Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992)

1992
Directed by David Price
Starring Terence Knox, Paul Scherrer, Ryan Bollman, Christie Clark, Rosalind Allen and Ned Romero

So I had never seen any of the 17 sequels to Children of the Corn.  To make a short story even shorter, Netflix has every single one of these things available on demand.  Now, I have seen one.  And...it kinda sucks.

Ok, maybe that's a little harsh.  I distinctly remember when this movie hit theaters - I was a little bastard back then, but I had seen bits and pieces of the original movie on cable.  Remember 1992, people?  I do.  A truly grand time, when Hulk Hogan was just rapping up his first run in the WWF and hip hop was still in its golden age.  I'm sorry...allow me to wallow in nostalgia for a moment.  Ahhh, 1992.  I can't imagine that movie executives were exactly EAGER to start trotting out sequels to Children of the Corn.  The first movie made money, but it was definitely no gigantic hit.  Stephen King did everything but disown the movie.  Nevertheless, it had garnered quite the following on video over the years, which meant that we would eventually get THIS - a micro-budgeted cheapie of a sequel that was in and out of theaters quicker than a hiccup but, just like the original movie, made back its budget many times over.

Why have we gotten the aforementioned 16 follow-up movies AFTER this one?  That's why.

Since we're dealing with a movie that labored in development hell for a while and went through a bunch of rewrites, we've got a plenty disjointed setup when it comes to the first act of this flick.  For starters, we have to get the Kooky Kids' Kult (KKK?  That's not Good!) back into full swing.  The kids from Gatlin, Nebraska in the original film are just kind of milling around, and fortunately, the good folks at nearby Hemingford (a town that was also featured prominently in Stephen King's best novel ever, The Stand) are willing to adopt them.  Within short order, the children go out into a nearby cornfield where one of them, Micah, is possessed by the demon from the original movie and becomes your star villain.  He's played by Ryan Bollman.  He tries, but he's no Jacob or Malachi, that's for damn sure.

Meanwhile, we need a reason to care.  Therefore, the script gives us the classic "father and son who don't get along" dichotomy.  The dad is named John Garret, and he's a reporter who sees this story about a town of kids who KILLED THEIR PARENTS as his ticket to stardom.  Because in the the total history of horror movies, this sounds like one of the most genius plans of all time.  The movie tries to amp up its emotion with the son character Danny, played by Paul Scherrer and coming across as something like 50% less annoying than you'd expect a character like this to be.  If I sound a little salty in this review, it's because everybody in this movie really does kind of come across like a cardboard cutout.  With one exception.

Ladies and gentlemen, Christie Clark.  Now, I knew the name before I watched this movie.  She's the little girl who loved Fu Man Fingers in Nightmare on Elm Street 2.  Said fingers were also the best part of that abomination.  Here, though, she was all grown up, and man, she's something else, because she was doing a damn good job acting like she actually cared about Children of the Corn II.  She's Danny's love interest Lacey, and even though it's essentially her job to be Pauline in peril throughout the movie's money sequences, she's the only person in this movie who doesn't just go through the motions.  Lo and behold, I found out in my extensive research that she had a long run on Days of Our Lives that began in 1985 and wrapped in 2012.  So three gold stars for her.

The last thing I ever expected when I wrote a review of Children of the Corn II: the Christie Clark love fest.  End communication.

And back to our regularly scheduled programming.  That about wraps up all the main ingredients for what we're dealing with here.  Micah promptly starts using his newfound magical powers to start killing people.  One of the early deaths has him using a freakin' VOODOO DOLL on somebody.  I have to say, I didn't expect to see that when I watched this movie, either.  The script then introduces a kind of secondary hero character in Frank Red Bear, a University bigwig who believes that the corn itself is responsible for the increasing town body count (it has reached something like five or six by the time this dude gets involved in the story).  Something about its toxic properties...by this point, I had kind of stopped caring, I'm not gonna lie.  You know, when I spend an entire paragraph singing the pages of Fu Man Girl, we're in trouble, and that's what this movie is.  It's all just THERE.

The film DOES pick up in its third trimester, as the cult kidnaps both Angela and Lacey while troubled son Danny has to go and save them.  Wait, Angela?  I just realized that I completely left her out of this review.  Yeah, this movie ALSO has a love interest for John.  She runs the local bed and breakfast, and that's all you need to know.  Shits and giggles, a couple of fake-out deaths, and a pretty nifty little sequence where Micah actually transforms into a demon just before the movie comes to a close.  Somewhat mercifully.

If you get the impression that this movie wasn't good, then I've done my job successfully.  It's not offensively bad or anything.  You're not going to see a ton of stuff that should have belonged on MST3K here.  For its budget, it's competently done and even competently acted.  But that's just the problem.  Folks...this movie is boring.  That's the worst thing that you can say about anything, whether it's a movie or a TV show or a video game.  It's alright to watch if you're, I don't know, half-asleep and really don't feel like paying attention to what you're watching.  But if you watch it on a Saturday night like I did ready to have some solid riffing material, you're in for disappointment. * 1/2 out of ****.  And yes, sooner or later, I WILL get to the later sequels.

Alrighty then.  Now that this flick is out of the way, I can gear up for what is to come.  October.  Halloween season, Samhain time, the celebration of the harvest.  Whatever you want to call it, it's the best month of the year, and it's truly ground zero for horror watching.  Preferably in binges.  This year, I'm going to be reviewing the four classic Universal Monster movies - Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and the Wolf Man are comin' at ya next month, so get ready.  As it turns out, I DID review the original Boris Karloff Frankenstein back when I did the International Horror Registry thing.  But that review sucked, so it's getting a George Lucas-esque reboot. 

* cue lightning *

It's alive...alive!

The Kiss (1988)

1988
Directed by Pen Densham
Starring Joanna Pacula, Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus, Mimi Kuzyk and Jan Rubes

Last week, I reviewed The Hidden, a 1987 epic of weirdness featuring a group of cops following a parasite-like entity that could control the actions of others.  This week's movie, released a mere year after that one, is similar in a lot of ways but different in many others.  The Kiss also has the basic plot device of some sort of supernatural...thingy that passes from person to person.  Unlike that one, though, this one has a lot of hot women.  So +2 cool points to the movie there.  I'm actually legit surprised that there aren't more mainstream movies released like The Kiss these days.  Sex sells.  The early '90s in particular was absolutely rife with this stuff, as Joe Eszterhas' sex- and murder-laced epics graced the multiplexes and a few of them did monster business.

This flick has one of those true oxymorons of plotting - a simple setup with complicated execution.  Stick with me.  The action starts in 1963 deepest, darkest Africa (the Congo, to be precise), where a young girl named Felice has just been sent away with her Aunt on a train ride...to hell.  It's implied, I swear.  It doesn't take long for the movie to turn all kinds of weird as crazy Aunt attacks Felice, launching into a fierce makeout session (seriously) that passes the spirit from a cursed Talisman from the Aunt to the little girl.  So that's what we got - an ancient totem that goes from person to person, with the added twist that it has to be someone of the same bloodline.  Oh, one more thing - the kiss ritual was all kinds of bloody to the point that I had to actually turn away from the TV screen while watching it.  I can watch buckets of fake blood in these movies, but something about this scene got me.  Chalk it up to my one in 10,000,000 glandular condition.

From here, we flash forward 25 years to the present day world of 1988 Albany, New York.  Felice's sister Hilary (Talya Rubin) lives in a bigass house with her husband Jack (Nicholas Kilbertus) and teenage daughter Amy (Meredith Salenger).  Felice is busy living it up as a globe-trotting model of a truly unique nature.  In the movie, we see her representing a vitamin company based out of South Africa.  'Cus when you think modeling, you think South African vitamin companies.  But then again, Hardees trots out insanely hot chicks eating burgers and I don't complain, so maybe I'm just a moron.  Soon enough, tragedy erupts as the pivotal character of Hilary is offed in a car accident.

Where we're headed from here should be fairly obvious to everyone.  Felice shows up at the Halloran household with the intention of passing the talisman from herself to Amy.  We get all of the usual things we expect to happen in the process, as Jack falls in love with Felice and invites her to stay at the house.  'Cus let me tell you something (brother), when you're deceased wife's sister looks like Joanna Pacula, this is totally something that you should be all about.  It's all pretty predictable stuff, sprinkled in some glorious bits of nudity from Pacula that ups the rewatchability quotient on The Kiss by approximately 73%.  Couple this in with the fact that the director seems to have this creepy-ish interest in slow-motion shots of Meredith Salenger swiming in a white bathing suit, and you've got the makings of a movie that could have gotten you through some lonely nights back in the day.

Wow, this review really did take a detour, didn't it?  Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

In between the hot women, however, we've got a movie that manages to deliver despite its predictability.  It's mostly due to the performances of the two female leads.  Pacula and Salenger had excellent chemistry as the proverbial Wicked Aunt and Virtuous One characters.  This was absolutely a MUST for this movie.  If the relationship between Felice and Amy didn't work, nothing else in the movie did.  Fortunately, it works fantastically.  So much so that we're easily able to forget all of the scenes that Amy shares with her friends and dip boyfriend that repeatedly go nowhere.  Folks, these teenage characters are your "cannon fodder" of the film that up our body count above the government-mandated minimum.  They're here to do nothing more than die and/or be in peril, and nothing more.  I AM, however, pleasantly surprised at how well the romance plot between Felice and father Jack came off.  While Kilbertus wasn't quite up to par with his two female costars, he does manage to come off as a sympathetic widower who is just unfortunate to learn that his sister-in-law looks like Joanna Pacula.  It's not that hard to forgive him.

Oh, and Felice also has otherworldly telekinetic powers and a killer demon cat that she uses to kill people.  I just realized that I completely left that out of this review up until this point.  So that's where our element of danger comes from in the script and nobody can say that I left it out.  Everything builds up to a finale that is nothing else if not batshit insane in the good way.  Much like The Hidden, it's some pretty damn cool stuff that gives us a satisfying conclusion. 

To be fair, I don't think this flick was quite as good as The Hidden.  It's just as out-there, but for whatever reason I didn't respond to this story emotionally quite as much as I did to the stuff between Michael Nouri and Kyle MacLachlan in that film.  It's probably dudebro bias, so take that for what it's worth.  Still, this is a horror flick that manages to be both emotional and occasionally pretty tense.  The acting is good, the plot is well laid-out, and it's got two incredibly hot women to gawk at.  For that alone, I gotta give my recommendation.  *** out of ****.

The Hidden (1987)

1987
Directed by Jack Sholder
Starring Michael Nouri, Kyle MacLachlan, Clu Gulager, Chris Mulkey, Ed O'Ross, Claudia Christian and Larry Ceder

By the time 2009 rolled around, I'd watched Friday the 13th Part II something like 50 times.  And I'm not exaggerating.  For the better part of a year, the discs in that much-maligned "Crystal Lake to Manhattan" box set got heavy repeats in my DVD player, playing over and over while I slept (don't look at me like that) and helping me get through a very difficult period in my life.  Thus, much like all eight original Jason classics, I know that movie like the back of my hand.  So imagine my surprise when I see the Mario Bava classic Twitch of the Death Nerve and realize that one of my favorite movies ripped off pretty much all of its kills from a movie that came out eight years earlier.

Amazingly enough, it wouldn't be the only time that the greatest movie series in the history of ever would shamelessly crib from another movie.  Jason Goes to Hell was the flick where original series creator Sean Cunningham told his director to do whatever he wanted as he long as he got Jason out of that damn hockey mask.  So...what we got was The Hidden.  The Hidden, you ask?  Glad you did.  This was a nifty thriller released in 1987, back when New Line Cinema was still in its "House that Freddy Built" phase and proud to trot out low-budget flicks with well-known 1970s TV stars.  What's more, it had Jack Sholder, the director of Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and it brought back one of the stars of that film, Clu Gulager, in a minor role.  What's more, it's also very fun.  Yeah.  Film criticism.

The two main characters are LAPD detective Thomas Beck (Michael Nouri) and FBI Special Agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan), and their search for a very elusive set of killers.  And I must say...these two actors have really good chemistry.  Now, it's not exactly Lethal Weapon, but you get the sense that there was a lot of fun being had on the set of this flick, and a lot of it had to do with Nouri and MacLachlan.  Movies with that quality are hard to find, so if you're in for a resounding round of non-pretentiousness, look no further. 

The plot wastes absolutely no time getting going, as a team of cops overseen by Beck have just captured Jack DeVries (Chris Mulkey).  Jack is a model citizen, no previous arrests, and has thus stunned the authorities by going on an Oliver Stone-level crime and murder wave across Los Angeles.  Seriously.  Had this character's name been A Guy, no one would have known any different.  Upon his capture, Beck meets Gallagher, setting in forth the relationship that would define the rest of the sweeping story of The Hidden.  Meanwhile, DeVries wakes up in the hospital and regurgitates the slug-like symbiote controlling his actions into another patient's mouth.  Wait, what?

Yup.  You know how Jason Goes to Hell was about body swapping?  That's also what we get here.  But while that film featured Jason Voorhees' soul moving from person to person, this one has this disgusting snail-type alien doing the same thing.  The general idea is that this thing does whatever feels good, and when it takes the form of a human being, it's murder, mayhem and debauchery, baby.  So...this alien essentially is Human Bender.  From here, there's a bunch of insanity that happens as the patient robs a liquor store, heads to a strip club, swaps bodies with one of the friendly dancing girls, flashes some tit, you name it.  Said stripper, by the way, is played by Claudia Christian, best known as Commander Ivanova in Babylon 5.  If you ever wanted to see a Sci-Fi queen parade around wearing next to nothing, this is your movie.

The flick is very different from the movie that ripped it off in one important regard, though - while it's goofy, it actually does a decent job hooking you in emotionally.  Screenplay-wise, it's pretty much spot-on.  The first ten pages do an excellent job creating intrigue, but it's the middle section of the movie that really shines as virtually every character is given a decent amount of time to develop.  Beck invites Gallagher over to share dinner with his family, and it's here where e learn that the younger FBI jackass once had a run-in with the creature that they're tailing and has a personal stake in the case.  A truly amazing character arc, if I say so myself.  We also get to know Beck's former partner and a bunch of the cops at the station, and while they're mostly caricatures, they're well-constructed and acted caricatures.  Especially Clu Gulager as the requisite bitchy Lieutenant guy, but that guy is always amazing.

Oh, and the movie has a giant swerve that I never in a million years saw coming.  Now, I am fairly easily fooled when it comes to movies, so take that for what it's worth.  I've never guessed a single Dario Argento mystery killer correctly despite everyone and their mother telling me that they were able to call them from a mile off...but I'm fairly confident that The Hidden will pull the rug out from under you in a pretty big way in regards to one particular thing.  See for yourself.

As the movie gears up for its final trimester, the stakes are also on the rise - another plus in the screenplay department!  The creature is targeting presidential hopeful Senator Holt (John McCann) in the hopes that it can CONQUER THE WORLD...or something.  This leads to shootouts, a fair bit of political intrigue, and a climactic fight scene that satisfies as well as a can of 1980s Coke.  Which, I'm fairly sure pretty much all of the actors in this movie were on at the time.  Suffice to say, the movie has an escalating threat and an equally escalating counter-threat.  As a result, I can't say enough good about writer Bob Hunt, who made very few mistakes when plotting out this film.

I don't know what else to say about The Hidden, other than it really is one of those one-of-a-kind type films.  It's that rare example of a project that came along with the right director, the right people in front of the camera, and at EXACTLY the right point in time.  I'm actually somewhat surprised that it wasn't a bigger hit - it grossed $9.7 million, and while I can't find the budget information on the interwebz, I'm guessing that it cost somewhere in the $5 million neighborhood to shoot, which would have put it right in line with Nightmare on Elm Street 3.  The special effects are impressive and practical, the actors are right on point, and the action/sci-fi stuff is pretty damn epic. 

*** 1/2 out of ****.  Yeah, this movie ain't gonna win any hoity-toity awards.  But it has enough going for it that I can call it a must-see without any guilt.  Check it out, you won't be disappointed.

Subspecies (1991)

1991
Directed by Ted Nicolaou
Starring Anders Hove, Irina Movila, Laura Tate, Michelle McBride, Ivan J. Rado, Michael Watson and Angus Scrimm

Are you ready, kids?  Are you ready for Radu?

Last week, I took an in-depth look at Full Moon Features' storied (ok, by me) [i]Puppet Master[/i] franchise.  That series is pretty much Charles Band's combined meal ticket and his kids' college tuitions, but it would surprise some of you normals out there to learn that Blade, Tunneler, Leech Woman etc. weren't the only bona-fide franchise that Full Moon boasted to its name.  Subspecies is a very different kind of vampire flick, one that combines Tolkien-esque sword and cheesy horror into something wholly unique.  It's also got Greenland-born-and-bred Anders Hove as a way-out-there vampire that had to have been a welcome change back in 1991 when this movie was released...to say nothing of now, now that we're just starting to exit the Twilight school of sparkly romantic vampires.  And, by proxy, the True Blood school of slightly edgier sparkly vampire stories with tits and gore.  Alas, this movie was quite successful on video store shelves upon its release, and much like those wacky killer puppets, Charles Band and company started pumping out sequels.

Today, though, we're just looking at the first film in the series.  I saw it way back in 1998 on some lonely Saturday afternoon, and remember thinking that it was awesome.  Upon revisiting it, I can safely say that 15-year-old Me was correct.  And that is what you call grade-A reporting.

One thing about Subspecies and its sequels is that these flicks have a very distinctive look.  They were all directed by Ted Nicolaou, and he chose to shoot the films in Romania.  This was nothing less than a stroke of genius, because (a) it lent the movie great atmosphere, what with all the ruined castles, leafy greens and fog that was present in the countryside, and (b) it was cheap, because they didn't have to build any of this stuff.  We're quickly introduced to everything we need to know as far as the back story goes.  The vampire king Vladislas (played by the incomparable Angus Scrimm of Tall Man fame) has some convoluted affairs that result in two sons: virtuous Stefan (Michael Watson) and Radu (the aforementioned Anders Hove).  We have a struggle for power between good and evil that has gone on for centuries, and we're also gifted with the presence of Hove whose combination of overacting and occasionally incomprehensible accent gives us some fantastically funny material to work with.  Trust me - MST3K this one with your friends and you're in for a great time.

Flash forward to the present day, where three young college friends are traveling to Romania to study...stuff.  Lo and behold, one of the first people they meet is Stefan, and we get the opening bouts of romantic tension between Michelle (Laura Tate), the leader of the students, and Stefan the leader of wooden actors.  Unfortunately, this guy is kind of the weak point of the flick, as he has about as much raw naked charisma as my left pinky finger.  Fortunately, Tate is pretty good, although she was recast as the series wore on.  More on that later.

Anyway, time for this King Arthur-esque plot to truly get rolling.  See, there is this ancient artifact called the Bloodstone that Radu is after that holds the key to conquering the entire cosmos, or something.  In order to gain control of it, he kills his father (presumably not before said father chastised his murderous son by yelling "BOYYYYYYYYYYY!"), and then makes it his mission to make Stefan's life miserable.  As the college kids thumb around the Romanian countryside, Radu manages to turn two of them into vampires while Michelle becomes the focal point of the story.  There's a broad sweeping romance between Stefan and Michelle, an epic climax, and a truly awesome side character in the vampire hunter Karl played by Ivan J. Rado who gives us the amazing gift of SHOTGUN SHELLS FILLED WITH ROSARY BEADS.  That was some creative thinking, right there, and I award 10 cool points to the screenwriter who came up with it.

When you rented a movie like Subspecies in the early '90s, you knew what you were getting.  But with the Full Moon name attached to it, you also knew that you were getting just a little bit more than that.  For starters, the setting - much like the Bodega Bay Inn in the Puppet Master films - is a masterpiece of atmosphere.  Again, every Full Moon movie was made on a Filet-o-Fish budget, but this movie definitely doesn't look it.  But the thing about this flick, like all of Charles Band's pet projects, is that there's this tangible sense of FUN to the whole thing.  I know that I harp on the differences between "THEN" and "NOW" in entertainment a lot, but that's the thing that's missing from, like, 95% of modern movies and television shows to me.  Entertainment these days seems to be about anything but fun, and it's so refreshing to revisit these movies where everything was unapologetically simple with no hints of "well, yeah, this guy is KIND OF a dick, but he's got SOME endearing qualities even though he does all of these illegal things..."  F**K that noise.  Give me thickly accented vampires and rosary-loaded shotgun shells.

The other reason to see this movie lies in the people in front of and behind the camera.  Yeah, you're not getting any Academy Award-winning performances, but everyone involved (especially Hove) went way above and beyond considering the kind of script we're dealing with here.  Even Michael Watson as Stefan.  I can't say that he didn't try; he's just as human black void of personality.  As for the other side of film-making, this really was just a textbook example of A-B-C screenwriting, where everything made sense and escalated.  For a goofy 1991 movie about vampires and ancient artifacts, that's an impressive feat.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  It's a fun start to a fun series, and speaking of...it's easy to see why the Full Moon audience responded so strongly to this one and made Charles Band bankroll more of them.  Seek out this box set if you've got the budget.

Puppet Master: A Retrospective

Lately, I've been watching a lot of the stuff on the Good Bad Flicks YouTube channel.  Why didn't I discover this sooner?  Just about everything that I love is celebrated on here, with a whole smattering of films that would have fit on Mystery Science Theater 3000 poured over in minute detail complete with humorous (yet good-spirited) barbs.  The guy that runs the channel is a huge fan of Full Moon Features, the old production company that used to release something like 17 direct-to-video horror films a year.  Which brings me to the movie series that brought me to Good Bad Flicks in the first place - Puppet Master

Without a doubt, Puppet Master was Full Moon's bread and butter series.  The first one was released in 1989, amid the wave of "killer doll" movies that appeared in the wake of Chucky.  You'd think that the 17,000th movie about stalking little toys would have been been boring and...well, bad.  But lo and behold, it was pretty frickin' awesome.  Enough that the people back in the late '80s renting every VHS horror tape that they could find responded to it in a big way.  Charles Band, the head honcho at Full Moon, took notice.  As such, it wasn't long until more Puppet Master movies started showing up in the video store.  And more.  And more, until the thing was an entire damn FRANCHISE just as much as the Freddys, Jasons and Michaels of the world could boast.  I would never, ever claim that this is the best movie series on the planet or anything, but I will say this: for a time, a very BRIEF time back when I was in high school, this was my favorite horror franchise.  It didn't take long for it to be supplanted, but it was fun while it lasted.

The basics go like this:  A group of characters appear at a location.  Most of the time, it's this fictional hotel called the Bodega Bay Inn, which also just so happens to be the site of World War II-era puppeteer Andre Toulon's experiments.  This guy's talent: living dolls, which he creates by extracting human souls and implanting them into the marionettes.  Oh, and said puppets are really cool and have even cooler weapons.  People start getting picked off by the puppets, there's some sort of ancient tragic romance storyline going on (more on that later), and we wind up with our big showdown.  Unlike most other horror films, though, the showdown typically doesn't involve the puppets.  There are other main villains at work here, and most of the time, they're overtly cartoonish.  Which just helps make them even more memorable.  I forgot 95% of the last 10 action blockbusters I saw in cinemas; I don't forget these cheesy movies from the '90s.

With that, let's start looking at some of the films themselves.  Which, I know, is what all seven of you were waiting for.

Now, I've already inducted the original movie into the IHR way back when that was a thing.  But I'll talk about it briefly again.  This movie introduces us to the back story of Andre Toulon (the AFOREMENTIONED WWII titular "Puppet Master" himself), putting the final touches on his last creation before Nazi spies rush the Bodega Bay Inn and kill him.  But not before he hides the puppets.  The action then switches to modern times.  All of our characters are psychics, and they all know each other, and they're drawn to the Inn for one reason or another.  What's even more interesting is that most of these characters are detestable pricks.  Not in the Rob Zombie way, but in an even-keeled kind of way, if that even makes sense.  But the real stars of the first movie - and in everything that came after - were the puppets themselves.

There was Tunneler, a soldier who drills his victims to death; there was Leech Woman, a truly disgusting creation who vomits bloodsuckers on people; there was Pinhead - nope, not Doug Bradley - but a strongman who strangled and beat on unfortunate saps until they perish; there was Jester, kind of the harmless emotional cheerleader of the group; and then there was BLADE, the most badass badass of them all.  Knife for one arm, hook for another, this guy was essentially my hero back in high school.  Looks-wise, attitude-wise, he's just awesome, and he already steals the first movie.  That's the thing about that original movie - the kills were just AWESOME.  For such a low-budget a movie, this stuff was creative, inventive and memorable, utilizing all those abilities listed above to varied perfection. 

So yeah, the first movie did huge with the video crowd.  Puppet Master II did almost as well, telling a much more personalized and Frankenstein-esque story about Andre Toulon himself coming back to life.  Resurrected by the life-saving serum that was introduced in the first movie (seriously, watch the movies for yourself if you want details about this stuff), Toulon walks among us, and he wants to reincarnate the spirit of his lost love.  Fortunately, he has an opportunity in the researchers who invade the inn like the marks that they are.  It's kind of a black sheep in the series considering what comes after, but it's pretty damn effective with some amazing stop-motion photography work by director David Allen.  It's also got Charlie Spradling as one of the sexiest victim characters in any horror movie ever.  She was so popular with fans, in fact, that she went on to host pretty much all the behind-the-scenes Full Moon stuff from that point on.

Ladies and gentlemen, Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge.  This was the flick that set the tone for Toulon's character for the rest of the series.  Now played by the awesome Guy Rolfe, this is the 1941-set origin story.  We see Toulon's bride get murdered by the Nazis, we learn the back stories of the puppets themselves, and we also get the introduction of an awesome new puppet in Six Shooter, a six-armed cowboy who shoots the dick out of unfortunate Nazi saps.  I think this movie is easily the best-constructed and most emotionally satisfying of all the movies, and I also think that if there is a movie in the franchise that is due for a big-budget reboot treatment, this is the one.  Imagine a movie where we actually get to know the characters who become the puppets, some fancy-schmancy handmade special effects with a modern twist and maybe, just maybe, Kiefer Sutherland as Toulon.  Now's that's terrifying.

Time for the bad puppets to go good!  That was the tagline when the fourth movie was released, and it delivered exactly on what it promised.  Parts IV and V were shot back-to-back by director Jeff Burr, and according to the ever-accurate Wikipedia no less than SEVEN writers churned out the scripts.  It gives us protagonist Rick Myers, affable dude who is now the caretaker at the Bodega Bay and just so happens to be working on artificial intelligence.  We get this weird plot involving an ancient demon lord who is out to reacquire the secret to reanimation, sending his little minions called "Totems" to the Inn to do it.  Which means, Puppet vs. Totem smackdown time.  These two flicks definitely aren't masterpieces by any stretch of the animation, but they're decent fun, and it was interesting to see the babyface-heel dynamic get switched.

A brief break in the series followed at this point, but soon enough, the series started cranking out more stuff.  1998's Curse of the Puppet Master isn't a movie that is going to take home any Saturn awards, but it's perfectly fine for what it is.  Another story of tragic romance with a twist, we have an evil scientist, his lovely daughter, and the love story between the daughter and the scientist's likable assistant.  There's also a really satisfying scene at the end where evil scientist gets gutted by the puppets en masse.  So that's nice.  1999 followed with Retro Puppet Master, the story of how Toulon himself found the secret to reanimation in Egypt.  And this one...yeah, it ain't good, unfortunately.  It DID feature newly-designed models of the puppets, but I definitely prefer the originals.  A best-of reel came next with Puppet Master: The Legacy, a decent-enough highlight package if that's what you're into.  From that point, the series went full SyFy.  And folks, you never go full SyFy.  Combining two of Full Moon's popular franchises must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys is simply awful.  Bad, bad, bad, dumb, it's really bad, and it's dumb.  And that is what you call constructive criticism. 

Fortunately, the series came back in a big way as the '00s crossed over into the '10s.  Starting with Axis of Evil, the series - still manned by Charles Band and his Full Moon Features label - has cranked out three more films in this little sub-series ever since.  Again, they're not perfect.  They're not artistic.  But they're fun and memorable, and we've even got a brand new movie this year and another one due out next year.  Stay tuned for Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, coming soon to TV screens and Blu-Ray shelves near you.

If you've been keeping score in this scatter-brained retrospective, the series now stands at an incredible THIRTEEN movies.  They continue to draw horror fans in, and they continue to turn a profit.  So what makes this whole thing special, and what makes people like myself keep coming back for more?  From the very first movie, there has been this tangible sense of joy and exuberance to the making of the material.  On the surface, yeah, they're movies about killer puppets.  But everything about the execution, from making the dolls as badass as possible with cool weapons, the settings ranging from the early movies at the California seaside inn to Egypt to Nazi Germany, and the over-the-top performances by the actors...you get the sense from watching that everyone involved had a load of fun on the set.  Compared to the soulless joy that comes from almost every film at the multiplex these days, watching these movies is a refreshing experience.  Stripped down to its roots, though, the story of Andre Toulon and his army of reincarnated soul puppets is a powerful story about love.  Cue Huey Lewis and the News song.  They're also about human evil vs. inhuman evil, how they cross and intersect, and ultimately they're about YOU, the audience, taking a side between the two.  Really, surprisingly deep stuff for a cheesy series about murderous marionettes.

Or maybe I'm just dumb.

Horror Video Games!

I have four nerdy passions:  (1) Horror movies, which I get to enjoy all of you fine people with here every week, (2) Pro wrestling, which I've been a loyal (and long suffering) fan of for many years, (3) Batman, despite everything Joel Schumacher and Christopher Nolan did with it, and (4) Video games.  A refreshingly blunt and to-the-point intro paragraph if I say so myself.  I'll take my donation any time now.

Yes, folks, the Lick Ness Monster is a gamer.  NES, Sega Genesis, Super NES, N64, Gamecube.  That was the list of consoles that I owned throughout my formative years.  As you can tell, I was (and still am) a big Nintendo fanboy, and that's something that causes me almost as much suffering as WWE does these days.  If only these guys could get their heads out of their asses and get back to basics.  But then again, they have to be raking it in over "Pokemon Go!" so I can't say that they're exactly hurting these days.  Still...much like my philosophy with movies, I'm a big proponent of "keep it simple, stupid."  As such, there was a time where I just lost interest in video games, because I thought that the whole experience from online multiplayer to the consoles themselves being more like general entertainment hubs than gaming machines had gotten to be anything but simple.  See how that list of consoles ended two generations ago? 

But alas, something brought me back.  Hearing that there was a new "Doom" game on the horizon was the lure, because that was the series that taught me that I can combine my loser-y fascinations.  500-some-odd dollars later, I had an Xbox One, brand-new copies of "Batman: Arkham Knight" (combining loser-y fascinations again!) and "Grand Theft Auto V" (because it looked so awesome on various YouTube gaming channels I follow), and a couple months' wait for "Doom."  Long story short, it was worth it, because it's still just as fast-paced, intense, and gloriously gory and horror-oriented as I remembered from my youth, with a story that doesn't go the traditional modern gaming route by shoving it in your face every five seconds.  It's there, but it's not intrusive, and that's a rare thing these days.  As awesome as it is, though...it still can't hold a candle to the original.  Spoiler alert. 

Thus, this week, we're going to be looking at my favorite horror video games. 

Going back to my childhood, I've always been a huge fan of the "Castlevania" series - well, up to a point, anyway, because that N64 one can f**k right off.  Of all the ones that I played in my youth, my favorite was undoubtedly "Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse" for the NES.  This is a series of games where you play as a member of the Belmont family, whip-wielding badasses on a mission to kill Dracula.  On your way there, you face off with skeletons, Gill-men, floating heads, you name it.  The mood, atmosphere and music are all creepy to the max, but what sets this particular game apart from the others is the innovations that it brought to the table.  There were different characters that you could find and take with you to find Dracula with different abilities ranging from high jumps to magic spells.  Oh, and the game is balls-tastically hard.  In other words, it's prime 8-bit side-scrolling goodness at its finest.

The next console that I owned was a Sega Genesis; I loved Nintendo, but the combined powers of Sonic the Hedgehog and the original "Mortal Kombat" in full blood mode were enough to win me over.  Well, until I bought a Super in college and realized how wrong I was.  But two games that I used to rent constantly were "Splatterhouse II" and "III," a series of games that I think is long overdue for a modern remake.  The plot goes like this: you're a buffed-out dude wearing a Jason mask that gives you mystical powers attempting to save your girlfriend from horrific monsters.  What more do you need than that?  Answer: nothing, because these games were just 100% pure awesome.  From your bare hands to bats to daggers, this game gave you the ability to splat the bad guys in insanely gruesome ways.  Well, by early '90s standards, anyway.  And I'll fully admit to pretending that I was playing as Jason himself.

From here, we go to arguably one of my most precious childhood memories.  Now, computers and my parents were two things that definitely didn't mix.  To this day, I still get called every time my mother gets a somewhat questionable email.  Thus, I was only able to play the original "Doom" and "Doom II" at a friend's house, and I'll never forget the time that I found out what the initials "BFG" stood for.  Many years later when I actually had my own laptop, these games were the first things that I downloaded.  To this day, I still give them a play-through at least once a year.  Here we have a first-person shooter about a space marine trying to stop an invasion from hell itself, with awesome weapons, baddies and loads of gore to be had in the process.  But it's this game's puzzle solving element that really pushes it over the top...and the memory of playing it in the dark with the computer screen being the only light in the room.

While I stuck with the Nintendo consoles after my Sega Genesis experiment, my roommate in college had a PS2.  It was here where I discovered the "Silent Hill" series.  In particular, "Silent Hill 2."  People...if only THIS story could have been presented to us unabridged instead of that godawful mess we got as a movie back in 2005.  Without a doubt, this was the creepiest game I had ever played.  The "Silent Hill" series is all about oppression, suspense and what is and isn't real, with the idea being that a town can bring out the worst fears of anyone unfortunate enough to wander in.  This really is like Dario Argento's Suspiria in game form with a psychological twist.  James Sunderland is a bad guy; this much we can gleam from the various cut scenes and horrific entities that you face off with here, up to and including the amazing Pyramid Head.  Whether or not he gains any kind of redemption in the conclusion is up to your imagination. 

Finally, we're back to Nintendo.  In particular, the Gamecube, as the remade version of the PlayStation classic "Resident Evil" hit store shelves in 2002.  I still remember the commercials for the original game when I was in middle school.  Zombies, guns and video games...the mystique and draw of this game was definitely there for me.  The Gamecube remake was my first exposure to the series, and while I've played many of the games in the series since, this is still THE definitive horror game for yours truly.  The story of an elite tactical team called to a countryside mansion to investigate a rash of mysterious and violent murders, the scares just build and never let up.  There's gunplay, but the focus here is on exploration, inventory management, and survival.  Oh, and staying the f**k away from Lisa Trevor, truly the most bone-chilling creation I've ever run across in any video game.  Those rattling chains still haunt my dreams.

Of course, those are just my favorites.  And as the recently renovated "Doom" (along with "Five Nights at Freddy's," "Alien: Isolation," "The Evil Within" and many others) proves, there's no end in sight.  Ever since I was a kid, I've enjoyed being scared.  It's why I like this stuff.  As such, I've always thought that it's fun to picture myself IN the horror movies that I watch, and this is your way to almost literally do it.  Who knows?  Maybe in a few more years I'll have my own personal Horror Holodeck or something.  One can only hope.

Night of the Lepus (1972)

1972
Directed by William F. Claxton
Starring Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun and DeForest Kelley

Get ready for one of my favorite overused points that I make here on the blog:  Sometimes, ordinary things can be the scariest things of all.  All you have to do is inject some mutation, weird science, or some other fancy contraption to just about any creature that exists on Earth and you can accomplish just that.  Occasionally, you don't even have to do that.  Things like spiders and sharks are always scary.  And then there are things that have been horrifying at some point in the planet's existence.  Proof?  There used to be beetles the size of poodles that roamed the deserts during the days of the dinosaurs.  Just the thought of this makes me want to curl up into the fetal position.

Which brings me to Night of the Lepus, a.k.a. Killer Bunnies: The Movie.  This is another one of those creature-fied horror flicks that used to get a lot of play on TBS when I was a kid.  Back then, it used to f**kin' TERRIFY me, and I wish I was making that up.  Rabbits are adorable.  The rabbits in this movie ain't.  Of course, this was when I was, like, eight years old.  And when this movie finally got a home video release in 2005, I couldn't pick it up fast enough.

Spoiler alert: it sucks.

I know that's not news to a lot of people, because this is one of the most laughed-at movies of all time.  Hell, it even got the Rifftrax treatment a few years back.  For starters, it's not scary.  At all.  It's also got what amounts to an amazing crop of actors for a movie about giant mutated killer rabbits, but sadly that cast is wasted, because they all look like they'd rather be anywhere else in the world than filming this movie.

Anyone who has seen a "Nature Run Amok" movie kind of knows the drill about where we're going with Night of the Lepus.  So, let's try and make this as quick and painless as possible.  Our star character is rancher Cole Hillman (Calhoun, significantly less nutty than in his later Farmer Vincent persona), good ol' boy who is concerned about the thousands of rabbits that have taken up residence on his property.  Help comes in the form of college president Elgin Clark (DeForest Kelley) and a pair of researchers played by Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh.  Amazingly, Leigh was still quite the looker in 1972. 

Our "weird science" portion of the movie begins here as the researchers capture several of the rabbits for experimentation, injecting one of them with a weird serum while their daughter falls in love with the captured bunny.  She keeps it as a pet, but it soon escapes, and this is where the s**t hits the fan.  Within short order, Whitman and Leigh's daughter takes a trek out to a local cave where they see one of the rabbits with blood smeared on its face and making the trademark 1970s shrieky "scream" soundtrack noise.  Yeah, you know the one.  Imagine Quint's fingernails scratching the chalkboard and mix it with the yelping of a dying cat if you don't.

Now, I will give it to the movie here.  It moves along at a nice, brisk pace.  88 minutes long, very little wasted motion, plenty of kills.  There's a few offshoot hick characters connected to rancher Cole who get to bite it once the bunnies start to invade the farm, with one of them getting to see the rabbits' massive teeth in a sequence that gave me nightmares as a child.  Yeah, this was the movie's money scene, and everything that follows is pretty much secondary.  The director had some pretty grand ambitions, as the rabbits go from the ranch to a nearby town, a big-time massacre sequence in said town, and threaten to invade a much LARGER nearby town in the process before our heroes put together the most epic electrocution plot ever to save the day.  Having seen the movie, take my word - it's not as much fun as it sounds.

The rabbits themselves are shot mainly through the art of forced perspective photography, shooting them in close-up against smaller backgrounds to make them look bigger.  Attack scenes were sometimes even done with human actors in rabbit costumes.  And folks, that...is awesome.  The beasts definitely don't look the greatest, but I admire th effort.  The laugh quotient here with the giant bunnies is somewhere around a 64%.

What ISN'T so admirable here is the acting.  And boy, is it bad.  There's a YouTube reel out there that contains the best stuff from the movie, and a lot of it is centered on  Calhoun, Kelley, Whitman, Leigh and the rest of the yokels.  They're either screaming stuff very unconvincingly, or shoving out all the exposition in bits that are stilted to the max.  As such, this isn't a movie where you get emotionally invested.  Calhoun in particular always has this William Shatner-esque "What...the hell...am I doing?" look on his face, but the other dudes aren't far behind.  Maybe Kelley transported Captain Kirk's brain into the other actors on the set (/dodges tomatoes).

Becuase the movie at least KIND OF works on its intended level, I'm not giving it my lowest rating.  It's also pretty funny.  The aforementioned Rifftrax version of this movie is proof of that, as there's plenty of material and unintentionally dumb bunny attack scenes to be had.  But it doesn't work as anything other than a dumb monster movie.  Thus, let's give this flick * 1/2 out of ****.  Still worth a watch or a cheap buy on DVD.