1313: Cougar Cult Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 1.7 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

There are some movies out there that make you want to offer your soul to the devil if it meant getting a slight reprieve from it. There are other movies, however, that the devil himself wouldn’t have, and 1313: Cougar Cult just happens to be one of those. The reasons behind choosing to watch it were numerous – I wanted to watch it because I love Linnea Quigley, I wanted Tropical Mary to watch it to see if even her gay sensibilities could withstand it, but most of all I wanted to watch it without warning the Occult Specialist what it was about and see his facial reactions. While those were funny as hell, it still wasn’t enough to make watching this movie a worthwhile endeavour. Tropical Mary summed it up best: either give us more movie or give us more porn, but don’t leave us in this purgatory where we’re neither entertained nor turned on.

This one looks like he’s missing a chromosome.

Three sisters, affectionately dubbed Overbite Edwina, Flashpoints Victoria and Forever-Lost-Thong Clara, own a gorgeous mansion in some or other unspecified opulent neighbourhood. As three older sisters living together are prone to doing these cougars are on the lookout for young, buff men to help… um… service their needs. By that I of course mean cleaning the pool and cooking them the occasional meal. If a naked, oiled up massage happens then so be it, but it’s hardly a prerequisite for the job. But these aren’t your regular run-of-the-mill MILFy cougars, oh no. These gals are a coven of blood-thirsty witch cougars. They need their young man to feed on / become their mates / offer as sacrifices to their omnipotent feline goddess Calabast. I’m assuming Calabast is the Egyptian Bastet‘s Californian cousin, but I could be entirely wrong.

A 70s disco party is about the break out…

After eating their last pool boy the cougars need to bring in a little fresh meat. Enter Coopersmith, Darwin and Rufus. Each one delectable in their own unique way, they’re only here because they want to earn some money doing a summer job. This will involve undignified levels of shirtlessness, obscenely long shower scenes and unparalleled scenes of the boys sleep-fondling themselves. Occasionally the cougars will be thrown in for good measure, but they seem rather secondary to the tighty whitey-ness of the rest of the movie. There’s some glitter, a candle and questionable cougar effects thrown into the mixture, but all this movie really is is an excuse to watch somewhere between three and six men rubbing themselves along a bed for more than half of it.

So the $1 million budget didn’t go into the special effects?

According to my research the movie was shot in only three days. Believe me, it shows! When you’re not watching young men gyrating in ways that would make Madonna uncomfortable, you’re watching scenes of the Scream Queens that have already happened at least 3 times before. Words cannot actually describe the awfulness of this movie, but if you’re in the mood to see JUST HOW BAD z-cinema can be, then this is the perfect movie to watch. If nothing else, watch it to see the terror in the guys’ eyes, the acne on their faces and their various oddly placed nipples.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Nipples make jets of water go plume.
• Straight guys regularly exchange massaging tips by massaging each other whilst being virtually naked.
• You don’t need soap to have an intensive, all-body wash down.
• This movie proves that some actors don’t have breakout roles, they have come out roles.
• You can only feel a person’s aura if you stand behind them while they’re showering.
• You only need one candle to summon a demon hell goddess.
• Fairy dust works perfectly well as an agent for possessing a person’s soul.

1313: COUGAR CULT TRAILER

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100th Review: Bikini Bloodbath

Year of Release: 2006
Genre:  Horror / Comedy
IMDB Rating: 3.3 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 3 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

It’s a special moment here at the B-Horror Blog 🙂 I’ve been doing this for just under a year now and this is my 100th review. To mark this special occasion I knew I had to go back to b-movie basics; I needed a movie that was not only bad but, in the tradition of true b-horror movies, was made with no budget, people who couldn’t act and had many, many breasts in it. Bikini Bloodbath just sounded like it would fit all of the above criteria, and boy did it ever. When the opening credits state that it was written and directed by ‘Who the Fuck Cares’ you just know it’s going to be bad. But it’s the good kind of bad in that it’s mindless and daft and you just watch the screen and marvel and the stupidity of the characters as they parade around in their bikinis trying not to be killed while keeping their blood alcohol content as high as possible.

Yeah, sure you are.

So we begin our bikini-laden misadventure at the local high school for late-20-somethings. All the girls are part of the school’s volleyball team and are busy getting in their final practice while being gently molested by their lesbian coach. With practice over our group of vapid females head off to the shower to wash one another off and throw used tampons at Suzy, the girl no one likes for reasons unknown. In amongst all of the scrubbing of backs and intense breast hygiene the girls decide that they should all get together that night for a final sleepover before they graduate highschool. Once they go off to college they worry that they won’t see one another again, so they really want to make this evening count and have many happy memories to guide them through the bleak years of adulthood. Only problem with all this? There’s a killer on the loose. The chef from one of the town’s favourite eateries lost it and killed most of his staff before making a run for it and is still on the loose. We know he’s close because he manages to kill one of the girls while she’s walking through the woods to get home. So let’s recap: half a dozen drunk, perky females in a house on their own in nothing but their bikinis and a killer on the loose. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong here…

A very lesbian death scene.

Not to be outdone by the women the football jocks decide that they’re gonna have their own party, and what unfolds is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen in a movie. Clearly the area isn’t rich in the more common manly jock that we are familiar with from other movies, so instead we have a more special group of people to deal with. Most of them also appear to be at that stage in their life where they want to experiment with another guy just to see what it would be like. Twister is played, streamers are strewn, ice cream is eaten, the football coach fondles a few of his players and really uncoordinated dances are danced. The girls are pretty much up to the same thing, except they also have daiquiris and are in nothing but their bikinis. Two of the guys decide that they’ve had enough of being groped by their team mates for one evening and head over to the girl’s party for a different kind of fun.

A bible and a big stick will surely defeat this menace!

The boys’ attempts at seducing the girls is brought to an abrupt halt, however, when our killer rocks up on the scene. It all began with a throat slashing and quickly deteriorated into an evening of bloodshed as the chef makes his way through the scantily clad little group. His job is made all the easier owing to a complete lack of common sense on his victims’ part. The first issue the group must contend with is Suzy, who was not invited to the party, and as such the other girls don’t feel she has any right to either be there or contribute to the escape plan. The second issue that needs to be dealt with is when one of the girls offers to make a run for it and go get the police she insists she must make a stop off on the way to grab some tacos. This inevitably slows down the rescue process. The third and final issue is that, lacking any idea of how to make it out of the house alive (although the killer is in the house), the group instead decides to make more daiquiris and get hammered. This slows down their reaction time when they need to do battle with the killer. All in all, it was a very interesting party to be at.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Women will clap for virtually anything.
• Women enjoy being sexually harassed by their lesbian gym coaches.
• Sometimes walking through a cemetery and then some dark woods is the quickest way to get home.
• Homeless people smell like cheese.
• If you weren’t invited to the party you can’t be allowed in to be saved from a killer.
• If you weren’t invited to the party you can’t contribute to any plan that would involve saving everyone.
• The Bible can be used as a weapon against a murderer.
• Pro Crack Whore is now a viable career choice.

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Chain Letter

Year of Release: 2010
Genre:  Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 4 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0.5 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

This movie made me terribly sad. As a reviewer it really breaks my heart to sit through a movie and watch as the director just loses more and more control over his creation. Some movies may miss the mark and some movies may forget to have things happen, but this movie just didn’t know how to end. Poor little creature. My psychic horror senses tell me that the director started off with a great plan, but as the story tried to develop itself the movie just got away from him and when it hit the 90 minute runtime mark he threw his hands up and said, “Right! Stop the cameras, we’re ending the movie here!” There’s no great character development, there’s no real insight into who the killer is or why he’s doing what he’s doing and, because the movie just ends, there’s no kind of solution offered. Plus there’s no real suspense at any point that may have kept this little train on the tracks. That said, it is a fun watch if you like to see the many creative ways that people can be killed with an excessive number of chains!

I do like it when my death threats come and they've been tastefully put together.

Being one of those movies that centres around high school kids a number of rules apply: we have jocks, we have sluts, we have one clever brunette and one dorky younger brother. Also, everyone’s well into their 20s. The dorky younger brother just happens to be Zack Young from Desperate Housewives. Whilst playing an intense game of WoW he receives a beautifully put together chain letter that tells him to send it on to 5 people within 24 hours. Since his sister Rachael needs to use the computer she throws him off and, believing in the immense power of chain letters, decides to forward it on but only includes 4 recipients. When Neil (Zack Young’s alter ego in this movie) finally manages to get his computer back he notices her mistake and adds her as the 5th recipient and sends the chain letter along.

Primitive eyewear was not a pretty thing.

Here’s where things start to go bloodshedingly wrong for our semi-group of 20-something highschool kids. You see while Rachael had sent the chain letter onto her friends the e-mail itself was coming from Neil’s account and, since he’s horribly unpopular, none of the friends take it very seriously and delete the e-mail. This is where our first victim Johnny Jones comes into the picture. After enjoying a nice little shot of growth hormones and a 3 minute gym session he goes to get some water. While drinking at the fountain he finds his head being repeatedly rammed into its delicate metal features and loses some teeth in the process. He is then dragged to another corner of the gym where our killer gets to work with his many, many chains. Like cooking, brutal slayings require a decent recipe: first of all you handcuff the victim to the chains. Once done you truss the victim up and lift them off the ground with some more chains to ensure that the arms pop out the sockets. You then slash their Achille’s heel, making it impossible for them to escape. You then take EVEN MORE CHAINS and proceed to grind their face into a smooth, delicate paste before making your escape into the night. In case you missed it: lots of chains. Chain Letter. What a clever little killer we have with us.

Something tells me a butterfly isn't gonna pop out of this thing...

In amongst all of this are a few ancillary characters of which the most important is Jessie. She’s good-looking but she’s brunette and occasionally wears glasses so you know she’s the brains of the outfit. As the body count shuffles a little higher she decides to enlist the help of Neil and her friend Michael to try and stop the murders. For backup they have Detective Crenshaw trying to work out what’s going on back at Police HQ. Of course nobody’s better equipped to figure out who a psychopath is than a highschool girl taking a class in the dangers of technology and Jessie, despite already forwarding the chain letter on, tells everyone to send it to her again so that she can do some detective work of her own. With the aid of her glasses and Google she manages to figure out that the chain letter has a virus attached to it that infects cellphones and computers and allows the killer to use them as GPS units. This makes hunting his victims down much easier than in the good old days where killers had to lurk behind bushes for hours in the vague hope of a victim crossing their path. It’s then up to Jessie, Neil and Michael to save the day blah blah blah stop the killer blah blah blah redeem mankind’s belief in the joys of technology blah blah blah.

Chain Letter isn’t good, but it’s the good kind of not good that you can at least cock your head at in confusion and have a good laugh at.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Schools are a combination of socialising and football games. At most students may have 1 class a day.
• Right after water and food a phone is right up there with the basic things needed for a human to survive.
• Men have enormous engines put in their cars in the hopes of enticing gorgeous women.
• Killers who use an  excessive amount of chains are helping to keep an entire industry alive.
• High school kids never have parents that live with them.
• The phrase ‘why don’t you come get me?’ should not be thrown around lightly.
• Policemen on the phone sound a lot like telemarketers.
• You don’t put glasses on to read – you put glasses on to think.

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You Broke It: Urban Legends – Bloody Mary

Year of Release: 2005
Genre:  Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 4.2 / 10
Level of Awful: Low
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Welcome to the second instalment of You Broke It: 3 Trilogies That Went Awry. Today we’ll be looking at the third movie in the Urban Legends franchise, Bloody Mary. I chose this movie because it fit many of the same criteria as I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer in that, while the first two Urban Legends movies were not directly linked, this movie takes the story down a completely different track and completely abandons its predecessors’ slasher elements in favour of being a ghost story. I would also like to state from the get-go that, despite the title, the Bloody Mary myth is used very loosely and only as a means of justifying adding this movie to the franchise.

Blink and you lose!

To begin our story we need to go back in time to the summer of ’69, albeit a far more tragic version than the one Bryan Adams has been describing for all these years. It’s the local high school’s homecoming celebration (admittedly, living in South Africa, I have no clue how homecoming works or what it’s for) and Mary Banner just feels like the most important girl in the whole school. The alpha jock has decided to dump his bitch of a girlfriend Dawn and asks Mary to the dance, proving that every now and then the plain girl can get the guy. He even manages to hook Mary’s 2 best friends Gina and Grace up with two of his buddies so that they can all be a matching set. If only good things like this did happen to the plain girl. Seems like the boys and Dawn aren’t happy about the fact that Mary and Co. don’t worship the ground the walk on so they decide to drug the three girls and play a little prank on them. Mary, not having any of it, runs away and tries to find help. Unfortunately for her she lands up cornered in the basement and, while trying to escape, she trips and knocks her head on the table, killing her. Not wanting to go to jail the alpha jock takes her body and hides it in a trunk, where it has stayed ever since.

Yeah, poor hygiene will lead to things like this...

Flash forward to 2005 and history’s busy repeating itself, just this time it has the use of modern technology. Samantha works for the school newspaper and recently published an article debating whether footballers should be given good grades simply because they know how to run around a field and throw a ball to one another. The article is accompanied by a very unflattering photograph of three jocks in particular. When homecoming rolls round Sam and her two friends decide that they don’t want to go and instead stage a slumber party. The boys, upset at how their vast levels of intelligence have been insulted by Sam’s article, rock up in the middle of the night, give the girls some chloroform and stick them in a room in the old abandoned paper mill. Unlike the events of the summer of ’69, however, all of the girls make it out alive and, the scare aside, seem none the worse for wear and continue on with their lives. This is when things start to get a little bit strange.

Yes. Yes they can.

Having shouted out the words ‘Bloody Mary’ three times during the slumber party (although not into a mirror or anything even mildly reflective) Sam and her friends have somehow managed to invoke the spirit of Mary Banner, and she’s pissed. Seeing this turn of events and Sam’s similar situation Mary decides that now is the time to take her revenge and kill those people involved in Sam’s kidnapping. It starts off with a simple homage to Aerobicide where one of the jocks is fried to a crisp in a sun tanning bed but gradually the attacks become more sinister and Mary’s ghost becomes angrier and angrier. What Sam and her twin brother David need to find out is why Mary has come back and why she has chosen this as her method of seeking revenge. With the help of Grace they will seek to uncover the truth about what happened all those years ago, but they will not seek to find out how Grace, a heavy stoner who hasn’t been outside her house in years, manages to get groceries and daily copies of the newspaper.

Some final thoughts on the matter. Like I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer this isn’t a terrible movie and, had it been released as a stand-alone film, would probably have been reasonably entertaining. It suffers from the fact that it tries to force the urban legend angle where it really doesn’t fit into the plot. The reference to Bloody Mary herself is only used so that the movie can in some way try to fit in with its predecessors and the murders using urban legends is in no way justified or explained. The use of newspaper clippings referring to the second Urban Legends movie, as well as a few recycled scenes, also fail to make this in any way a part of a continuous narrative. Whoever’s idea this was should hang their head in shame (just a little bit) for trying to sell a ghost story by piggy backing on two slasher films and hoping that nobody would notice. Because we did.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• To spike a hippie chick’s drink you need A LOT of rohypnol.
• Girls who assert their independence and opinions are doomed to a lonely, single life.
• Pillow fights are a great way for friends to sort out their issues.
• Some people just don’t see the funny side of being drugged and locked in a room.
• Alpha jocks can convince lesser jocks to do anything.
• Anyone who uses dial-up internet is high on crack.
• Ghosts always start out with a plan but God help you they devise a new one later on.

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The Slaughterhouse Massacre

Year of Release: 2005
Genre:  Horror
IMDB Rating: 2.5 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 2 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

I’ve watched many a bad movie in my time, but rarely do you come across a movie as sneaky as this one. I actually saw this one a few years ago, quite a bit before I started this blog. I thought of reviewing it when I just started everything up but couldn’t remember it well enough so I left it. One day is one day and I’m getting ready for a b-movie evening when I come across a movie called Sickle in one of my little boxes of discount horror and decided to give it a watch. Turned out to be this movie under a different name. Sneaky little hobbitses! Unlike a fine wine I actually think this one got worse with time, but let me first describe it to you and then you can decide whether you’d want to give this one a spin.

It's never like they describe it in the Mills & Boon novels...

As with any slasher we need a little back story to get us going so we first need to go back 10 years in time. A rather slutty girl has decided to drag her boyfriend out to the strangely remote slaughterhouse to have a little fun. For some or other reason the idea of having sex right next to the spot where chickens are de-feathered is just too damn arousing for her and her purple velvet thong to resist so, despite some objections from the boyfriend, they make their way inside anyway. Of course, just because the slaughterhouse is out in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean that it’s abandoned; if b-movies have taught me anything it’s that the exact opposite is usually the case. This is the slaughterhouse of Marty Sickle (apt name), a man who doesn’t take kindly to college kids having sex near his chicken bath. To take care of the problem he stabs the guy in the back while the two are going at it and then has his way with the girl. The girl then summons every jock she can find to lynch Marty and get back at him for what he did. The legend of Marty Sickle then passes into local folklore…

Lives will be lost, plastic heads will roll...

More to the point the story makes its way into the minds of a group of dumb jocks and even dumber bimbos. These are your typical first year college students who are somewhere in their mid-30s but trying to look a lot younger than they actually are. Feeling that good grades aren’t all that necessary in life they decide to have a party before some of them go on to the old slaughterhouse for some silly fun. What this movie then tries to teach you is that all you need for there to be a party are a few loose women prepared so experiment with their sexuality in front of a group of strangers. This is just as well, because the party doesn’t have an awful lot more going for it (who keeps a TV on the floor?) After panning around the room for about 20 minutes the director eventually decided that it was time to get on with the main point of the movie and it’s off to the slaughterhouse we go!

I had a similar look on my face after watching this movie.

Much like the tale of Bloody Mary the legend goes that if you go to the exact spot where Marty Sickle died and mutter a little rhyme a few times his ghost will come back from the other side and go after anyone who dares to enter his old domain. This is jumping the gun a little since there is a very crucial point that needs to be made about this movie. Filmed on a budget of $250 000 there clearly wasn’t a lot of money available for a decent space to actually do the filming. To counteract this the actors move from room to room and scene to scene at an agonizingly slow rate. When they actually do summon the ghost of Marty Sickle back they even try to escape from him at the same rate. The only reason that they don’t die very quickly is that Sickle himself moves at a snail’s pace, but to be fair he has been dead for 10 years so the others really don’t have an excuse. The question of course is that when you yourself walk like a geriatric and you’re being chased by a ghost whose speed and stealth are the equivalent of a pregnant hippo what are the chances of this little group of friends and lovers making it out of this situation alive?

Apart from the horrifyingly slow pace that this movie moves at I’m glad I (re)watched it because it was enough to give the Breast-O-Meter a good try out without overloading it on its first go 🙂

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• It is possible to smoke weed for 48 hours straight and feel very few side effects.
• Women who can’t find their boyfriends routinely go into occupied bathrooms to see if he’s there.
• The police still refer to weed as ‘wacky tobacky’.
• Ghosts are remarkably solid.
• After your boyfriend sacrifices himself so that you can escape the best plan is to run back into the haunted building.
• A combination of wearing silk underwear and being pregnant virtually guarantees your survival during a ghost attack.
• The number of deaths resulting from bleeding ankles is tragically underestimated.

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