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 t