining stuff one Valentine’s Day and get stuck in it and only one guy gets rescued. So people shouldn’t go down the mine, but they’re dumb and go anyways and the guy now wearing a gas mask and a miner helmet rips two guy’s hearts out. The sheriff gets one of them in a box! Then the guy chops up more people. I’m not sure why he wants to chop everybody up (something about a dance), but he does a real good job of it. The guy grabs this girl and two wimpy guys go after him and that’s mostly it. A lot of the movie is wasted on the two wimpy guys and the girls being all mushy, but the killings are good enough to keep watching. Anyway, after I saw that movie, I told Jimmy Johnston and he got this cow’s heart from his Uncle Purdue who works at the Kroger’s meat counter. He gets there real early in the morning cause that’s when they deliver the meat and stuff. We wrapped the heart up in a box and sneaked it on Ms. Fridley’s desk before school started on Valentine’s Day. Man! Did she scream when she opened it up! Anyway, that cancelled the Valentine’s Day party, which was fine by me since I forgot to get any Valentine cards. All the goony girls were mad, though, and they all looked at me but they couldn’t prove I did it. But Jimmy messed up and left the Kroger tag in the box and the principal, Mrs. Trammel, got Jimmy’s uncle to fink on us and me and Jimmy had to write an essay on "Why I Was Wrong To Send A Real Heart To My Teacher." I also couldn’t watch TV for a month, too, and no playing with my X-Box, either. So although I think My Bloody Valentine is a cool gory movie, you got to be careful not to get any ideas when you watch it. Or at least be careful to "remove the evidence," like my Uncle Renfield put it.

NAIL GUN MASSACRE (1985). We have a basement in our house that’s always been kind of damp and dark and stuff, which means it was neat to play in, but Mom didn’t like it. She always ragged Dad to put stuff like carpeting and paneling in it and more or less ruin it. Well, Dad and his pal, Jimmy Johnston’s father, tried to put paneling on the basement’s concrete walls one Saturday and ended up with big holes in the walls. After Dad took Mom to some restaurant so she’d stop yelling at him, he said he’d hire some guys to fix up the basement. Well, these men who wore those over-hauls and caps that said "Copenhagen" (what’s that?) showed up and began to work in the basement. They chased me out of there pretty regular when they were working and not sitting around making fun of Dad’s Hyundai and spitting stuff into cans they carried around. But I got a chance to see them use this cool gun that shoots nails! Really! I told Jimmy Johnston and Floyd Reed about the nail guns at school and we all thought the same thing—make a gore movie with nail guns! Then Uncle Renfield told me one had been made already. So one night I sneaked downstairs and searched through Uncle Renfield’s videos and there it was! Boy, I popped that tape in, quick! I knew this had to be a cool film. Well, it looked pretty cheap right off, crummy music (sounded like my cousin Mar-goat playing her old electronic keyboard even though she only knows a few keys) and it seemed like somebody had spit on the camera lens half the time. And it started with some guys dressed just like the guys who were fixing our basement grabbing this lady and doing bad things to her. Then this guy wearing those leafy clothes that soldiers wear and a motorcycle helmet shows up and shots this one guy with a nail gun. That was kinda cool. Then the nail-gun guy drives this van that they carry dead people in and goes and nail-guns some other guys—he nailed one guy who was going Number One in a place that really must have hurt! One guy who was using this chainsaw got nail-gunned and he accidentally cut his hand off! So there was some good stuff in this movie. But I saw that nails guns weren’t all that great, cause they don’t make much gore. Just a little blood and that’s it, except for the guy that cut his hand off. But lots of dumb guys got killed in the movie and so I didn’t fall asleep while I was watching it or anything. The next morning, I told Mom she better be careful around those guys fixing the basement and she said those guys quit cause Dad said something mean about pickup trucks. So now we got this basement with half paneling and half without. Anyway, you ought to watch this movie as long as you’re not expecting lots of blood and gore. And if you know someone who can put up paneling and doesn’t drive a pickup truck, call my Dad.         

NATURE TRAIL TO HELL (1982). Both Uncle Renfield and my Dad were Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts cause they didn’t have Playstation ‘way back when they were kids and every so often they try to con me into joining the Cub Scouts. Of course, I’d rather watch The NeverEnding Story 20 times in a row than do that, since the Scout uniform is dorky, you have to salute and stuff, and I don’t like sleeping on dirt. But those two bring up the subject often enough that the whole Scouts thing really ticks me off. Which is why I really liked this video when I watched it one night after Mom and Dad went to bed and I was sure they were asleep ‘cause I couldn’t hear Letterman coming from their room. Anyway, this movie’s not only got lots of blood and gore, and it gets sprayed right at the screen (Uncle Renfield told me that it was done in 3-D, which would be cool to see guts and eyeballs coming at you, but the video wasn’t 3-D), but also the main people who get hacked and chopped are a bunch of creepy Boy Scouts! Yay! The movie even starts out cool, with the kind of old people who make those hacking noises when you’re trying to eat your patty melt at IHOP getting axed by this psycho killer while they’re camping. The psycho killer wears this white mask kinda like Jason and Michael Myers and he sure knows how to slash and hack all right, just like them. Then these dopey Boy Scouts and their leaders who are just a bunch of stupid teens go in the woods to hike and campo and do all that crummy nature stuff they do, and the psycho killer starts hacking them to pieces, too. I mean, lots of body pieces laying around, and heads flying everywhere, and blood gushing out—a real quality kind of movie. The teens in this movie are real stupid, just like the creepy ones at the high school are, so this movie is realistic, too. Like a couple of teens just disappear, then another couple, and there are pieces of bodies and guts and stuff laying around, but instead of running outta those woods and calling 911, the stupid teens and idiot Scouts just keep hiking. If it weren’t for stupid teens, these movie psychos wouldn’t have much to hack up, except maybe some old people once in a while. What’s really cool is practically all the dumb Scouts and dumber teens get chopped up in this movie. I figured out who the killer was real early, but that’s okay, he still rocked. I had to fast-forward through some nature stuff, although some places in it where animals ate each other was cool. And they kept calling the kids Cub Scouts although they were wearing those green sacks the Boy Scouts wear. But this was the best hack-and-slash gore movie I’ve seen in a while and it has lots of Scout slaughter and now every time Dad or Uncle Renfield talk about how good it is to be a Scout and always "be prepared," I just remember how these lame Scouts weren’t prepared at all to be hack, chopped, slashed, and stabbed. I’d rather not be a Scout and stay out of the woods, if you know what I mean.

NIGHTMARE WEEKEND (1986). Uncle Renfield and my Dad talk about scary movies sometimes and they usually end up laughing about how lame a lot of them are. Well, I sure know what they mean. I’ve looked at a lot of the videos that Uncle Renfield stashes here ‘cause his townhouse (Dad calls it a "cracker box") is so stuffed with DVDs and things, and a lot of them are crappy! I mean, if you’re gonna get a camera and some guys and maybe some girls and make a scary movie, then put something scary in it! Don’t put something stupid in it. And, of yeah, have some blood spray and guts falling out so we don’t fall asleep or something. That’s kinda something I thought grownups would know, but they don’t seem to know that when they make scary movies sometimes. Like this movie. It had a cool title and everything, and it wasn't so old that I thought it would at least have some gore, anyway…boy, was I wrong! I mean, it’s about this crazy guy who invents these dopey silver balls that he shoots down people’s throats, and they become zombies, only without any kind of cool makeup stuff and they don’t eat people, just strangle them or something. I mean, there’s almost no blood, and forget about eyeballs or intestines or anything good like that plopping out. And even that’s not the stupidest part! There’s this creepy girl and she runs this computer to control stuff and the "computer" is this lame hand puppet, like something you see on those loser PBS kid shows in the morning. A puppet! And this is supposed to be a scary movie! A lot of the first of the movie I had to fast-forward through because it was just about these dumb older boys and girls yakking about some party and then going to the party and that creepy girl playing with her stupid puppet computer. The puppet has this stupid high voice like some cartoon character. Just totally feeble. Finally, the crazy guy shoots out the silver balls and the guys and girls swallow them and become lame zombies and just about everyone dies in real boring ways. I was kinda hoping one of the zombies would rip up that puppet, but even that didn’t happen. It was the dopey puppet who knocks off the zombies. How stupid can you get? Didn’t the people know that a crummy puppet pulling some lever and killing all the zombies is stupid and lame? It’s a real cheap movie, too, where you can see the lights move when the camera moves and the color is real muddy and all that. So I can’t say you should watch this movie unless you like those puppet shows on PBS, and, if you do, then this dumb movie might scare you, so maybe you shouldn’t watch it, either.

NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES (1971). I don't know much about Mexico, except Taco Bell, so I was real surprised to hear they made scary movies there. I didn't know this was a Mexican scary movie--I like King Kong, with the big ape falling off that building, so I gave this a try. It's not about a big ape, though, but about some guy who becomes a monkey-looking monster when his Dad, a doctor, sticks an ape's heart in him. Why do doctors in movies do stuff like that? Anyway, there's also this wrestling lady with a red costume like Catwoman, only she gets whipped by some ugly woman wrestler and her heart goes in the ape-guy, but he turns to an ape still. It's real confusing. There's some blood and gore and stuff in it and some naked women, but I think they put that stuff in so grownups like Uncle Renfield will go watch it. The wrestling is more boring that that stuff on Saturday afternoon TV. I was kinda sad when Kong fell and died, but I didn't care much when this money-looking guy croaked. Course, by that time, old Mrs. Baumgarten, my baby-sitter, was waking up and I had to beat feet back to my room.

NIGHT OF BLOODY HORROR (1969). Did you know that Uncle Renfield was in the Air Force? My Dad says Uncle Renfield joined the military ‘cause nobody but the government would hire him. Anyway, I thought of that ‘cause when I sneaked downstairs after Mom and Dad went to sleep after arguing about Dad playing with my XBox more than I do, I popped in this video with that cool-sounding title and I saw on the TV screen—Major Dad! You know, that balding guy with the big mouth who played that Major guy on TV and he’s married to that lady who got kicked out of Designing Women because she got too fat. Well, I guess he made this movie before he became a major and all. Anyway, this movie’s about Major Dad fooling with this lady and this lady goes to one of those churches where you go into a little room and spill your guts, only in this room the holy guy spills her guts! Cool! Then Major Dad goes to a bar and gets beat up and this nurse lady stops and takes him to her home. They get real close and all, and even go to the beach and stuff together, but he dreams about chopping wood and then he’s chopping the nurse lady with an axe! Very cool! Next, this doctor guy gets involved while the cops give Major Dad a real rough time. Then they let Major Dad go, even though they say he killed some other ladies. (Can they do that?) Anyway, he goes to another bar and a guy calls him a murderer and Major Dad beats him up. Then the doctor guy talks to Major Dad and it turns out Major Dad shot his brother when they were kids only he didn’t mean to. Then Major Dad goes to bed with this other lady and strangles her and then uses a meat cleaver on some pal of his. More cool stuff! But then it gets stupid and the real killer turns out not to be Major Dad at all and there’s no more blood and gore in the movie. Really lame! The big bloodbath that shoulda been at the end didn’t happen and the blood and gore in other parts of the movie wasn’t much. I mean, the title said "night of bloody horror," but it was really "night of a few blood drips and one cut-off hand." And Major Dad had some much hair and was so skinny, he almost didn’t look like Major Dad. And the whole movie looked like they shot it after school for lunch money. So, this movie started cool but ended up lame. I could recommend this film for a few neat murders, but it’s got so much talking and not enough blood spray that I really can’t. Except if you want to see Major Dad back when he was Private Dad or something.

NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1959).  I thought "ghouls" was something funny old Uncle Renfield calls "girls" (that's why he's still a bachelor, Dad says), but then I found out different.  Jimmy Johnston told me in school that ghouls go and eat people and stuff--he saw it in a book, or something.  So, when I saw this video in Uncle Renfield's collection, I decided to watch it and see some chomping.  Well, first of all it isn't in color, so it's real old and all, and second, it don't have any people-eating.  It's about some guy who puts a towel on his head and makes stupid people think he can talk to dead people.  How come grownups believe this stuff?   Anyway, another guy is a cop looking into all the dead people walking around and he goes to the fake guy's house, where the fake guy mumbles a lot and stuff moves around on strings, and stupid people look all scared.  But  the fake guy does get some dead people to come after him.  But there's no blood, no maggots, nothing.  And then there was this guy in a coffin who looks just like he's reading stuff off a paper, kinda like Floyd Reed had to do when he couldn't remember his words for the Thanksgiving play last year.  The only thing cool is this movie is a huge guy--he looks like one of those WWF wrestler guys--he's bald and has some gooey stuff on his face.  He looks scary, anyway, although he don't do much.  There's also this cop named Kelton who is the dumbest cop ever in a movie, I think...and I saw every Police Academy movie ever made.  He made me laugh, a little, and then I heard sounds coming from Mom and Dad's bedroom, so I fast-forwarded through the rest of the movie and beat feet to bed.  I complained to Uncle Renfield about this movie and he told me that this was a good movie for the Ed Wood guy who made it.  Well, if this was a good film by him, I'd sure hate to see this guy's bad films.  Uncle Renfield says this Wood guy's bad films are watched by millions of people everywhere!  They love them. he says.  Well, they're dorks, I say.  If I'm gonna risk getting punished and lose my Playstation for a whole week, I want to see some blood and gore.  I guess if you like this Wood guy, you'd like this movie, but I sure don't know why.

NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972). Uncle Renfield told me they made a monster movie about giant bunny rabbits. I said, "No way." He said, "Way," and told me to watch this tape. I did. All I can say is…way. Uncle Renfield went to college (Dad says he never really left) and he says Lepus is Latin for rabbit. I guess a movie called Night Of The Big Bunny Rabbits wouldn’t sound very scary. In the movie, a couple of scientists, work in a lab and make super rabbit medicine or something and the rabbits get it and get real big…I’m not sure about that part. The Doctor from Star Trek is in there somewhere, too. Then the big bunny rabbits attack everybody and smash buildings and cars and stuff. But they hop real slow when they’re big--I think some of them were people in bunny suits--and the buildings look like the little buildings on Dad’s model railroad and the cars look like model cars like Mom and Dad used to buy me until they worried about me maybe sniffing the glue. Even big, the bunny rabbits look like bunny rabbits. People shoot the bunny rabbits and they get blood on them and roll over and kick and die. Then they hop on over to an electric fence and get roasted. That’s about it. I can’t figure why scientists would make bunny rabbits so big, anyway. All they’d do is go around eating up all the lettuce and carrots and making big rabbit pellets. Anyway, it wasn’t very scary and I hope they don’t make another giant bunny rabbit film—I like big lizards better.

OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES (1982).  Mom sometimes tells a funny story about Dad, specially when he starts cutting down movies while we're watching them (Mom hates that--she thinks there should be no talking during a movie).  She says that Dad got a video camera once and shot lots of home movies with me as a baby and all, but no could watch them--cause Dad, the great director, kept using the zoom thing on the camera so much, watching it got you seasick.  Dad doesn't like that story, much.  But I kinda thought of that story when I snuck downstairs one night when everyone was conked out upstairs and watched this video.  I'll always watch something with zombies in it, boy.  But this was no Zombie--the director could have been Dad!  Really!  All through the movie, instead of moving the camera or something, this director kept using the zoom thing and I almost did get seasick!  Even if it weren't for that, this movie was pretty lame.  It's sposed to be about zombies and all, and it is, but the zombies look like guys dressed in uniforms who got paid two dollars and the makeup looks like it was put on with a squeegee.  It's sposed to be about these old dead German soldiers who want to keep these boys and girls wearing real bad clothes from getting some gold in some lake in the desert.  But it's really about these boys and girls doing naughty stuff and always doing it at night, so the zombies can get at them.  Why the boys and girls don't go looking for the gold during the day when the zombies are sacked out, the movie doesn't say.   So it's crummy looking, kinda dumb, and the music was so rotten that I just turned down the sound all the way.  But the worst thing was--no gore!  Well, almost no gore...the gore was that cheap, toss-some-guts-around kind, that anyone, even Dad, could've done better.  I got so ticked off, I told Uncle Renfield about this movie, and he gave me a spiel about the director being this guy named Jess Franco, and that he made lots of stinky movies, only he's real popular anyway.  Huh?  I mean, either a movie delivers the stuff or it doesn't...this movie only delivered me a headache trying to see what was going on--it was so murky and all.  You ought to skip this movie and maybe all movies made by this Jess Franco guy--and if anyone really likes this stuff, maybe Dad can sell his home movies to them.   

OCTAMAN (1971).  A while ago, I watched that old movie channel when it had lots of those goofy old Godzilla movies on, and I bet Uncle Renfield that the dumbest-looking rubber-suit monsters came from Japan.  He said no way, and I should check out this movie called Octaman.  I didn't believe him, cause what could beat rubber Japanese monsters jiggling like Jello when they fall on the ground?  Anyway, one night when Mom and Dad went to bed early so they could get up early and go on a free day trip (only they overslept and missed it and groused at each other all day about it), I sneaked downstarirs and put this movie in the VCR.  Well...Uncle Renfield wins again, darn it!  The writing on the front of the movie was just starting and suddenly I was looking at this rubber suit octapus-man who went around swinging his dangling rubber arm-things--sposed to be tentacles--and looking like some guy in a crummy Halloween outfit.  You could see the zipper and all.  This was the beginning of the movie and it already sucked.  Then these scientists go to Mexico looking for pollution--they coulda stayed home and did that--and they find these rubber octapus toys and cut them up and then old Octa-rubber-man attacks them.  He didn't want anyone playing with his octa-toys, I guess.  This monster was so lame that the people had to wrap his octa-arms around themselves and then drop dead after they got tired of all that wrapping.  The dumb scientists kept picking up the little rubbery octapus things even though Octa-rubber-man kept showing up and killing them.  Then they got tired of that and they chased Octa-rubber-man and put him in a circle of fire and he conked out for some reason (maybe he was afraid of his rubber melting).  But he got away and killed more people and the killing was all that red goop splashed on that wouldn't fool my older sister Pat's dumb mutt Scampers.  Finally--it seemed like hours and hours--they pumped Octa-rubber-man full of bullets and he flopped in the water and was dead.  They coulda done that at the beginning, but I guess then they wouldn't have had a movie.  Well, they still didn't have a movie, if you ask me.  It just proves that all the dumb-looking rubber monsters didn't come from Japan and I really gotta stop betting with Uncle Renfield about movies.  If you wanta see rubber tentacles flopping around, you'll like this movie, but if not, even watching Godzilla bounce around is better than this.

PARASITE (1982). Uncle Renfield told me that a long time ago, people watched 3-D in the movies and they thought it was cool cause you could see hatchets coming at your head, and eyeballs exploding right into your lap and blood gushing at your shoes, and stuff like that. That is kind of cool, but most of the 3-D stuff I’ve seen is pretty lame, and what’s really lame are those movies which were 3-D when they showed them in the theaters but they aren’t 3-D anymore for some reason, so you have these parts in the movies where you can tell something is sposed to pop out of the screen and doesn’t…like I said, lame. Even when a 3-D movie which isn’t 3-D any more but has a girl who’s gonna be a big star some day so you can see her before she got all stuck up and married that old bald guy Bruce Will is just as lame. I found that out one night after Mom and Dad finally went to bed after trying to stay up and watch this special on TV about the Earth getting too warm or something. I looked through the videos Uncle Renfield keeps here and this one sounded kind of sick so I popped it in. But it wasn’t anything like that. It was one of those real cheap movies that someone made with their tips from Denny’s and shot on the weekend—at least it looked like that. It had that Demi Moore in it and she looked like she was Demi Moore’s daughter, she was so young, and she didn’t seem to know what she was doing in this movie. It’s about this scientist who invents this long slug thing that eats people from the inside and if you get infected, it’ll get in you and grow and then burst out of your belly or your head or something. The scientist guy’s trying to find a way to cure the parasite thing (why did he invent it in the first place?) but some creeps break in to this hotel room and get the parasite thing and it spreads everywhere. So there oughta been lots of good bloody body bursts in this movie…but there isn’t. Just a few and they’re pretty feeble—the best one is when the parasite pops from this old lady’s face, although she was so ugly it was really a kind of improvement. There’s places in the movie where the parasites drop from the ceiling and blood gushes from a pipe, stuff that would be okay, maybe, in 3-D, but without it, it’s not much, really. There’s this government guy who drives around in kind of a cool car and that’s the only thing in this movie that isn’t dirt cheap. If they ever get this move to be 3-D again, you might want to watch it, but not until then.

PIGS (1972). For some reason, my Mom doesn’t like pork. She almost never cooks any pork chops, won’t cook bacon, won’t even cook hot dogs if she thinks they have pork in them. My Dad and I think this bites, but Mom won’t budge. I asked her one time why she didn’t like pork and she said, "Because pigs are dirty, John-John." I said, so what, cows are probably dirty before they’re made into hamburgers and stuff, and then Mom told me to scram or I’d catch it, but good. Anyway, I thought about what Mom said about pigs when I saw this video one night after Mom and Dad stopped discussing my report card and finally went to sleep in their bedroom (I got another "D" in Citizenship just ‘cause that stupid Ronnie Banks didn’t like me calling him a geekboy, even though he is). In this movie, not only are the pigs dirty, everyone is dirty…especially the guy who owns the pigs. He looks like he took a bath last year sometime. He runs this diner that the folks in the movie have to be nuts to eat at…it’s filthy just like him. Then there’s this girl who killed her Dad (cause he tried to do something bad to her) and ended up in some hospital shows up and ends up working at the dirty guy’s dump of a diner. So you have this crummy guy and his crummy diner and this wacko girl…and, oh, yeah, he keeps pigs for some reason. Turns out that he feeds the pigs people after he kills them and chops them up and the girl joins in, and the pigs are happy, I guess, but I wasn’t because this movie didn’t make any sense at all. Not one bit. Like when a guys who’s kind of a cop asks the girl if she wants to go back to the hospital and she says she does and she puts on this weird makeup and then takes it off and then stabs him a bunch of times after she tells him a lie that he has a phone call. It’s kind of nice and gory and all, but why didn’t she just say "yes" to the guy and then run off? And all these other folks wander in and out of the diner and the pig area and don’t notice stuff like cut-off hands lying around—the stupid sheriff didn’t do anything with all the people disappearing until the dog that belonged to one of them got killed. Anyway, finally, the dirty diner owner who before asked the girl to stay suddenly tells the girl to leave and instead of leaving, she stabs him a whole bunch. Then she chops him up and feeds him to the pigs and runs off…but why didn’t she just leave? She obviously didn’t like the guy and the whole place was a mess, anyway. I ended up looking at some parts of the video twice trying to figure it out (the girl went postal just cause she heard a certain song and kept trying to call her Daddy, even though she knew he was dead cause she killed him, and junk like that) and then I gave up. The blood and gore wasn’t great, really, and the movie will drive you crazy if you try to follow it, so I can’t say you should see it. And I got to admit—after seeing this movie, I kind of understand Mom’s feelings about pork.

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972). I gotta stop either ticking off Uncle Renfield or stop listening to him when he tells me about a scary movie I need to see. What happened was that I was at his dump that he calls a townhouse because it’s got a roof like a house although it’s a crummy condo and everyone knows it. Anyway, I was playing with his old Aurora model kits while he was yakking on the phone to some guy named Rondo. These are monster models he put together back when he was a kid which means they’re about a hundred years old, and I had that Wolf Man giving the Mummy a smack alongside the head and suddenly both of the models kinda went to pieces. Cheap old plastic. Well, Uncle Renfield didn’t say much when he kicked me out, but I shoulda known he was gonna get even. Anyway, Jimmy Johnston was gonna sleep over my place while my parents went to this late night party a couple weeks later and I asked Uncle Renfield what scary movie would be cool to show Jimmy? Well, he suggested this one ‘cause these maniacs go around killing each other, he said and it has a real gory ending. It sounded real cool, and I saw it in his video collection he keeps stashed at my house. So, anyway, that night Jimmy and I were at the TV, munching some Doritos and salsa, and watching this movie. Well, it’s just sick! I mean, you hot this skinny guy and woman who keep women in their basement to get babies from and sell them and they don’t like this fat guy in a dress who has a Mom who eats eggs all the time and some dumb punk who does nasty stuff with chickens. The mean couple spit all over the fat guy in a dress’s house and stuff, and the fat guy has a party where this one guy uses his bottom like a trombone and…it was just weird! Jimmy said, "Hey, these guys are homos," and I think he was right about some of them, anyway. Well, finally the fat guy in a dress shoots the mean couple so that was all right. But hardly any gore or blood, so it was kinda lame, too. Then the fat guy in a dress starts following this dog around and Jimmy and I thought he was gonna kill it and eat it or something, which would have been a little cool, anyway…but, instead, the dog did Number Two, and the fat guy in a dress scooped it up and ate it! Really! Man, Jimmy and me were blowing chunks of Doritos and salsa halfway across the living room. Jimmy then said he had to go home so he called his parents and they picked him up and next Monday at school he told everyone how I showed him a homo film where guys eat dog poop. It’s all Uncle Renfield’s fault, boy. I think it’s gonna be a long time before anyone stays overnight again at my place, that’s for sure.

PLEASE DON'T EAT MY MOTHER (1972).  When I was a little kid, Mom and Dad took me to see this music-movie called Little Shop Of Horrors.  Even though it was about a plant that ate people, it was a stinky movie cause everyone stopped every five minutes and started singing, and the people-eating was real fakey.  And that Rick Moron guy is always playing a feeb.  Well, I heard Uncle Renfield tell Dad that this movie was better cause it had no singing and lots of eating--all kinds of eating, Uncle Renfield said and he winked at Dad, who laughed.  So I found it in Uncle Renfield's stuff and watched it late one night after Mom and Dad went to bed.  It's kinda like the singing movie, except the nerd guy has a slobby mother and the people-eating plant has a female voice and gets sexy with the nerd, so he goes out and brings the plant people to eat, mostly girls.  People take their clothes off and wrestle together in this movie an awful lot and do other things I'm not supposed to know about, and the nerd guy watches all this and it's kind of sleazy and all.  But the plant eats lots of people at least, although you don't see much of the actual eating or anything.  The plant's really rude and shoots out these clouds like it farted, which was pretty funny, although I can't figure out how come the nerd's mother never smelled any of that.  But the plant eats her too, so the title comes true, for once.  Then there's another plant and the plants kind of gang up on the nerd guy and the plants get around everywhere, so everyone's in danger of being eaten.  That was the end of the movie.  No gore or anything, some funny stuff, and no singing, which is the best part.  A few days after I watched this movie, Mom threatened to throw out my monster models cause she says I get the glue and paint everywhere, and I don't except in my room, and she said I should find another hobby, so I told her, "Okay, I'll go get a plant."  Mom didn't get it though (she never does), and the next thing I know I got this leafy thing in my room that I gotta water and stuff.  I don't want this plant to eat my mother or anything, but I wish it'd eat itself, before the guys see it in my room.      

Q, THE WINGED SERPENT (1982). Some of the boringest stuff I gotta put up with in school is what our teacher, Ms Fridley, called "Exploring Other Cultures." What that means is that boring old American history isn’t bad enough, we gotta go study other people’s history no matter how dull it is. Anyway, we found out in class that the Mexicans came from these weird people called the Aztecs, who built pyramids but put steps on them, which makes sense if you think about it, stabbed people to make their gods happy (kind of cool), and had lots of gold that people from Spain stole from them. So Aztec history didn’t suck that bad, I guess. One night, after Mom and Dad left to play Texas Hold ‘Em with the folks from Dad’s office, which meant they wouldn’t be back until real later (the time it takes for Dad to lose the mortgage money, like Mom says), I went to bed at the time I promised but sneaked down and popped this video from Uncle Renfield’s collection in the VCR. I thought this was gonna be one of those stupid Japanese monster movies with guys in rubber suits that I could laugh at—but it was an American movie, about this Aztec god who’s a monster bid, and flies over this city, and chomps on people because it’s hungry, I guess. See, you have to be like on top of a building, like on the roof getting some rays, or washing windows real high up, so the monster bird, called "Q" (it has a real long name I can’t even begin to spell) can get at you. This cop talks to a guy in a museum and finds out about this Aztec god who’s a big bird and tries to tell his bosses about it but they think he’s crazy. Then there’s this sleazy crook who helps steal some diamonds and then he loses them (he’s not real smart) and runs away, he finds "Q’s" nest, and finds its giant egg. So, when his fellow crooks catch him, he leads them to the nest where old "Q" chomps them up, which means he’s not real stupid, either. He tells the cops about the egg only when they promise not to toss him in jail and give him lots of money, and then they lay traps for "Q"—but the monster bird eats the cops and even eats the one cop’s partner! Even the cops can’t kill "Q"! Except they later can and they kind of fill it full of holes and the sleazy crook gets away to steal some more diamonds or something, although he says he won’t. At the very end, another of those big eggs show up, so there’s gonna be another "Q", which is what I expected from watching movies like this. But it’s not a bad movie, at least it’s not boring, and the sleazy crook is kind of cool in a way. But the giant bird really does look like a big puppet. The gore isn’t much, either, just some blood on windows and some body parts. So if you’re looking for some good gut munching or flying eyeballs or something, you won’t like this movie. Ms. Fridley sure didn’t like this movie when I told her about "Q" and asked her why we didn’t hear about giant birds that eat people when we were studying the Aztecs. She make me take a note home that got my PlayStation2 and Xbox locked up for a whole week.

RABID GRANNIES (1989).   My friends at school have all their grandmas and grandpas living, but I don't.   My grandpa and grandma on my Dad's side were history before I was even born and on Mom's side, there's just my grandma Esther.  She likes to bowl and play poker with her buddies at the Senior Citizen Center and one Christmas she sent me a real biker's helmet, but Mom exchanged it for mittens.  Thanks, Mom!  So, anyway, my one grandma is kind of cool even though Dad says she probably will end up in prison someday cause she cheats at bingo.  But that's nothing compared to what these grannies do in this movie I saw one night after I sneaked downstairs to check out some more of Uncle Renfield's collection.  In this movie, two nice old ladies (it turns out they're not grannies, but aunties) are having the family over, only some creepy nephew sends them this gift and turns them into people-eaters.  I don't know how cause the gift is just this box, except its sposed to be Devil stuff.  So the old ladies get all nasty looking and they start ripping their relatives apart and eating them.  It was real gory, and lots of cool guts and stuff flying and everybody gets munched--even a little girl.   This one preacher even blows his head off with a shotgun!  So it's real entertainment.  Since all the people getting chomped by the old ladies are kind of jerky, you don't care about them, so you don't mind seeing them made into granny-food. The people in the movie do that funny thing where they say something but their lips say something else.  I mean it's foreign and all.  Uncle Renfield said the movie was made in Belgium which is a place sort of like France, except they eat waffles there instead of snails.  The thing is, this movie is even funny in places, which is something you can't say about even cool guts movies like Dr. Butcher, M.D.   I even laughed so hard at one scene where this fat gets get his legs eaten off that I woke up Mom and Dad.  I heard Dad mutter something and then Mom mutter something in their bedroom upstairs and I had the sound off real quick.  But they didn't come downstairs so I was safe.  The next morning at breakfast, Mom asked me if I made a noise the night before, and I told her that it might have been when I went to the bathroom.  I think she bought it.  Anyway, this is a cool gory and funny movie that's worth watching...except that granny thing.  I mean, grandmas shouldn't be monsters or anything.  Sometimes they're the only one that will take you places and buy you things even when everyone else is mad at you.  So they should call this movie Rabid Aunties and leave it at that.     

RETURN OF THE ALIEN'S DEADLY SPAWN (1983). I think all these movies about aliens coming to Earth and wanting to act real nice and be friends are crummy. I mean, why bother to come all the way to Earth just to act like a sissy? I think real aliens would do stuff like in that movie Alien—you know, burst outta guy’s chests and shove their fingers into heads and stuff. So when Mom made a big deal about us watching this dopey E.T. movie, it was all I could do to keep from hurling. That stuff’s for little kids! Mom got real mad at me when I told her E.T. was about as stinky as Pokemon and because I said that I had to go to bed early. But I fixed her, kinda…when she and Dad were asleep (I can always tell cause Dad snores like a buzz saw and if Mom isn’t telling him to knock it off, she must be asleep, too), I sneaked downstairs and dug through Uncle Renfield’s stash of videos until I found one about aliens. I popped it in and, boy, did I score big! This movie’s got all the gut munching and flying gore you could want, and some stupid girls get killed, too, which is even better. It’s all about this alien who looks like some sort of big plant with pods for heads that lands on Earth in a meteor. The alien monster chews up some kids camping and then it gets into this family’s basement, so that when people do down there, they get eaten up, with lots of blood and body pieces and stuff. And in one part, the Mom goes downstairs and she gets chomped! I said, "Take that, Mom!" and I had to remember to hush up or Mom and Dad might catch me. One little kid goes downstairs and he almost gets chomped, but he’s careful (the alien monster’s got no eyes and can only hear, you see) and the alien monster doesn’t catch him. He gets to see his Mom’s head floating around in all the blood and gore and them watch three little baby aliens pull her face apart. Cool! Boy, if Mom ever saw that, she’d think twice about how cute aliens are. Oh, yeah, and the Dad gets munched up by the aliens, but that’s not nearly so cool as the scene with the mother. This alien finally gets tired of messing around in the basement and goes upstairs and attacks some kids and one of them is this snooty girl who kinda looks like my older cousin Margot (who I call Mar-goat except when she can hear me). The alien monster grabs her head in its mouth and when she pulls away, she’s got no head! Her body (without the head) goes flying out the window! Way cool! Why can’t they make movies like that nowadays? This guy who fixes electrical stuff is eaten up, too, and some old lady who’s the kid’s aunt goes to a house with other old ladies and they start to eat lunch and the alien monster’s babies eat them instead! Then the kid’s uncle gets eaten up by the alien babies and it made me think of Uncle Renfield. This movie’s just full of cool scenes and it ends with one alien monster that’s about as big as a T-Rex! So it’s number one right now on my list, even above Make Them Die Slowly and Doctor Butcher, M.D. So I can give his movie the biggest rating and if you watch it, you’ll like it, too. Anyway, the next morning, Mom started lecturing me again about "giving good movies a chance," and I just asked her how she would like E.T. if he lived in the basement and ate people. She just sighed real loud and told me to go to school.                 

ROBOT VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY (1959).  You can't tell my ol' cousin Margot (I call her Mar-goat when she's not near enough to sock me) anything.  She was over at the house one night cause Mom and Dad had Mom's sister over, Mar-got's Mom.  They were yakking in the dining room, so we watched TV and caught some boring show about Egypt.   I know about Egypt cause they got these mummies that croak people with one hand.  Mar-goat said they have mummies in Mexico, too, and I said no way, they got tacos and those real tiny dogs, but no mummies...not until she visited Mexico, anyway.  Well, Mar-goat called me a name and stomped back to the dining room and got in me trouble again.  Then Uncle Renfield said there were too mummies in Mexico and that I should watch this movie.  So, a few night later, I sneaked downstairs and popped this video into the VCR.  It was in black and white and old--the only thing older than the movie was that Mexican mummy.   He looked like he went up against a paper shredder and lost, with his bandages hanging off and him reeling around like he inhaled when the president didn't (that's one of Dad's jokes that I don't get).  He looked like a homeless mummy, sort of.   Everybody in the movie talked English except with their lips--you could see they were really speaking Mexican.  The robot was this big tin can thing and really stupid looking--like the costume for the tin guy in the "Oz" play the third grade put on.  But there was this guy inside the robot all the time--you could see his head sticking out the top of it (so I guess it really wasn't a robot).  There was lots of talking and talking and the Mexican mummy stumbling around in this old dumpy crypt or something, and then finally the robot-guy and the mummy met and started fighting, and that wimp mummy tore the robot guy apart in about two seconds. That was the lamest fight I ever saw!   That robot guy musta been put together with duct tape.  They might as well have shown Mar-goat fighting the robot guy--she probably would of taken one second to bust him up.  So, it wasn't much of a mummy or a robot, and not much of a movie, either.  What I'd like to see is one of those Egypt mummies taking on that Mexican mummy--that might be worth watching. 

SANTA CLAUS (1960).  Christmas is a cool holiday all right, but most Christmas movies stink.  I mean, they're either about some old coot who treats people real bad, gets scared cause he's gonna die (who isn't?) and then becomes real nice and all, or they're about some kids that want presents more than world peace or something and they get lectured until they change their mind.   I mean, Christmas movies are feeble, mostly, and Christmas movies for kids are turbo feeble.   Well, Uncle Renfield told me that a Mexican movie about Santa Claus was so creepy and scary that it was kind of a horror movie.  So I checked it out last Christmas Eve after Mom and Dad thought I was asleep so they went to sleep (they don't put any presents or anything out until Christmas morning cause one Christmas I got up early and unwrapped my presents and had my new toys all broken before they even got up--that's what they say, I sure don't remember it).  I wasn't expecting much cause I seen Mexican monster movies before and they're kinda funny but not really scary.  Anyway, I watched this flick.  Well, Uncle Renfield was wrong.  It wasn't scary but it was sure weird.  In it, Santa has these kids from all over the world working for free to make toys with the elves pushing them around, and they're all on this cloud, and Santa uses something called a Master Eye that spies on kids to see if they're naughty or nice and this weird old guy whose sposed to be a magician helps him and...well, they don't know squat about Santa Clause in Mexico, I guess.  To prove it, they have Santa taking on the Devil--I mean, what is this, a church movie?  Then there's this really spazzed out girl and these creepy boys and Santa and the Devil are sposed to be trying to get them to act either good or bad.  All the time, everything's real hokey, like stupid wind-up reindeer and Santa dropping to the ground using a teensy little umbrella.  And it has the baloney "good kid" stuff like all the other crummy kid Christmas movies.  Like in one part this kid dreams about a great Christmas gift--and it's his parents!  Yeah, right, like you have to ask for parents.  Anyway, although the whole movie is about presents, the idea is that Christmas isn't supposed to be about presents.  Has there been a kid's Christmas movie that didn't say that?  So we're all supposed to feel gulity cause we want an X-Box for Christmas instead of saving the environment.  I admit if I saw this movie when I was a little kid, the idea of the Devil going after kids and sending people to hell would of creeped me out.  The idea of Santa watching me all the time with his Master Eye creeps me out even now.  I mean, if he really did that, I'd never get any presents.    

SCREAM BLOODY MURDER (1972).   Mom and Dad are on me a lot about stuff and sometimes they act like they think I'm a rotten kid, and then they take me to Chucky Cheese, so maybe they don't.  Anyway, Mom and Dad ought to have seen this video I saw one night after they went to bed if they want to see a real rotten kid.  The movie starts out with the kid and his Dad in a field with a tractor and the kid fixes it so the tractor runs over his Dad!   For no reason!  It kills his Dad and then the dumb kid gets his hand run over too, so he loses his hand.  Then it's a lot later and the kid now is older and has a hook for a hand and he's rottener than ever.  His Mom hangs out with this old guy and the creepy kid doesn't like it, so the kid just hacks up the old guy and his Mom, too!   Just like that!  And nobody does anything to him!  Me, I get my Playstation taken away if I say just one bad word.  Anyway, the rotten kid just wanders around and meets this pretty woman who takes money for being with guys, the kinda stuff I'm not sposed to know about.  So, he goes to this fancy house and the nice black lady in it and her dog are nice to him and the lady gives him some food.  So guess what he does?  He hacks up the nice black lady and the dog!  He uses the place to try to get the pretty woman interested in him.  At the same time, he kills the old lady who owns the fancy home and her doctor too, just to keep in practice, kinda.  Well, the pretty woman finally figures out that the weird kid with the hook hand is a crazy killer (duh!) and he hides her in the house and she tried to scram so he slices her up too.  Now that he's run out of folks to chop up, the rotten kid wanders around, and see his dead Mom and other people he killed sitting around all bloody and talking to him.  Finally, he can't stand it and uses his hook hand on himself.  That's where the movie ends.  I guess it's an okay movie for gore cause it's got some real bloody parts in it and all, but I didn't like it cause of that rotten kid and the stuff he got away with.  Besides, not only was he rotten and creepy, he was stupid.  I mean, if you chop up your parents, who's gonna take you to Chucky Cheese? 

SEVERED ARM, THE (1973).  One time in the cafeteria when they were serving that soggy cardboard they call meatloaf, Jimmy Johnston started talking about zombie movies and how it's like to eat people.  I thought he was trying to make Sherri Northcut throw up cause she hurls at about anything gory, but he was serious.  He wondered how people would taste.  Floyd Reed told Jimmy that he'd probably taste like the meat loaf, only worse.  Jimmy threw his meat loaf at Floyd and missed and hit Sherri who yelled and got us all in trouble.   But I thought about that when I sneaked down one night after Mom and Dad went to bed and watched this video.  I figured a movie with this title had to be a little gory at least.  Well, it was, but no way like it should be.  It's about these guys who go into a cave where it's all dark and some rocks fall and they can't get out.  They talk about starving and all, and they they decide to start chowing down on each other to stay alive.   They pick this one poor guy and cut off his arm and start eating it (Correction, John-John...the arm isn't actually eaten in the movie--pay better attaention, will you?--Uncle Renfield) and then they're all rescued!  I bet they felt pretty stupid!  Anyway, a while later, the guys start getting killed in some pretty boring ways, except one guy who gets hung by his arm until it snaps off...that was pretty cool.  Anyway, the thing is, I wondered how the guys in the cave thought the other guy's arm tasted, but they never said.  I mean, I wasn't expecting them to say anything like "This arm tastes like school cafeteria meatloaf," but they coulda said something about it.  Another thing:  if you cut off someone's arm, don't you go to jail or something?  I guess if you think you're going to starve and all, you can get away with cutting parts off people.  The rest of the movie sees the arm-chompers pretty much killed off and the killer was the one you know it was all along...at least there was a reason to kill people in this move, unlike a lot of movies where people get hacked up and stuff just cause they happen to be standing around.  The movie needed a lot more blood and gore, though, cause I was pretty much fast-forwarding toward the end of it.  I asked Uncle Renfield what people might taste like, and he said it depends on how they're cooked!  I think Uncle Renfield was just kidding me, but the next time I stay overnight at his place, I'm bringing Jimmy or Floyd along.

SHE WAS A HIPPY VAMPIRE (WILD WORLD OF BATWOMAN, THE) (1966).  It's real funny to hear my Dad and Uncle Renfield talk about the shows they watched when they were kids.  It's real hard to think of them ever as kids, specially Dad, who says bad things about everything I wanna watch, like Buffy, The Vampire Slayer.  Dad doesn't know what cool is.  Anyway, they talk about that old Batman show, where the people run around in funny costumes and drive crazy-looking cars and says weird stuff like "Holy license plate!"   It's pretty stupid if you ask me.  Anyway, one night when I sneaked downstairs, I was messing around in Uncle Renfield's video collection they hide in that old cabinet, and I found this video about a hippy vampire, so I decided to look at it.   Rip-off central!  It wasn't about any vampire...it was about this lady who wears kinda tight black clothes and stockings with a bat painted on her chest and a mask and who calls herself Batwoman.  She didn't wear anything hippie, like those floppy clothes or beads or anything, so she wasn't a hippy or a vampire.  She and a bunch of other bat-ladies just went chasing after this bad guy with a helper who acted so stupid he had to be brain dead.  This bad guy had something like an atomic hearing aid--I think that's what they said (I have to turn the sound down low so Mom or Dad won't wake up).  That's really dumb stuff.  I think it was sposed to be funny but it was just dumb, and the movie even got worse, with everybody chasing each other on foot, like they couldn't afford cars, and finally running around this room that's sposed to be a secret lab but looked like someone's basement with some junk lying around it.   It's so dumb that it looked like it was made for one of those kiddie shows Mom used to make me watch, like Blue's Clues, only dumber.  Really!  I got so mad that there weren't any vampires that I tossed the remote control at the TV, only I missed, and it knocked down Mom's china plate of Elvis Presley and it busted on the floor and I had to glue it back together, and there's a crack between Elvis' legs but Mom hasn't noticed it yet.  That dumb movie!  It even made that old Batman show look okay, since at least that show had some shooting and explosions and stuff.   This movie just had a lot of talk and running around and it was only funny if you fast-forwarded the VCR to make the people in the movie run like crazy.  Some dumb stuff is funny, and some dumb stuff is just retarded, and this movie is that--retarded.   I asked Uncle Renfield why they called this stupid movie She Was A Hippy Vampire when there weren't any hippies or vampires, and he told me that the guy who made this movie, Jerry Warren, would call a movie anything to get folks to go see it.  I feel sorry for anyone who went and paid to see this movie...at least I saw it for nothing, which is what it was worth, although Mom may end up getting part of my allowance when she notices her Elvis plate.  

SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED (1974). You know, a film with this title should be real good--there should be a law or something that says a film with a title like this should be at least scary.  But all this is, is one of those hairy-suit "Bigfoot" movies, only the monster wears a white hairy suit this time.  A bunch of geeky students and this professor guy (who shoulda been called Bigmouth because he never shuts up) go to look for this Bigfoot monster on this island, and they find it, and it kills them.  But they don't leave, just hang around for Bigfoot to mangle each of them up.   These are college students? The gore is real fakey and they just glopped it on the dead people.  It takes a long time for the body count to start and then it's kinda boring somehow.  The students running away from Bigfoot sometimes look like they're really laughing cause they know it's a guy in a hairy suit.  Then it turns out there's no real Bigfoot but instead some stupid people-eating religion or something...I couldn't figure it out.  Big deal.  This is another monster movie without a monster and a gore movie without much gore.  Like I said there should be a law.   Uncle Renfield told me the people who made this movie also made a real gory movie called Snuff.  So that's the film I shoulda watched the first time around.   Uncle Renfield told me I can't watch it, but I'll try to get a hold of it anyhow.

SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984). Every Christmas, it’s the same old thing at our house. Mom and Dad start asking me what I want for Christmas, then Dad says, sure, he’ll go out to the money tree and pull down a few hundred bucks just for me and Mom says the way I’ve behaved I probably won’t get any presents anyway. So why do they ask me what I want? And then, on Christmas, I get presents anyway! If Mom and Dad are trying to teach me a lesson or something, I don’t get it. Like that one Christmas, when Mom and Dad were all upset cause Dad wanted to make getting a new BMW car "everyone’s" Christmas present, which would’ve been a rip-off cause I don’t get to drive it. Mom told Dad he had another big think coming and so they weren’t in the Christmas mood, much. They wouldn’t even put on those lame Christmas videos they always watch, like the one where the guy has this little fat angel telling him he was better off with a boring life and the other where they all stand around and sing about snow for Christmas, or something. Well, I wanted to see something Christmasy, so I snuck downstairs just before Christmas after Mom and Dad stopped arguing in their bedroom and put out the light. I looked through Uncle Renfield’s stash of videos and I found this Christmas one and put it on. Man, and I thought I was having a rotten Christmas! In this movie, this kid and his little brother are coming from their granddad’s house for Christmas and they stop to help this guy, who must be okay cause he’s wearing a Santa Claus suit. But he’s a psycho or something and he rips up the kid’s parents—real nice and gory, too. If that’s not bad enough, this kid then gets put in this place where’s there’s nuns and he watches some naughty stuff through a keyhole and he gets punished and he don’t like Christmas ‘cause that’s when his Mom and Dad got killed and so he didn’t get any presents. So he gets big and works in a toy store and puts on a Santa Claus suit and starts hacking people up. He really doesn’t like Christmas! He’s a psycho and all, but he uses neat things to kill people in a Christmas way. He strangles one guy with Christmas lights and uses a cool toy axe to smash this other guy’s head in and the best part was when he stuck this girl on a pair of antlers! There just aren’t cooler ways of killing anyone that that! So this is a neat gory movie and not just for Christmas, either. But after watching it, I could see things might be worse for me and Mom and Dad were okay, really, I mean they never stuck me in a house full of nuns or nothing like that. So I told them that the next morning and Mom looked at me funny and Dad said I must want something really expensive for Christmas. But I meant it, even after Mom and Dad didn’t get me that G.I. Joe anti-tank cannon and Jimmy Johnston got one and a G.I. Joe Humvee with missile launcher besides. (I kidded Dad that Jimmy got a HumVee but Dad didn’t get his BMW, but Dad didn’t think it was all that funny.) So I say you ought to watch this movie and get in the Christmas spirit. Just don’t get any ideas from it, if you know what I mean.

SLIME PEOPLE, THE (1962). I don’t know how you feel about it, but I don’t think fog is very scary. I mean, you can’t see anything, so how can you be scared? There was this scary movie I saw a while back all about the fog and some lighthouse and I slept through it cause fog isn’t scary. It’s boring. It was just the same when I watched this movie one night after Mom and Dad conked out in their bedroom. This movie was not only boring cause it tried to scare you with fog and stuff, it was also stupid. This guy lands his plane and the fog is covering everything and keeping people in—yeah, right—and these monsters that look like rubber suits from Spencer’s Gifts are killing soldiers with guns and stuff and the monsters are only carrying spears! So a spear is better than a bazooka, I guess. And the monsters can only be killed by those crummy spears cause the spears are hollow. Huh? Anyway, this pilot who’s also a reporter gets with this professor guy and this scaredy-cat Marine and some girls and this creepy guy who acts cool but isn’t (how cool can you be carrying a goat around?) and they go after the monsters. It’s an old movie and all so you know there won’t be much gore or anything, but this movie is just lame when it comes to monster killing. They shoot the monsters even after they know it won’t do no good, then they grab these spears and stick them in the monsters and the monsters drop dead. Big deal! I guess we’re supposed to be creeped out cause it’s so foggy and everything but, like I said, fog isn’t scary so it’s just boring. And the girls and the guys are all hugging and kissing like within two minutes of meeting, so that’s pretty lame, too. Everyone’s trying like crazy to come up with something that will punch through that fog wall and you just know it’s going to be something really weak—and it is. They figure out it’s seawater, which means salt and stuff, and that’s all it takes to get rid of the fog that’s keeping them trapped, somehow. That’s so dopey that I just about stopped watching the movie then but I figured to keep watching in case the fog melted real cool or something when the tossed seawater at it. Nope. They find this dumb looking balloon machine that’s making the fog, and the machine is something like I saw at Toys ‘R’ Us and it didn’t scare me then, even. So they pop the balloon and the rubber monsters croak and that it. Feeble! And there wasn’t even any slime! This movie is so lame that I don’t think you’d like it even if you drank lots of beer while you watched it, like Dad and Uncle Renfield do sometimes, but not when Mom’s around cause she doesn’t much care for beer or monster movies, either. Anyway, maybe they should have put the whole movie in the fog and then they wouldn’t have had to hire any actors or get any rubber suits, either.

SNUFF (1976). One of these days I’m gonna remember that if Uncle Renfield tells me something, it probably isn’t true. Like when I asked him, "Is there a scary movie where the gore and blood and stuff is real?" and he said, yeah, it’s a movie called Snuff and he had a copy of it in the bunch of old videos he keeps at out place ‘cause he has no room in his "townhouse" that Dad calls "the crackerbox." That night I almost couldn’t wait for Mom and Dad to go to bed and shut off the light in their bedroom, so I could sneak downstairs and find that video and pop it into the old VCR. I mean, I was really thinking I was gonna see something. Well, I did see something, but it wasn’t much. Most of the movie was about these creepy people who ride around in crummy little motorcycles and mess around and get mad and cut each other’s feet with knives and stuff…you can tell it wasn’t made in America, and Uncle Renfield later said it was done in Argentina. Boy, they sure made crummy movies in Argentina! They also must be real poor down there cause practically every place in the movie (except where these rich people live) looked like a landfill. Anyway, these creepy people go around and rob folks and shoot them down, and it looks like they used someone’s backyard and got some cap guns somewhere and made it all up as they went along. I mean, this movie reeks. And it look like it was made for about two bucks…there’s the one place in the movie where this woman goes to talk to this cop and the police station is outside someone’s garage with a desk on the driveway! The head guy for the creepy gang is called Satan, even though he looks more like Bobby Flower’s father, except that Mr. Flowers has a pot belly and he wouldn’t be caught dead on a motorcycle. After lots of boring stuff that I fast-forwarded through, the head guy finally gets his creepy gang to barge in on the rich people I mentioned--and then stand around and yak and yak and finally kill them with almost no blood or gore. Feeble! I was really ticked off, cause Uncle Renfield said this was a real gore film. Then, when the stupid movie ended, another movie stared, a real short one, where the guy who was sposed to be directing the other movie, or something, decides to hack up this lady (I’m not sure why). That’s sounded pretty cool to me, until they used all this fake-looking blood, and rubber "skin," and guts from some butcher shop—it mostly looked like they were hacking away at some plastic doll or something. I mean, it was so fakey that even my dopey cousin, Margot, the one I call Mar-goat, would’ve laughed at it. And then the video was over. Rip-off! There wasn’t any real blood and gore--it wasn’t even good fake blood and gore! I told Uncle Renfield about it, and eh said when that movie came out, some folks thought it was real and I told him some folks need to wear glasses. Anyway, the only reason you’d want to watch this movie is to see what a big fat liar Uncle Renfield is.

SOUL VENGENCE (1975). Did you know that they had a lot of black movies a long time ago that were about shooting guns and selling drugs and wearing funny clothes? I didn’t until I saw that rotten movie Blackenstein. Uncle Renfield called it "Blaxploitation," and said it was some white guys making movies about black guys who beat the snot out of white guys and black guys who work for white guys. But I didn’t understand any of that stuff until I watched this movie one night after Mom and Dad went to bed after another evening of them watching TV and saying how stupid it was but not changing the channel or anything. Anyway, I popped this movie in the old VCR and I thought Uncle Renfield musta put a regular movie in his collection by accident or something. This was a movie about some black guy who got beat up real bad by a white cop and a white judge sent him to prison—he did sells drugs and stuff but he shouldn’t have gotten beat up like that, so you feel bad for him. Then he gets out of prison and tries to live right, but things go wrong for him and people let him down and all. So, then--he decides to stick it to white people, and I mean, stick it! Now, I was almost asleep by this time, but I woke up real quick when the black guy found out he can make his thing (you know, what a guy uses to go Number One with) get real long like a snake and use it to make white women obey him and use it to choke bad white guys to death! Really! I’m not lying! Some of the older guys at school talk about "watering the snake" and "snake" is just about right here. I couldn’t believe it--even from one of Uncle Renfield’s videos. I even used the reverse on the remote up to check and see if I was dreaming or something, but no, there it was. I guess if you’re gonna have something on you get real big and all to kill people with, that’s not the worst thing to choose, but what if someone stepped on it? Yow! Anyway, this one white cop who wasn’t as nasty as the other white guys figures it all out somehow and tries to arrest the black guy but the black guy jumps off a building—I mean, I think he jumped off the building cause the movie kinda just ends as he’s ready to jump. We don't even get to see his brains splattered on the sidewalk or anything. Like I said, it takes a long time for any monster stuff to happen and there’s hardly any blood or gore. But it’s worth seeing once cause of that snaky thing. Just don’t watch it with any girls hanging around, though.

SUGAR HILL (1974). This is supposed to be Black History Month, or something, and my teacher, Ms. Fridley, told us to do something for it, a project or whatever having to do with African-American people. Well, I couldn’t think of anything and I was getting near the deadline for turning in my project and I got so desperate that I even asked Mom and Dad and they gave me these "suggestions" that would’ve taken years in some library, so that was no help. I finally got so desperate that I even asked Uncle Renfield and he said, "Just watch this movie, Sugar Hill, and do a review on it for your class." That wasn’t too long after I accidentally melted his tape of S.S. Extermination Camp by leaving it too close to the heat register, so I shoulda been a little more suspicious, I guess, but like I said, I was desperate. So, one night after Mom and Dad went to bed, I snuck downstairs and popped this tape into the VCR and watched it with my Teen Titans notebook, all ready to take notes for school. Well, the movie did have lots of black people, all right, and they had on those funny clothes they used to wear a long time ago, way back when Dad and Uncle Renfield were in high school. So it was history stuff. In the movie, these white guys are crooks (you can tell because they talk tough and they aren’t black) and they want this black guy’s business and he tells them they can go stuff themselves and they beat him til he’s dead, instead. His girlfriend gets really p.o.’ed by this and goes to this really ugly old black woman who knows voodoo and they go into a swamp and do voodoo stuff and then the head voodoo guy shows up and he says he’ll help out and he does by having these zombies rise from the swamp. The dead guy’s girlfriend gets the zombies to go after the guys who killed her boyfriend and they do and there’s some okay blood and a little gore when the zombies use their machetes on the crooks and chop em up and cut off their heads and other cool stuff. One crook is even shoved into a coffin full of snakes and I gotta admit, that was a new one for me. This black cop who likes the dead guy’s girlfriend tries to get her to fess up to leading the zombies and to cut if out, but he’s kind of a wimp, really. In the end, all the crooks are killed by the zombies, the boss crook dies by getting sucked in by quicksand, and the dead guy’s girlfriend gives the head voodoo guy the boss crook’s girlfriend, so he’s happy, and everyone’s happy, except the crooks who got chopped up and all. It didn’t have much gore, but it had enough stuff in it for Black History Month…I thought. But Ms. Fridley stopped me right in the middle of my review when I read it in class and I had to take a note home and now my Playstation2 is locked away for a whole week! Somehow, I think Uncle Renfield set me up, but I can’t prove it. Anyway, this movie isn’t real bad, even though it’s kinda skimpy on the blood and gore. It’s also not a part of the African-American Experience--anyway, that’s what Ms. Fridley says.

TENTACLES (1977). I don’t care what my Dad or Uncle Renfield says—most of all those black-and-white monster movies they think are so neat are really just old and feeble. I mean, a few are okay, but mostly there’s no blood or gore or guts or nothing, and the movie don’t even show the people being killed anyway. It was kinda neat the way in King Kong, the big ape chewed on those native people and stomped them into the dirt, and in that dinosaur movie where the monster ate that cop, but that’s about all the good stuff there is in those old monster movies. Anyway, I was in a mood for a good monster movie one night and I spotted this in Uncle Renfield’s video stash that he keeps at our house cause he’s got no room at his place he calls a "townhouse" but Dad calls a "clownhouse." So I popped it in the VCR after Mom and Dad had talked themselves to sleep upstairs. This wasn’t any old black-and-white movie. It was in color and all about this big old octopus, one that goes around and grabs people and eats them. The octopus just shoots out a tentacle and grabs some people food, kind of like my pal Jimmy Johnston eats Tater Tots. The movie started out with the octopus snatching this baby from a crib, so it seemed like it was going to be cool. But then the people-eating stopped and there were all these old and fat actors running around talking and talking. One guy was always yakking on the telephone and he was ticked off, and these other guys were lying to everyone and they were ticked off, and these other guys went around in boats and they were ticked off…it was like everyone forgot about the octopus and I don’t see how, since he was so big and all. A lot of these actors were only in the movie a short time and never got together with the other actors, so it was kinda like they were in different movies. I fast-forwarded through all these places where the boat guys were messing around underwater like for hours and still they couldn’t find this big old octopus! Finally, all these dumb kids and their fat old lady keeper get in these dinky boats for some reason and then the big old octopus attacks them. But it’s just some baby octopus in a tank and the kids and the fat old lady were bobbing in the water like something’s grabbing them. Lame! By this time, I was fast-forwarding so much, it was like the movie was bobbing in the water, too. Then the boat guys get these smart killer whales (I hate all those kiddy movies with smart dolphins and killer whales and stuff) and the killer whales swim around and the movie makes like they kill the big old octopus (only they’re just ripping up some regular-sized octopus). It’s like your sposed to say "Yay!" for the smart killer whales. Well, if they’re so smart and all, how come they couldn’t find the big old octopus before it ate all those people? And why did the dumb boat guys wait til the end of the movie to sic those killer whales on the big old octopus? Uncle Renfield later told me this movie was from Italy even with all those old Americans in it…I guess folks from Italy like dumb monster movies. This movie was even dumber than an after-school special, and any after-school special I can remember had more action than this crummy movie. It was so crummy that I have to take back some of what I said before about those black-and-white monster films, cause none of them were as lame as this movie. I even remember seeing an old black-and-white monster movie with a big octopus and the octopus pulls down a bridge. Now, that’s a cool monster! Anyway, I think only sissy kids who like the killer whales at Sea World might like this movie and only if they don’t fall asleep before the movie gets to the octopus-ripping part.      

TERROR AT RED WOLF INN (1972).  I don't get along good with my Granduncle Bud and Grandaunt Ro.  That's what they make me call them, though their real names are Buddy and Rochelle.  But they get mad if I just call them that.  They're my Mom's aunt and uncle and they have a big old house and Granduncle Bud dyes his hair so it looks icky and drives a Land Rover and Grandaunt Ro paints weird paintings with naked people in them and teaches folks about it at some center or something.  They never had any kids for some reason.  Anyway, they don't act like old people should act and when I go to their house, they seem real nice for about five minutes--then I say something and next thing I know they're real quiet and Mom and Dad are too and I can't wait to get back home.  I mean, they act like they really don't want kids like me around--they got a "full life" already.  That's what I heard them say lots of times and Dad says they're worse than Yuppies, but he doesn't say it around Mom.  They kinda remind me of this film I saw one night when I sneaked downstairs after Mom and Dad got all quiet in their bedroom.  This is a movie about people eating other people, which is really gross and stuff, especially when they show zombies chomping on intestines and things, so it oughta be my kind of movie.  But this movie didn't have any zombies.  It had these old people who were nice to you until they wanted to eat you, then they chopped you up.  This girl at a college gets a letter saying she could stay at an inn for free and all, so she goes over there fast.  There's two other girls there and the old people I told you about and their moron son.  The movie makes a big deal about the old man cooking this meat and shows everyone chowing down on it…you know what's up right away.  But the dumb girl doesn't, even when the phone don't work, and she can't go into the freezer, and one of the other girls is gone one morning without telling anyone.   Well, the dumb girl finally snoops around and sees the old people butchering the other girl for meat.  Now me, I'm outta there and I'm calling 911.  But the dumb girl stays!  She likes people burgers!  I got so ticked at the stupid ending that I shut it off before the writing at the end of the movie.  There's not much blood or gore even with all the people chopping, and lots of the movie is about stuff like dreams and car chases and not about scary stuff.  So I can't say this is really worth looking at.  But if you got a grandaunt and granduncle like I got on my Mom's side, you might see this movie and end up glad they don't want you around.

THING WITH TWO HEADS, THE (1972).   Our teacher, Ms. Fridley, told us the last time we got off for Martin Luther King's birthday that we all needed to do something in his "spirit, " which meant we needed to do something that had to do with race and stuff.  About a dozen of us guys volunteered to hang out with the only guy who’s an “African-American” in my class, Rakeesh, cause he's a cool guy anyway and his mother always bakes cookies and stuff.  But Ms. Fridley said we guys already do that and it wouldn't count.   Then she made me stay after school and told me she knowed I'd probably watch a movie to do the assignment and she wouldn't accept any movie except on that really showed how hard it was for black people and white people to come together.  She gave me a few movie titles but none of them was a horror movie.  So I went home kind of bummed out and thought about it and got bummed out even more and then I really messed up--I asked Uncle Renfield for advice.  Well, he recommended this movie cause, he said, "you can't get a white guy and a black guy closer than by putting their heads on the same body."  That sounded okay, so that night I sneaked downstairs where the house was dark and popped this video into the VCR.  This was one crazy movie!   See, this rich white guy is dying and wants his head put on a healthy body, and he's also dumb because he's a racist and he gets his head stuck on a black guy who looked big and mean enough to clean even Mr. T's clock.  Uncle Renfield said the big black guy used to be a football player and I'll bet they paid him better to play football than be in this movie, cause this movie was kinda cheap and crummy.  The big black guy is an escaped criminal and he has to run from the cops and he owns the body so the rich white guy has to run, too.  In one part of the movie, they jump on this dirt bike that looks like it's gonna get squashed by the big black guy and these real stupid cops chase them and the cop cars get smashed up, only it's the same four cop cars shown over and over again.  The big black guy and the rich white guy argue a lot, the big black guy's girlfriend doesn't like him with an extra head, and lots of the movie has the big black guys running around with this hokey looking plastic head strapped on.  In other places, it's just the rich white guy leaning his head on the big black guy's shoulder.   And nothing good happens, like maybe the racist white guy getting more tolerant toward black people.  So when I had to make my report to Ms. Fridley and the class, all I could say was that putting a white guy's head on a black guy's body wasn't good for race relations.  I mean, it was true, but Ms. Fridley didn't seem real happy with me.   So I had to write an essay on why I should do my assignments the right way.  I shoulda had Uncle Renfield write it cause it was all his fault but I've seen his writing in HORROR-WOOD and I figured I was already in enough trouble.  Anyway, this movie is okay if you like things with two heads, especially if one of the heads is plastic and wobbles around a lot.    

TOOLBOX MURDERS, THE (1978). Mom says horror movies don't scare her but one thing does--Dad trying to fix stuff. She says half their repair bills are cause Dad tries to fix something and breaks it worse that it was. Dad says he tries to save a few bucks and all he gets is grief from a woman who broke the thermostat once just by looking at it (he meant Mom). Anyway, the way it works is, my Dad comes home, gets the rundown about me and the house from Mom and if something has broke, he goes and grabs this ratty old metal toolbox and Mom says, "Oh, shoot," or something like that. Sometimes when something big's broke and Dad grabs the toolbox, Mom sounds just like the women in this movie I watched one night when Mom and Dad were asleep called The Toolbox Murders. In the movie, this guy wearing a wooly face mask wanders around this apartment house carrying a toolbox. Only he doesn't try to fix stuff--he uses the tools in the box to chop and dice some people. Well, you know this is my kind of movie. I thought the TV's sound was messing up the first part of the movie though, cause the guy goes and kills four ladies and there's no one speaking! But I found out later that's just how the movie is. So the first part of the movie is cool with good gore and a hammer and a drill and a chisel and even a nail gun making the gore fly. But then the movie gets cruddy. There's almost no gore for the rest of the film, the goofy guy who's the killer whines a lot and even talks like a kid to this woman he grabs, and nothing much happens, except the cops and the one woman's boyfriend run around acting stupid…I mean, even a real dummy like my Cousin Amy (everyone calls her Mee-Mee) could figure out who's doing the killing. Not the cops or the boyfriend in this movie, though. So again I had to use the fast-forward a lot to keep from falling asleep and maybe getting caught by Mom and Dad. The ending was kinda creepy, but it came after a lot of yakking and yakking. And this movie looks real cheap and crummy. The acting is worse than at my second grade Fall Festival, where practically everyone forgot their lines and Miss Compton had to whisper them through the curtain. There's lots of women without their clothes on too, which mean they didn’t have anything else to film, I guess. So I can recommend this movie only until the killings stop and all the yakking begins and then maybe the ending too. So it's a "fast-forward" kinda movie. If you're fast-forward is broke, though, just don't ask my Dad to fix it. 

TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1972).  I think I said before that if a movie has zombies in it, I'll watch it.  Somrthing about rotting old bodies eating people really gets to me.  I think I've seen about every kind of zombie there is, from black-and-white zombies who just shuffle around and don't eat nobody to zombies in color who eat people's insides and everything.  But I never saw blind zombies before.  I thought Uncle Renfield was kidding with me when he said there were movies about blind zombies who were knights and rode horses and gutted Spanish people.  But one night I sneaked downstarirs and put this video on and--there they were!  These zombies were knights or something who tied up this woman and killed her--I don't know why--and the other people burned them up--with fire, I mean.  The people even put out their eyes with fire and all.  So this movie was kinda cool to start with.  Then there was the boring stuff about people in this town having a festival with dummies of the knight guys and everything--that's something to celebrate?   The hero is this guy who does fireworks, which is a pretty neat job, I think.  Anyway, they all party and the blind zombies rise from the graveyard and find horses somewhere--I don't know where, but the horses aren't blind, though.  They kill a couple people, like this one guy who was doing naughty stuff to this woman, but the woman got away--they always do, you know.  Then the blind zombies ride into the town and start using their swords on the people, really messing up the party.  Now here's the deal--the zombies are blind--so, they can't see but they can hear.  These people are so dumb that they don't figure it out until lots of them are chopped up.  Now, I think that's kinda neat, even though those people act even stupider than those morons on Survivor.  The people that didn't get chopped up run into this big building and keep real quiet.  The blind zombies kind of walk around trying to hear someone to chop.  Then the folks leave the building and try to walk past the zombies real quiet so the zombies can't hear them.  But someone makes a noise, naturally, and the zombies wade into them again.  There's lots of cool blood spurting but not much gore--I was kinda hoping for a little more guts and stuff.  Finally, the zombies kill just about everyone and the movie ended.  Even though it was late, I wasn't a bit tired.  This movie was kinda scary and neat.   At least with the blind zonmbie on horses, it was different.  I don't know why other people who make zombie films don't try something different like this--their movies would be a lot better, boy.  I told the guys at school about this movie and now we all like blind zombies.  Uncle Renfield said two more blind zombie movies were made, so I'll watch them too.  I can sure recommend this movie, except if you don't like zombies and all.  But if you don't, then why are you reading this?     

TORSO (1973). The first time I saw a movie with good gore--you know, with eyeballs popped out and tongues ripped out and intestines chewed on, I noticed that the people talked one way but the words went another way. I just thought it was cause of all the killing and the people were scared and stuff but when I got older I found out that these good gory movies were dubbed. That means they were made in some foreign place and people stick American words where the foreign words were. Anyway, the real good foreign gore movies were Italian, the place they invented pizza and that funny coffee that Mom likes so much. I kinda thought I'd seen all the good Italian stuff, but Uncle Renfield mentioned this movie called Torso that he said was one of the first Italian gore movies. When I sneaked downstairs and watched it one night, I saw he was right for once. I mean, the movie starts with these kids in a car making out getting sliced and diced and then this other girl who messes with some guys also got chopped. It was a great way to start a movie, but there wasn't much gore, though. Then the movie slowed down and was about this girl college student and her three yakking girlfriends going to this place by the beach to do girl stuff. It gets really boring here and I had to use the fast-forward. These are Italian girls but they're just like girls here…yak, yak, yak and mess around with their hair and talk about doing stuff but never ever doing it…typical girls. The girls get all naked and do stuff so the older guys won't get bored, but it's boring anyway. I was going to give up on it and go to bed but then the last part of the movie has the killer going to the girls' place and killing then. It's really cool when the one girl is hiding out and she has to watch the killer is chop up her friends so they'll be easier to haul to the dump. But…again there's not much blood and guts and stuff. You see bits and pieces but no real big gory mess or anything. So if you're looking for body parts and guts and brains and all, you might not like this movie all that much. But the killer trapping and going after the girls is scary and the way the one girl keeps slipping away from the killer even though she hurt her ankle is cool--she's not one of these dummies who just stands around waiting to be axed. This is one of those movies where there's some creepy guys hanging around so you can't guess who the killer is right away. It's really lame the way the movie tells you who the killer is, though. I can recommend this movie but not to guys who want guts flying everywhere every second. How come the Italians make all these gory movies anyway? I asked Uncle Renfield and he said it's because they don't have the MPAA, whatever that is.  

TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN, THE (1976). It gets hard to watch good TV at my house, specially when Uncle Renfield comes over, cause then he and Dad gotta watch those real old TV shows and some of them aren’t even in color! And even when they’re in color, they’re so old and feeble that I have to leave the room and get on the X Box in my bedroom or I’ll go postal. One of those creaky old shows is called Gilligan’s Island, and it’s even stupider that The Osbournes, with all those people running around this island getting in trouble and eating cocoanut cream pie and stuff. What Dad and Uncle Renfield really like about that show are the two girls, specially the smaller one, called Mary Ann. Every time that show runs, they both kinda drool over her until Mom gets ticked off and then they’re back to watching The Sopranos. Anyway, this Mary Ann lady was in this movie I saw, which is about some guy wearing a hood who goes around killing people who wear real old clothes and drive real old cars and stuff. This movie is just about as lame as Gilligan’s Island, and it’s boring, too. In fact, one of the cops called Sparkplug kinda reminded me of that goofy Gilligan, cause he’s always doing dumb stuff (like driving a police car into a lake) but no one fires him or anything. In most of this movie, the cops who wear cowboy hats talk, go look at a field, talk, go look at another field, talk, and then other folks talk to the cops with the cowboy hats. It’s worse than one of those yak-yak movies on Lifetime Channel that Mom watches when Dad’s not home. And everyone just says the words and looks bored--except for the big top cop guy, who’s kinda good, really. It’s like one of those stupid plays Ms. Bixley used to make us act in back in third grade, where we’d just say the lines and hope it was all gonna end soon. But we weren’t being paid or nothing and these actors were. Anyway, the last person this creepy guy in the hood attacks is this Mary Ann lady and she sees her husband get killed and she gets beat up by the guy in the hood but doesn’t get killed although the guy in the hood had enough time to do it right. After that, the hooded guy gets real dumb and walks around his hood in the day and the two top cops shoot and him and hits him but he gets away. It’s like the cops and the killer can’t do anything right. Then the movie ends and it’s sposed to be real, so there’s this guy out there who did all this stuff and all, but he’s probably dead by now. This movie is not only boring, but there’s almost no blood and gore, and the killings are just lame—like a third-grade play. If you’re like Dad and Uncle Renfield and you’re hot for Mary Ann, you might like this movie, but I don’t think anyone else would. Maybe if they make this movie again, they should stick it on an island, or something.

TOXIC AVENGER (1985). Our teacher, Ms Fridley, is always yakking about saving the environment and stuff and how evil companies are spilling nasty stuff like toxic waste in our water and all. I asked her once why the companies would do that, since people might notice that they grew a new eyeball after having a glass of water and she made me take another note home to Mom and Dad. Anyway, some of what Ms Fridley said came true in this movie that I watched one night after Mom and Dad went to bed after arguing about whether I should be able to watch The Sopranos (by the time they finished, the show was over). In this movie, this really creepy kid has a crummy job cleaning up at this place where people get steam baths and stuff—the other kids, real snobs, treat him rotten. One girl really makes him look like a wuss (he ends up wearing this sissy ballerina outfit), so he jumps out of a window and lands in some of that toxic waste that Ms Fridley talked about, and becomes this zombie-looking guy with powers of some kind (I never figured that part out), called the Toxic Avenger. Mainly, though, he gets back at those snobby kids and he does it real good, boy. Like when the snobs ran over this kid on a bike with their car and when they have him on the pavement, they then run over his head! There’s some really good blood and brains spurting out in that scene. So the Toxic Avenger gets back at them by really mauling this one girl cause she got herself excited looking at pictures of the kid’s smashed head, and then the Toxic Avenger deep fries one guy and smashes another guy’s head in a weight room, and pulls the arms off another and beats him with them, and uses a mop to mash up their faces. The police and the fat guy mayor think he’s too dangerous or something and call in the army, but the people support Toxie and he takes care of that mayor by pulling out his guts! Now, this is a real horror movie—lots of blood and gore and body parts flying everywhere! And Toxie (that’s what they call the Toxic Avenger) is cool because he doesn’t have that lame idea that bad guys have to be handed over to the cops, like Batman or Captain Planet does. He just chops them up or smashes them, and that’s lots more fun to watch. The film is kind of goofy, though, sort of like they wanted to make it funny but also wanted all the good gore, too. And it is kind of funny if you don’t mind gooey smashed heads and stuff. Toxie even has a girlfriend, but she’s blind, so that makes sense, although he looks like he’d smell pretty bad, too, but anyway. This is a movie you ought to see just for the blood and gore but it also does pretty good in explaining what toxic waste can do to you if you jump right into it.

UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS, THE (1966). You know that music that plays when you go the page on Uncle Renfield’s scary movie site where he lists the stuff he’s got that month? It’s kind of creepy and I asked him once what it was called, and he said it was called "Spooks" and sometimes "Worms," cause it can be sung like "The worms go in, the worm go out," and stuff. Well, this movie has this same music, only the words were, "Have you every wondered…when a hearse goes by…if someday soon…you will die." Which is kind of stupid cause I never wonder about stuff like that. Who does? Anyway, I watched this tape one night after Mom and Dad went to sleep kind of early because they went out with some people to see a movie, and old Mrs. Baumgarten, who’s older than anyone I know, had to baby-sit me…which she did by falling asleep while we were watching Wheel Of Fortune so I got to watch Dragonball Z while she snored away. Then Mom and Dad came home before they were sposed to because Dad said something about the President the other people didn’t like. So for once I had plenty of time after Mom and Dad stopped talking so loud in their bedroom and turned out the light to watch this movie. It’s about this undertaker guy and his two buds who drive motorcycles and stab women with knives and fence spikes and use meat choppers on African Americans and smash faces with chains and even cut up a woman so you can see her insides and all. So it’s got some good stuff in it and the motorcycle guys use some of the body parts in their crummy restaurant to save money—they cut off one lady’s legs and sold them in the restaurant as "leg of lamb" cause the lady’s name was Lamb, which make me laugh, a little, until the hero guy ended up eating some of it, then I didn’t think it was so funny--and the rest goes to the undertaker so he can charge people a lot for funerals. That’s kind of cool and evi, I guess. So this movie was almost worth having to listen to old Mrs. Baumgarten snore for about two hours. But the blood and gore is pretty much scattered around a lot of talky parts of the movie and toward the end there’s hardly anything worth watching--the hero guy gets blown up but there’s no blood spray or intestines flying or anything and the undertaker kills one of the motorcycle guys by dumping him in acid, which means all there was left was a skeleton, and the undertaker get killed in the end with a knife on the head and there no blood al all! It’s kinda like two people made different parts of this movie. And it’s real cheap and all with this cop who works out of someone’s bedroom that they try to fool you into thinking is an office but it isn’t, and there’s really stupid stuff like the undertaker stepping on a skateboard and someone gets a pie in their face and things like that. So the movie’s kind of lame, really. Once the bloody and gory stuff stops, the rest of the movie is so dumb and dull that you’ll probably fast-forward through it like I did. So all I can say is go ahead and watch this movie for some okay gore and stuff but when they do the acid thing you might as well stop it and start rewinding the tape.

VAMPIRE HOOKERS (1979). I think I said a couple times before that in the movies practically anything can be a vampire—a dog, a bike, anything. So ladies who get paid to mess around with losers (that’s what Mom said "hookers" are when I asked her and Dad snorted but didn’t say anything cause Mom looked at him pretty funny) being vampires is no big deal. I watched this movie one night when I was sposed to be babysat but the babysitter, a new one, a girl named Chelsie who goes to high school and all but is as dumb as a box of rocks, had to leave early because her boyfriend called her up and whined and everything—anyway, after she left, I popped in this tape cause I thought it would be a naughty tape and it would serve old Chelsie right if I got corrupted and all cause she couldn’t tell her whiner boyfriend to suck it up and leave her alone when Mom and Dad are paying her 10 bucks an hour. The movie was about this old guy who mush have been a hundred years old and his girls who pretend to be hooker but really are vampires and they bite guy’s necks and all that stuff. These two sailors who first go to this bar where the women are men (kind of creepy) end up at this other bar where they meet another sailor guy who’s their boss or something, and they go to another bar that this big-mouth cab driver talks about and the one sailor meets a hooker who takes him to a crypt and he gets the vampire bite. Which means that sailor guy isn’t any smarter than Chelsie. I mean, I don’t care how pretty that hooker girl was, I’m not going to any old crypt. Anyway, the other two vampire hooker shows and the old guy who’s their Dad, and then the other sailor guy gets bitten by the vampires, and the last sailor guy is stuck with having to kill all those vampires. This sounds more cool than the movie really is, though, cause there’s lots of the old vampire guy doing poetry and painting and just yakking it up, like they paid him a dollar for every word he spoke, and there’s this guy who does his errands for them, he’s this fat slob who doesn’t wash or anything and even sniffs his own farts—he even makes my Uncle Renfield seem like Tom Cruise. He’s sposed to be funny, but he’s about as funny as someone else’s fart, and he’s shown way too much in this movie. Besides, there’s almost no blood, no gore, and that old guy won’t stop yakking. Maybe if you like sexy girls you might like this movie more than me, but even Chelsie’s boyfriend would probably fast-forward through most of it—or, probably, have Chelsie do it for him.

WEREWOLF VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMAN, THE (1971). I guess you all know that Uncle Renfield and his old-guy friends are really into those old black-and-white horror films, the ones where the people talk like they’re reading out of some old English book and there’s hardly any blood or gore or stuff. You know, the boring horror movies. Well, once when I told Uncle Renfield he was a dummy to waste his time with those old lame movies, he told me there were actually some movies that were kind of made like the old movies, only they were in color and had blood and gore and good stuff in them, only they were made by some Spanish guy. Well, I like Spanish food like Taco Bell, so when I saw this movie in Uncle Renfield’s stash at out house, I decided to watch it that night after Mom and Dad went to bed and actually fell asleep (I got to be careful cause Mom and Dad sometimes talk about stuff when they’re in bed and they can hear me tiptoeing about a mile away). Anyway, I popped this movie into the old VCR. Well…it wasn’t black-and-white, so that part was good. I could tell it was made in Spain or somewhere, cause they people were moving their mouths but the words that came out didn’t match. I didn’t mind that, cause some good gory movies, like the Italian zombie films where they pull out intestines and eat them, are like that. And it was sorta like those old horror movies, with people talking a lot and wringing their hands and feeling sorry for themselves and lots of time wasted on stupid romantic stuff. In fact, I was fast-forwarding through most of the movie. There’s this bulky guy who looks kinda like that fat guy who was on Saturday Night Live a long time ago, the guy who did that Samurai thing, and he’s kind of the hero cause he talks the most and goes after the girls but he’s also the werewolf, so I guess he’s not the hero after all. He’s dead but these two stupid guys take the silver bullet out of his chest (I still don’t know why they did that) and he came alive and ripped them up pretty good with some blood spraying. Anyway, then there’s this boring part where this girl and her friend decide to look around for this dead lady who used to drain women of their blood and stuff. They come to this crummy old place and the bulky guy owns it. There’s lots of yakking about old curses and this is where I fast-forwarded the most. The bulky guy has a crazy sister and a cool dungeon, but not much happens with them. The dumb girl messes around and releases the dead lady and she’s a vampire and then the bulky guy and the lady vampire finally do some tag teaming. But it’s kind of lame, cause the vampire is a lady and all. And the werewolf guy looks like he’s wearing a hairy mask and the lady’s fangs look like those plastic ones you can buy from Spencer Gifts. And there isn’t much blood and gore, although more than you see in the real boring old horror movies. So this movie isn’t much and it looks real cheap and the people in it all act like idiots…I mean, if you see a lady vampire in her coffin with a cross stuck in her, how stupid is it to just pull it out and walk away? So I can’t say you should see this movie, unless you like those old horror movies Uncle Renfield likes and then you might like this one, although it is even more boring than most of them, even.      

WILLARD (1971).  I think I wrote before that in movies, anything can be a monster...a rabbit, a piece of rug, even a squirrel!  So, monster rats are no big deal, I guess.   One night, my Mom got all scared cause some mouse zipped across the carpet in the living room, and she yelled at Dad to kill it and Dad said he couldn't fit in a mouse hole, and that led to more yelling.  Finally, Dad set some traps but the mouse never showed up again, even when I put out some of that smelly cheese Dad likes to eat even if Mom won't kiss him after he does.  I think the mouse left to find a house with less yelling.  Anyway, Uncle Renfield heard about it and told me about this movie, Williard, about monster rats.  So, I thought it would be kinda cool to see it and I sneaked downstairs a few night later and found it in Uncle Renfield's collection and watched it.   Rip-off central!  The rats are just regular size--there's just lots of them and they are run by this dweeby guy, Williard, who everyone picks on cause he's a feeb, so he sics these rats on them.  Willard has a girlfriend, and the woman playing her is the one Clint Eastwood lived with until he got his eyes fixed (that's what Dad says).  The head rat is named Ben for some reason and he wiggles his whiskers when Williard talks to him.  The Williard guy kills his slobby Mom and his slobby boss, and then the rats kill him.  Big deal!  There's almost no blood or gore or anything, and you don't care when anyone dies, especially that lame old Williard guy.   Even all the rats running around wasn't really scary, although I was listening real close to noises after I went to bed--you never know.  I told Uncle Renfield that this movie was pretty crummy, and he said as crummy as it was, it was better than the second movie they made about the rats, called Ben.  Uncle Renfield said in that movie, a killer rat is the good guy and Michael Jackson sings a song about the rat.   Well, I think Uncle Renfield is just messing with me again, cause Michael Jackson may have done some stupid stuff, but he'd never sing a song about a rat.  Anyway, if you think rats running around and squeaking and stuff is scary, like my Mom does, you might think this movie is kinda scary, but if you don't, you ought to go rent something else.  Even rats wouldn't like this movie, much.

WORM EATERS, THE (1977). I saw this video when I was grabbing another video one night when Mrs. Baumgarten fell asleep baby-sitting me and I told the guys at school. Keith Lachnit told me I didn’t have the guts to watch it and I told him I did, so I did. I wish I hadn’t. In this video, there’s a really sick guy who has what’s called a worm farm. How do you farm worms? Anyway, he has a thing about eating worms and bites people who become worm eaters too. They really eat worms in this video! No kidding! I just about barfed all over the living room carpet, but Mrs. Baumgarten might of woke up and caught me. I ended up throwing up later, just thinking about this movie.  The whole movie wasn’t about much more than eating worms. They sure didn’t spend much money on this movie, except for worms. Sometimes when I eat spaghetti, I think of this movie and I can’t keep the spaghetti down. Mom’s getting to think I don’t like her cooking. If you don’t care for spaghetti anyway, then go ahead and watch this video. If you do like spaghetti, don’t watch it.

YOG, MONSTER FROM SPACE (1970). I have a theory (I think that’s what it is) about monster movies where the name of the monster sounds really stupid or lame—stay away from them cause they’re probably another Japanese movie with guys in rubber suits rolling on some cardboard buildings and toy tanks and stuff. Lame! I made this theory up after Mom and Dad one night decided to go watch some people from Ireland dance together for about 10 hours (talk about lame) and left me with a new sitter, this girl named Roxy Scarsdale who’s in high school and all is so skinny she looks like one of those stick figures I used to draw. (At least Mom and Dad didn’t call in my creepy cousin Margot, who I call Mar-goat, but not to her face, to baby-sit me.) Anyway, after my parents left, Roxy just told me to shut up or she’d call Mom and Dad on her cell phone, and then yakked on her cell phone for ages while watching crummy stuff on TV like American Idol, so I had no chance at the TV and Uncle Renfield’s videos until she finally left, saying that this was a crappy job and Mom and Dad could mail her what they owed her (I think she was ticked off cause some guy didn’t call her back). Anyway, I had to get a video in quick before Mom and Dad got home, so I grabbed one that at least had "monster" on it and played it. Arrgh! I knew I was in trouble when I saw those Japanese people first talking then the words coming out a second later. I knew it would be dumb and it was. In the movie, some spaceship or something we sent up came crashing down and this guys saw it from his window in an airplane, and then later knew exactly where it hit on some island (yeah, right) and he went to the island and met these other Japanese guys and also these retarded people who shook around like they had hives and then the rubber monsters popped up. The silliest had to be this giant squid or whatever it was. When it finally got on the island, you could tell it was a rubber puppet—it wasn’t even heavy enough to keep from being blown around in the wind! Then they added this rubber crab monster and a rubber turtle monster and then the movie was three times as lame. They smashed up the island (lots of cardboard and toy action figures got wasted) until the Japanese guys torched the rubber squid and the rubber crab and the rubber turtle had a feeble fight and fell into this volcano--it didn’t happen soon enough for me. One of the Japanese guys turned out to be some alien who was working with his alien buddies to kill everyone and take over. The alien burned up a bunch of rubber bats in a cave and then went and jumped into the volcano itself. I think the guys who made this rubber monster mess should have jumped into that volcano, too. No blood, no gore, only puppets and action figures getting killed, completely feeble. And the worst part was that Mom and Dad came home and caught me still out of bed and gave me a week of staying in my room after school without the XBox. I wish I had a volcano handy to toss people into…that Roxy would be the first.

YOUNGARY, MONSTER FROM THE DEEP (1967). I guess if you read my stuff here, you know I think those Japanese rubber suit monster movies are pretty lame. I mean, you got this guy in this rubber suit and he walks like he has to go to the bathroom real bad and he swings his arms and stuff and some cheesy flames come out his mouth and he stomps on cardboard buildings and stuff…I just can’t get real excited by it. I told this once to Uncle Renfield and he said if I thought Japanese rubber suit monsters are lame, I should see Korean rubber suit monsters. Well, I took that to mean the Korean rubber suit monster movies are better, so, one night after Mom and Dad got tired of discussing summer camp for me in their bedroom (I plan to get sick or something then so I don’t have to go), I sneaked downstairs and popped this movie into the VCR (Uncle Renfield just stores his video tapes here, he keeps the DVDs at his dump) to see for myself. Uncle Renfield told me once he was in Korea before and said it was like Japan only cheaper, and that’s kinda how this movie looked. It’s about this scientist guy who checks stuff out by riding this space ship that kinda works like the space shuttle only it’s one of those old space capsules that they went to space in the old days. He’s looking for this earthquake or something and even I could figure that earthquake is really a rubber suit monster. Meanwhile, he has this creepy little kid hanging around who shoots people with itchy rays so they have to scratch themselves and stuff and talks real whiney and needs to punch in the nose if you ask me. Well, anyway, the monster, Youngary, finally shows up, and, boy—he’s even crummier than the Japanese rubber suit monsters! So, Uncle Renfield meant what he said the other way. Youngary has this phony looking horn on his head that’s gotta be plastic and his eyes look like plastic and he opens his mouth and some cheap flame thing shoots out fire—you can even see the tube and all. Feeble! He has a thing that shoots out beams, but he doesn’t use it much, so it’s pretty feeble, too. Just like in the Japanese rubber suit monster movies, the Army and the scientists yak-yak a lot and argue and meanwhile the monster steps on a lot of paper houses and toy cars and stuff. That’s just boring, but then this movie gets real stupid. There’s one scene where the little creepy kid somehow sneaks up on the monster and watches it dance! How lame is that? This is supposed to be a big scary monster and it dances even worse than that fat guy in those Austin Powers movies. The worst part is that the creepy kid woke the monster up after the Army kicked its rubber butt, the little brat. And he still gets treated like he’s Harry Potter or something while I have to do without my Playstation2 just because I accidentally download a virus into Dad’s computer trying to get some cool games off the Internet. Maybe I’d be better off living in Korea or something. All in all, this movie reeks more than the Japanese rubber suit monster movies—even the ending is real lame, the scientist guy dumps some chemical on the monster, and the monster just drops dead. Anyway, I guess I learned something from this movie--that the Koreans not only make cheaper cars and DVD players and stuff than the Japanese, but they also have cheaper rubber suit monsters, too.

ZOLTAN, HOUND OF DRACULA (1978). I picked this one cause my older married sister Pat and her husband, Uncle Ron, who sells insurance my Dad says he wouldn’t buy even if he were dying of beriberi, brought their big dumb mutt Scampers to stay with me while they and Mom and Dad went to some place where they serve dinner and a play. Scampers is kind of a food-vampire—he eats anything I toss him from the fridge, even pickled onions. Anyway, in this video, Dracula’s servant is awakened in Transylvanian along with Dracula’s dog, Zoltan, who has pointy teeth and scary glowing eyes and bites necks. Somehow, they get to America and the vampire dog, Zoltan, bites other dog’s necks and they become vampires, too. The dogs kill people too, except this old guy who comes from Transylvania to try and stop them. Then there’s this guy who’s a Dracula but not a vampire and he and his family go camping and Dracula’s servant and dog go after them. The part where the vampire dogs led by Zoltan attack the family is kinda scary, and one part where two guys are trapped in a shack with the vampire dogs trying to get at them really scared me, especially when dumb old Scampers touched the back of my neck with his cold nose and I jumped about a mile. This video, like that motorcycle-vampire video, shows that just about anything can be a vampire. If they make this movie again, they ought to use Scampers…if it’s food, he’d be worse than old Zoltan any day.

ZOMBIE LAKE (1980). Usually I like zombie movies if they are in color and not those black-and-white ones where mostly some African-American guy runs around making jokes while some lame zombies shuffle around and look stupid. Zombie movies in color have real zombies that go around and eat people, ripping off their faces and yanking out guts and stuff. You know, entertainment. So, after two nights in a row sneaking downstairs and watching some crummy videos with cool titles but feeb monsters, I sneaked downstairs one night after Mom and Dad conked out and this time made sure I picked a zombie movie that said on the box it was in color. I felt sure I wouldn’t get ripped off this time, but I was wrong. This film would have been better if it had been made in black-and-white and had a African-American guy running around cracking jokes. What we have here are some zombies with green paint smeared on their faces and wearing uniforms that I think are German attacking some ladies by a lake and the ladies sometimes don’t have any clothes on, either. I kinda think the movie was more about the ladies who take their clothes off than zombies, because there was way more ladies taking off clothes than zombies munching on folks. It started out right away with the ladies without clothes and zombie stuff. While the beginning writing was still going up the screen, this lady goes to the lake and takes off her clothes and then a zombie with one of those funny German helmets grabs her. He and the lady shuffle around and some real fake-looking blood slops out, and that’s it. Then a lady with clothes on gets grabbed by another zombie and more fake blood glops. They didn’t even try to make it look real or nothing. A whole van full of dumb ladies goes to the lake and hangs around and more zombies grab them, more fakey blood, and that’s about it. Except there’s these long boring parts showing the lady reporter messing around and a real dopey part where the zombies swim underwater in the lake. And there’s this creepy little girl whose father is a zombie and she has to get him and his zombie pals to leave the lake so they can get destroyed. Even the zombie-killing scene are real fakey and even boring! The whole movie was boring, really, and I think I fast-forwarded through most of it. So that proves you can’t even count on a zombie movie in color being decent. I forgot to mention that this movie wasn’t made in America, so you have that thing where the people say stuff, but their mouths stop moving before the words do. I can’t recommend this movie unless you’re older and like ladies to take off their clothes a lot. Then you might like it, cause at least those parts in the movie aren’t fakey.

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