Weasels Rip My Flesh

Year of Release: 1979
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.3 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

OK people, pack it up and head on home. Nobody needs me anymore, the journey to watch the world’s most awful horror movie has officially come to an end with Weasels Rip My Flesh. Just joking, I’m not going anywhere, although I am considering revamping the blog. My main idea includes redoing the Levels of Awful as ‘Surprise!’, ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, ‘High’ and ‘Weasels Rip My Flesh‘. Anyone remember my review for Monsturd? Weasels Rip My Flesh would shit all over that movie. It’s quite spectacular in its mind-melting awfulness; friends of the “director” in the roles, papier-mâché monsters and black bags being used as the surface of Venus. To make sure you really get value for money all of this is crammed into little more than an hour’s worth of film. If you’re feeling like you have nothing left to live for and want to go out with your brain violently squeezing itself out of your ear in a desperate bid to escape then this is the perfect way to end it all.

That poor granny-haired boy…

Mankind has finally mastered the art of space travel and extended our reach beyond the stars. Well, not really, but we’ve managed to make our way to Venus. Turns out the planet is made up largely of black bin bags and isn’t nearly as hot as we thought it was so landing a spaceship there is easier than parallel parking on a slow traffic day. Thrown into all of these amazing discoveries is the fact that our sister planet is home to life; blue, slimely, squishy life but life none the less. Using the latest in giant hair clip technology the brave astronauts of this cardboard spaceship  collect samples of Venereal life to bring back home for further study. Sadly the homeward trip for these brave, brave men is marred by the fact that the spaceship suddenly veers hopelessly out of control and crashes in a swamp where two young boys just happen to be playing.

Oh my God, what a horrifying mutant weasel!

The saying ‘boys will be boys’ is never more applicable than when two young boys on the cusp of puberty come across a package marked “DANGER: RADIOACTIVE CONTENTS” written in white board marker. The number of things that can be done with radioactive Venereal life is virtually limitless as you can well imagine but, when one of the boys is bitten by a rabid weasel, the toxic slime becomes the perfect vehicle for revenge. They pour the now luminous mustard yellow goo into the weasel’s burrow and the strangely doll-like creature mutants into a horrendous monster in a matter of seconds. Now the size of a car the monster weasel makes a quick snack of the two boys before heading out of the swamp on a rampaging trail of terror.

Some of the most amazing costuming in a movie ever.

Somewhere in amongst the ensuing confusion that involves random road-side researchers, horrendous moustaches and weasel arms that can move around on their own 8 months fly by and the swamp becomes a scene of unsolved mass murders. We catch up with the movie to follow what I hazard as a guess to be two policemen trying to find out what’s going on in the swamp. In between chain-smoking a few cigars, being overbearingly Italian-American and some wooden dialogue thrown in for good measure the two cops are taken hostage by a scientist that looks strikingly like Nintendo’s Mario (were Mario to be homeless with an alcohol problem). This scientist has discovered that the mutant weasel is the key to amazing regenerative medicine but, since the weasel has rabies, he needs human blood to purify his new serum. The cops now need to find a way to escape from the scientist’s evil clutches without becoming a little snack for the giant weasel.

I would just like to reiterate, if you feel like life is actually worth living, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE! You may not feel the same way by the time the closing credits roll round.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• A woman’s hair clip is perfect for collecting samples of alien life on Venus.
• NASA has absolutely no way of knowing if one of their spacecraft has made it back to Earth safely or not.
• NASA containment technology is no match for a 10-year-old with a stick.
• It’s very easy to not notice a car-sized weasel running across the road.
• A messy kitchen is definite proof of a torn off arm dragging itself around the house.
• It’s easy to confuse a stagnant swamp for an ocean.
• Mutant weasels can either destroy the world, cure every disease or unlock the secret to immortality.
• You can use a lit cigar to burn through metal chains.
• Contrary to popular belief having your arm ripped off will not result in massive blood loss.

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You Broke It: Halloween III Season of the Witch

Year of Release: 1982
Genre:  Horror / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0.5 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Of all the trilogies that went awry this week, this one really went all out to screw up a franchise. The only way this could have been more of an 80s mess is if Linnea Quigly had been in it. A little birdy has informed me that the Halloween franchise has long since past the point where its a trilogy (I don’t think there are words for the number of movies that make it up now) but trying to find three separate franchises where the first two movies were connected and the third falls under the banner but has nothing to do with the first two is a tall order. Let’s travel back to a simpler and less colour coordinated time and investigate the wonders of Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

I said no onions!!

John Carpenter, Debra Hill and Tommy Lee Wallace’s ill-conceived idea begins on a back road somewhere where a strange man is running away from a mysterious car. This movie’s nearly 100 minute run time is incredibly well padded, so the running carries on for quite a while before the car and its drivers eventually find the man hiding in plain sight and try to kill him with their bare hands. The man manages to escape and make his way to a little gas station but not without a few injuries, so the owner (who has a very odd-looking face) takes him to the hospital to be treated. It’s here that we meet our first main character, Dr Dan Challis. The good doctor really doesn’t do much but sleep in the nurse’s lounge, but for him to be active right now would interfere with the plot’s (alleged) development. In one of the rooms our stranger has been sedated and is busy resting, all the while clinging to a jack-o-lantern mask that he refuses to give up. While he’s sleeping a man similar to one of the Men In Black goes into the room and cracks the stranger’s skull in before going back to his car and setting himself on fire. Making any sense yet? No? Don’t worry, I’ll try to get you there…

Laser beams: now with extra mintiness.

In an attempt to shift the movie into second gear we find out that the stranger has a daughter named Ellie, and she wants to know exactly why anyone would want to kill her dear old dad. Since the old man owned a Halloween novelty store and was on his way to top up on his Silver Shamrock line of Halloween masks she decides that this is as good a place as any to start. Dr Dan also goes beyond the call duty and decides to tag along with her to try and find out what happened to his poor patient. The two make their way to Santa Mira, a tiny little Irish community in the hell and back of nowhere that’s about as relaxed and welcoming as London in 1984. Everyone’s under surveillance, the entire town is centred around the Silver Shamrock factory, a curfew’s in effect from 6pm and the most irritating advert for the Shamrock masks is playing on every TV in the country. Still not seeing how the movie’s working here? Don’t worry, if you actually watch it in all its tedious glory everything’s so slow to happen that you have plenty time to figure out what’s going on.

If she'd flossed regularly this might never have happen

OK, so the long short of it is that the Silver Shamrock company is busy making some very special Halloween masks for all the wee ones out there. The factory is owned by a man named Conal Cochran and the masks he’s making come kitted out with a very special trademark attached to the back that, when activated, kills the children and makes them ooze insects. This is all in some way connected to an ancient Celtic sacrifice that apparently takes place every 3000 years and involves sacrificing a lot of children at a time of planetary alignment. The trademarks are powered by a giant stone that Cochran managed to steal from Stonehenge and cart all the way back to the States without anyone noticing a thing. The stone, along with the bewitched and bedazzled trademarks, will activate themselves on Halloween night (most of the movie takes place in the lead up to Halloween rather than on the actual day) by a specially programmed advert. Dr Dan and Ellie now need to find a way into the factory, find out what’s happening, stop Cochran and not be killed by his army of super advanced robots.

My final thoughts. Having read some reviews I was quite surprised to find that some people out there quite enjoyed this movie. I think the problem for me personally is that the Halloween movies, apart from this one, define what good horror is and they are the standard against which all other movies are measured. Michael Myers terrified me as a child and can still give me nightmares, so to see this is just sad. Whether it could have functioned as a stand alone movie if it didn’t fall into the Halloween franchise is hard to say. To give it some credit, however, despite its complete lack of continuity and irritatingly slow pace it does contain two short scenes from the original Halloween movie in it. Having done that it already has more of an authentic Halloween feel to it than anything Rob Zombie could have hoped to accomplish 🙂

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• A car moving at 1.5 miles an hour can easily crush a man.
• Brandy and surgery go brilliantly together.
• You need a little lower arm strength to rip someone’s skull to pieces.
• Malls will be the death of small Halloween mask shops.
• Motels bring out the sleazy in everyone.
• Security cameras in the 80s were designed to be very loud and very noticeable.
• The local town drunk should be your first port of call when trying to snoop for information.
• Children frequently go trick or treating way up in the hills surrounding a major city.

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH TRAILER

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Plague Town

Year of Release: 2008
Genre: Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 4.8 / 10
Level of Awful: Low

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Welcome to Plague Town, adult population +- 20, bat-shit crazy children 1000+. Rather than being on my usual mission to watch awful movies I decided to give this one a viewing because I felt like a little break from the normal absurdity and I’d heard some good things about the movie. For the most part those things were right, and this is by no means a bad movie. Why I’ve ranked it as ‘Low’ in terms of its Level of Awful is that there’s just that little something that’s missing from it, something I put down to the characters (or, rather, the actors portraying the characters). The problem isn’t that the acting is bad or that the characters don’t interact properly with one another, but rather that there just isn’t any power behind them and for that reason you don’t really connect with them or end up caring what happens to them. That said everything else in this movie is very decent: the kids are genuinely creepy, the kills are creative at times and the atmosphere in general is quite suspenseful. In the end it’s a very watchable but ultimately forgettable movie.

♫ Sisters are doin' it for themselves! ♫

Meet the Monohans, an American family who’ve come to Ireland to discover their ancestral roots. The family is made up of Jerry, the dad with a bad back, Annette, Jerry’s soon to be newer model wife, Jessica, Jerry’s blonde and bitchy eldest daughter, Molly, Jerry’s younger mentally disturbed daughter, and Robin, Jessica’s English boyfriend of 3 days. The purpose of this little holiday was for the girls to get to know Annette better before the wedding day, although neither girl seems to share their father’s interest in making this little family unit function properly. As they wander the beautifully scenic Irish countryside they meet up with an old man digging a grave, who takes an instant shining to Molly. Not interested in the advances of an 80-year-old the family decides to find their own way back to the road where, along the way, fights are had, tantrums are thrown and people walk off into the dewy afternoon in a bitter attempt to show that this holiday is by no means fun. This becomes a problem when everyone spends so much time looking for Jessica that they miss the last bus back to town, and things start to become very creepy when the sun goes down.

Book club was just getting weirder and weirder as the night progressed...

Something is very wrong with the children in this seemingly idyllic Irish hamlet and 14 years ago the whole town went to hell. For a while it seems the town had been suffering a series of abnormal births leading the women of the town to produce horrifically deformed children. Convinced that this is the work of the Devil the local vicar has taken to shooting the children as soon as they are born in an attempt to keep Satan at bay. It all goes wrong one night when a new father decides that enough is enough and that the children can no longer be blamed and he kills the vicar and from there it seems that the town’s women continued to give birth to their little precious monstrosities. Back in the present and all grown up the children have been raised on an odd mixture of Catholicism and being allowed to kill any out of towners they come across, something that they do very well with a delightfully creepy giggle.

"You have such a friendly face..."

Unaware of the oddities surrounding them in the woods our family decides to take shelter in an abandoned car that they find on the outskirts of town. Several more hissy fits are thrown and one by one people leave to go and find a telephone, leaving Molly and Annette in the car. Unfortunately the children aren’t the only thing that the group needs to be careful of since the older and unmutated generation of people in this town have plans of their own: wanting to keep their families safe but also wanting to rid the town of the birth defects they capture anyone they find from the outside, referring to them as ‘clean seeds’. Effectively what they have going on is a breeding program that aims to rid the town of its problems by introducing clean, fresh blood into the mixture. Understandably not everyone is keen on this idea and must be taken by force when they become unwilling sexual partners. The ultimate in creepiness here is Rosemary, a good girl with taped on eyes and a propensity to hang people from trees by their noses. As the children are summoned to the attack Molly must find a way to save her family and try and get them out of this little hamlet of hell before it’s too late.

We saw it in Wicked Little Things and we’ve seen it here as well: children are evil and best avoided 🙂

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• You can’t tell someone that they’re interesting after knowing them for only 3 days.
• It’s never too cold to have sex outside.
• Sisters get jealous when one is allowed to spontaneously hallucinate while the other isn’t.
• Just because a man shoots your boyfriend in the face with a shotgun it doesn’t mean that he wants to hurt you.
• You should try and sleep when creepy babies are crying in the woods.
• Mutant children are very shy. That’s why they kill and eat people.
• Some people are of the opinion that a cup of tea is the perfect cure for being shot in the face.

PLAGUE TOWN TRAILER

Wicked Little Things

Year of Release: 2006
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 5 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

In my journey to watch some of the most horrifying horrors ever made, I occasionally manage to lay my hands on something that doesn’t look very promising but turns out to be quite enjoyable. To this end I have decided to start a ‘Surprise!’ Level of Awful for movies that beat the odds and managed to come being rather fun to watch. I rate that if we can celebrate the bad, we might as well celebrate the good as well and that is why I have chosen to begin this category with Wicked Little Things. Zombies are my favourite niche in the horror genre and, in my opinion, there is nothing more frightening than children. So combine the two and watch as zombie children hunt down person after person and you have a fantastically, gory treat on your hands!

Sometimes a rabbit foot alone isn't gonna do the trick...

This tale of pint-sized terror begins in 1913 in Addytown, a town largely built on the mining industry. Over at the Carlton mine the owner uses immigrant children as his slave labour, sending them into the little nooks and crannies that regular miners can’t get into. As with many mines that operate outside the legal system and aren’t overly concerned with safety an explosion goes off and a large portion of the mine caves in and many of the children are buried alive. With the mine’s closed the town slowly became deserted but, for those that remained, the children’s deaths became a part of local legend and at night you can still see them walking around in the woods. This is the town that Karen Tunny and her two daughters Sarah (Scout Taylor-Compton from Rob Zombie’s attack on Halloween) and Emma are moving to after the death of Karen’s husband following a prolonged battle with a terminal illness. Karen has no money and few possessions, but fortunately her husband left her a creepy old house filled with evil-looking toys out in the middle of nowhere right near the old Carlton mine…

Children aren't the picky eaters you may think they are...

As normally happens in this kind of situation Sarah, the teenager, manages to find a group of rebels that she can hang out with and Emma develops a not-so imaginary friend named Mary. As Karen attempts to bring the old abandoned home into better order the children begin to make their presence more known, especially when they attack Sarah and her friends while they are out hotboxing in the middle of a field. Thrown into this mixture is William Carlton, the last surviving descendant of the original owner of the Carlton mine. As he moves through Addytown buying up more and more of the property for development the children’s attacks become more and more violent and Emma’s imaginary friend begins to take Emma away for longer and longer periods of time. With the help of Mr Hanks, a local who has been sacrificing animals to the cannibalistic children in an attempt to keep them under control, Karen must attempt to save her daughters and herself from the ever-angrier group of ghostly children and try to find out why they are so angry and what it will take to make them rest in peace before the few remaining inhabitants of Addytown land up being a very undercooked burger meal for the children.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED:

• Children are amazingly competent with sticks of dynamite.
• Moving your children to a derelict old house near haunted forest after the death of their father is a great way to cheer them up.
• Teenagers have radar when it comes to finding other teenagers with weed on them.
• Every town has a group of 3 teenagers, 2 boys and 1 girl, just in case another girl needs an instant boyfriend.
• Little girls’ imaginary friends inevitably turn out to be some sort of ghostly apparition hell-bent on spilling blood.
• Burnt and rotten dolls are the customary gift of a ghost zombie to a normal girl.
• Creepy houses built next to creepy woods near an abandoned mine where dozens of children died are apparently prime property.
• Property development is a far more important endeavour than trying to stop your crew from being eaten.
• Any supernatural mystery can be solved provided you have a folktale and a box of old photos to work with.

WICKED LITTLE THINGS TRAILER

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