By DAVE DUGGINS

Time to share a little inside information with you, gentle readers.

Renfield and I are team players. In the course of making our decisions about how to handle each month’s installment, a certain amount of correspondence passes between us, so that we might better coordinate our efforts to bring you eloquent and critically unbiased reportage.

This is how professionals do it, folks. Please don’t try this at home.

Renfield 

Renfield,

I hate to tell you this, buddy, but you can't fire slaves! Excuse me for being late; I was watching I Walked With A Zombie for the fifteenth time, just to remind me of my station in life!

Don’t get your drawers in a knot. Here’s your list of movies. And don’t take pot shots at my day job! If it weren’t for my concerted efforts in defending this great nation of ours, you and I wouldn’t have a movie industry to write about! How many cool horror flicks do you think they’d crank out in a Communist America? Huh? HUH? About none, I’m thinking!

Since this is "Son of Five Thanksgiving Turkeys," I decided to select only sequels for this one. It's kind of spread out over the long, squalid history of wasting perfectly good money on perfectly terrible celluloid.

Our first turkey is War Of The Colossal Beast, which is the sequel to the equally stupid Amazing Colossal Man. They’re trying to get some mileage out of that college word, but nobody who worked on the film has a college education. Did anybody who worked on this film have even a fifth grade education? I picked this one because I just love that half-his-face-is-missing makeup – that little window in his melon with his eye socket and a chunk of his skull showing through. Stuff like this is why I watch the late show, man. Classic.

And this one’s appropriate for Thanksgiving because that boy can haul in some chow. Holy smokes, can he! That’s how he gets discovered again after all those years: all these big food trucks go missing. These government think-tank guys get together and dope it all out: who could eat that much? Um, gee, d’you think it might be that 50-foot-tall guy? I thought we waxed him! As they say in Washington, our early reports were inaccurate due to misinformation. You can’t trust anybody these days, dude.

The flick also has a cool King-Kong rip-off kinda plot where the only reason they revive the guy downtown is so he can break out and stomp some cardboard buildings. I am just all about that. Shades of Godzilla--but hey, be fair. Godzilla is prettier.

The next movie is the second in about a billion installments of the classic (not) slasher series, Friday the 13th. Two big reasons to like Friday the 13th Part Two: 1) the amount of female skin on display; 2) the complete and utter cruelty involved in dreaming up all these crazy ways to kill people. I mean, the guy in the wheelchair gets a machete in the face! That’s, like, beyond cold. We don’t have words for how nasty that is. Nasty.

Of course, all that skin means some people are doing the nasty, and as they point out in Scream, you should know better than to get nekkid in a horror film. It’s a free ticket to the boneyard. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to death. Bloody, violent death. In this case, one spear takes ‘em both out. Very efficient.

There are several other colorful deaths. The sole survivor of the first movie bites it in the first scene of this one, of course – with an ice pick to the temple. Ouch. That’s basically the only reason to check out a F13th flick: who dies and how they get it. One kid gets cut in half while walking on his hands to impress his girlfriend. Guess you didn’t impress Jason, smart guy. Anyway, a lot of people die and then it ends. Yay. Time to throw in the next one.

And get the barf bags ready.

I personally debate whether or not The Fly II is a turkey. I really like this flick, but I hear a lot of people say they think it’s just dumb as a wheelbarrow full of bricks. It’s kinda cool for curiosity’s sake because it’s got Nana Visitor in it, that chick who plays Major Kira in Deep Space Nine. Whoo, mama. The way she fills out a Starfleet uniform. You think they make those things skintight on purpose? I mean, she ain’t Jeri Ryan, but I wouldn’t exactly kick her out of bed for eatin’ crackers, either. Anyway, you don’t see that much of her and her character’s really bitchy so she dies early.

I say you should check out this movie for Thanksgiving because it will make you hurl. You can do the whole Roman food orgy thing if you want: gorge yourself on bird, pop in The Fly II, wait until you get to that scene where the security guard gets his head crushed by the elevator (and his head does’t just get crushed; his head explodes, like somebody planted an M-80 in his skull), go do the Technicolor yawn, come back and grab some more bird. My advice is to go for the white meat the second time around. It’ll make you sleepy, and then you won’t have to be conscious for the rest of the flicks, because there’s no question about whether or not they suck.

I think George Romero and Steve King got together and made Creepshow 2 just to prove the truth of the all-sequels-blow-goats cliché. The first Creepshow was great, perhaps even brilliant. Creepshow 2 is a big stinky pile of donkey poo. They even took one of Steve’s best short stories, "The Raft," and turned it into a parody of itself! Hell, the original story was an homage, one part Joseph Payne Brennan’s "Slime," one part Arch Obeler’s "The Dark" and two parts Roger Corman. He even mentions Corman’s movies in the story! On the page, it’s amazing; on screen, it’s just dumb. The other two stories are equally dumb. One’s about a cigar store Indian that comes to life and the other is the old zombie hitchhiker schtick. "Thanks for the ride, lady!" the guy says, enunciating perfectly even though his lower jaw is missing. Please! Dumb, dumb, double-dumb. Pass the pumpkin pie.

Hey, Corman made crap movies, but at least they were funny.

John Boorman often makes excellent movies, but I guess everybody has to step in something warm and brown sometime. Exorcist 2: The Heretic is both warm and brown – not to mention totally incomprehensible. I mean, what the hell is going on in this thing? All I can figure out is that Pizuzu is back, harassing Regan and making her do and say embarrassing things. Richard Burton just totally hams it up as the Catholic Priest who’s trying to figure out what this crazy story is about.

Maybe Regan’s not really possessed. Maybe it’s just Teret’s Syndrome. Maybe you should spend your hard-earned rental dollar on Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo instead of this sort of cross between a horror flick and 2001: A Space Odyssey. This move will give you narcolepsy if you don’t already have it. Or apoplexy. Or one of those other plexys. You don’t want any of ‘em, trust me!

Watching these things one right after another totally erodes your critical sensibilities, turning you into a half-dead creature who writes letters to soap opera stars in the character’s name (what do you mean, Erica Kane isn’t real? I see her on TV every day! Dear Erica, that was so mean what you did to Justin. I hope he never forgives you.) It also makes you forget what the hell number you were on, so next thing you know you’ve watched six of these awful buggers instead of five. I throw in the sixth since I question whether or not The Fly II is actually a turkey. Does that seem fair? Do you even care about fair? Does anybody actually read this column, Renfield? Wait … don’t answer that.

The final flick in this putrid pack of prepubescent pandering is I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Know what? I didn’t give a crap last summer. Am I supposed to care now?

Again we have a case where the first movie did a decent job with the formula – nothing super-special, but the movie was watchable. This? You buy this on DVD, pal, you’ve just purchased an expensive coaster. It’s cack, as our British cousins would say. It has basically the same story, your usual bargain basement assortment of throwaway suspect characters (who become throwaway victim characters as the plot advances), one well-planted but screamingly obvious red herring, and at least one girl with a nice body. Depending on your bent, you could even say there are three babes in this movie, but three nice bodies do not make up for the fact that there is not one lick of common sense anywhere in evidence in the story. It’s a dumb story. Not even half as smart as a wheelbarrow full of bricks.

If you take my advice and eat the white meat, you won’t have to worry about it.

So there are your movies, Renfield. If you don’t like em, go ahead: fire me. Go on, I dare ya! See if you can find somebody else willing to write about crap like Goke, the Body Snatcher from Hell.

Dave

P.S. Are you ever gonna email me that naked picture of your sister?

Ummm...thanks, Dave.   At least you delivered on the five indigestible horror movies as promised.  As far as that picture is concerned...I didn't really say she was my sister...

Article copyright © Dave Duggins

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