Raptor Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2001
Genre: Horror / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 2.6 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 2 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

There are few things in life that can guarantee as much fun as an early 2000s movie with cheap animatronic dinosaurs brought back to life by a mad scientist, Eric Roberts and all of his self-importance in the lead role, and a sex scene that we could have sworn was on a perpetual loop. I present to you, dear reader, Raptor, perhaps one of the most glorious achievements of b-cinema I’ve seen yet. I gathered my most of my elite team of movie watchers for this one: Tropical Mary, Stygian Mole, and our newest recruit, Plaas Meisie. There are no words to describe the sheer awesomeness and cheesiness of this movie, but if you’re a fan of b-horror you absolutely NEED to watch this as soon as is humanly possible.

Officer Mom Jeans and Black Cop consult on the case…

As is often the case in these movies, we’re thrown into the middle of some little town in the middle of absolutely nowhere where the most thrilling crime that probably takes place is a little old lady having her dentures stolen. Eric Roberts is the local sheriff, and this gives him the right to practically smear himself with smarmy and then roll around in a vat of self-produced and bottled egotism. Armed with two belts, a pair of mom jeans and a token black deputy, Eric’s ready to find out what happened to those poor drunken teenagers out the middle of the desert – because something ate them up good. Thinking that it was something reasonably standard, like a bear, a cougar or a shark, he’s joined on the investigation by Busty Blonde Animal Control Lady (hereafter referred to simply as ‘Busty’), but she’ll be damned if she knows what killed the kids. Maybe it has something to do with the recent spate of mass-chicken murders happening all along the county’s various highways?

This was just unholy and unnatural…

Over at the Eunice corporation (nominally a chicken manufacturing plant, whatever that may be, and which is still running blue-screen DOS computers by the looks of things), something’s more than a little amiss. There are far too many crazy scientists in would-be berets pushing far too many flashing buttons on control panels for this to be a simple chicken farm. Of course, for the omnivident viewer, we know that the trucks transporting enormous numbers of chickens is simply a cover up – that’s how Eunice Corp. is transporting all of its raptor and t-rex eggs between its different facilities after one of the raptors escaped into the desert. Being a team of maybe four people, however, means that the people at this particular facility aren’t doing a great job keeping track of their genetically re-created little monsters, and more and more are starting to wreak havoc on the little town.

Disco T-Rex is getting down tonight!

For Officer Mom Jeans the problem becomes personal after his sweet, innocent little girl is attacked by one of the raptors after getting it on with a man twice her age and squealing like a little pig while they did it on the back of his pickup truck. But how exactly does one small town sheriff take on a giant company like Eunice Corp.? Infiltration and a Busty sidekick – that’s how.  The two of them are determined to get to the bottom of what’s going on, but there’s a little more going on behind the scenes that they don’t know about. Apparently this whole dinosaur resurrection process originally began as a government military operation for fighting overseas, so they also want in on the action when they realise that their supposedly cancelled project is back online. Can Eric Roberts’ seemingly infinite supply of self-satisfaction conquer the might of an angry, resurrected mother T-Rex? Do silicone boobs move at all? Why are everyone’s intestines in this movie brown? Watch, dear reader, and have all of these questions answered.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• ‘Whatever happened, happened here’ is usually how most police investigations start.
• Deserts can be right quirky creatures sometimes.
• Character enhancement is best done with copious amounts of silicone.
• Surprised raptors shed their toenails like geckos shed their tails.
• If it’s not as intense as black ops, and at least 2 black guys are involved, it classes as dark ops.
• Most companies have emergency spaceship entrances installed in their elevators.
• Clones can be pulled out of thin air and given all the memories of the original person.

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Jersey Shore Shark Attack Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Horror / Action
IMDB Rating: 3.4 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

For anyone that has never set foot in the beautiful city of Cape Town, you’ll never know quite how miserable our winter can be. After 5 months of glorious summer and a very brief autumn when the leaves begin to fall, you’re suddenly lurched into the next 4 months of non-stop cold, wind and, thanks to the wind, rain that comes at you sideways. In this kind of situation, there’s really only one option: hide out at Tropical Mary‘s house with Jersey Shore Shark Attack and wait for the storm to ride itself out. I’m not going to advocate that this movie is any good, because that would be a blatant lie, but for anyone who has had the misfortune of being subjected to MTV’s Jersey Shore then this is an absolute must-watch. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, this movie goes about ripping off a bunch of orange oompa loompas while throwing some albino sharks in for good measure. How could you say no to that?

The country’s brightest young people get together to discuss serious issues.

It’s a tough day down on the Jersey Shore. A tangerine Nooki suspects that her ex-boyfriend Gino ‘The Complication’ Moretti (because, apparently, whenever he’s around, situations with members of the opposite sex become complicated) has been cheating on her (how an ex-boyfriend can cheat on you raises several questions that I couldn’t answer, so I’m just gonna assume it’s a guido thing). Her suspicions are apparently confirmed when we switch to a shot of him in bed in nothing but his boxers whilst a topless female sleeps next to him. He throws her out on the balcony with nothing but a pillow to protect her modesty, but Nooki’s a smart bird and thinks that something’s up when she discovers a lace bra in The Complication’s bed. Things just got complicated.

If we leave it out long enough we can make shark jerky.

You know things are going to go into a bit of a downward spiral whenever Dylan Vox (of Vampire Boys, Aliens VS Avatars and various gay porn movies fame) appears on the scene, and lo and behold there he was in a golf shirt with a popped collar. Now you know that shit’s gonna go down. In an unexpected educational turn I learned that creatures on the Jersey Shore are fiercely territorial, with Vox and his preppy crowd fighting desperately to keep Nooki and her carrot-coloured people on their half of the beach. Through this series of informative events we are introduced to the rest of Nooki’s people: she’s got her pals J-Moni and BJ, while The Complication likes to hang out with Donnie and Paulie Balzac. Before he’s eaten, the boys were also friendly with a guy called JP who, despite being quite regular in size, is constantly referred to as a midget.

I almost got eaten by a shark. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Well, that more or less covers the ‘Jersey Shore’ part of the movie’s title; let us now move on to the actual shark attack. In an attempt to improve the Jersey Shore and attract a more wealthy and classy kind of visitor (hence the growing number of preppy hipsters), the town has begun drilling just off shore. Drilling for what I’m not entirely certain, but it hardly seems all that important. The point is is that the drilling has been sending tsunami-like sound waves out across the bay and colliding with a crystalline cave full of albino sharks. The sharks, who are seemingly very keen listeners, follow these sound waves back to their point of origin. When they arrive at the Shore (keep an eye on them swimming – I’m pretty sure it’s just recycled Sharktopus footage) they begin to eat everyone in sight. It’ll fall to The Complication to defeat the preppies, win Nooki’s love, save the entire Jersey Shore population and defeat the sharks once and for all. Just another day in the life of a guido.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• New in Jersey Shore fashion: Jersey Shorts (kickass butt not included).
• It’s fine to do you, but you should never do it in public.
• Sharks are a lot like whales, just with fins.
• The bigger the vibration, the bigger the shark attack.
• Any semi-capable police station has a well stock armoury right next to its kitchenette.
• Present tense: to drown. Past tense: to drownded.
• Present tense: to drive. Past tense: to drove.

JERSEY SHORE SHARK ATTACK TRAILER

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Arachnoquake Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Sci-Fi / Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.4 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

After the joy that was Piranhaconda and Alien Tornado I felt that Tropical Mary had to be roped in at some point to join in the fun. This one, admittedly, was a mixed bag of tricks. At points it felt strangely competent for a Syfy movie, but at other points was on the brink of embarrassingly amateur. All of that said and done, though, a movie about blind, fire-breathing spiders from the depths of the earth can be nothing but fun. It also brought out a very bizarre mothering instinct in me whenever the baby spiders came streaking onto the screen; there was just something incredibly sweet about their little squeals…

AMERICA!

It’s a beautiful day in New Orleans: the sun is out, the hookers are packing up from a hard night’s work and the remnants of Katrina have just about been cleared away. Katelynn and her kids, Justin and Anabell, are about to take a tour of the historic city while husband Charlie drives a female baseball team back home. A small earthquake struck the city the previous night and has left small portals to hell littering the streets, but this isn’t enough to dissuade anyone from undertaking a little sight-seeing. Mom and kids are being taken around the city by bus driver Paul who, although being threatened with death by his father Roy should he screw this up, is clearly very hung over. That’s nothing a quick adrenaline rush can’t take care of though, which he and the other passengers get when spiders ranging from a few centimetres to Irish Wolfhound start coming out of the ground.

Mama!

Now these are particularly nasty little spiders. They’re very fast, they use echo location to find you, they’re very good jumpers, they lay their eggs in people, they drain your eye juices for food and shoot fire at you when they’re pissed. Paul gets the group away from this particular lot of spiders (despite being seemingly unable to identify exactly what it is he’s driving), but to be honest Paul’s a bit useless and it doesn’t take long for the spiders to catch up to the group. Insect repellent doesn’t do an awful lot to slow them down, although a tin of canned peaches to the forehead will take out a little one. Deciding that running is a better option, Paul takes those members of the tour group that weren’t eaten back to his father and sister Petra to see if they can come up with a new and better survival plan.

Hijacking Spiders from the Centre of the Earth.

It was at this point that Tropical Mary thought it would be a brilliant move if the bigger spiders grabbed a few of the smaller ones and used them to do jazz hands, but sadly this never happened. Instead, through a series of unfortunate twists and turns, the group finds themselves running through a forest trying to save themselves. Turns out escaping by boat isn’t a viable escape plan when the spiders are part Jesus and can run on water. Why subterranean spiders would evolve the ability to walk on water is another story, but this is bringing logic into a situation where none is warranted. The army’s called in to try and eradicate the problem, but Katelynn (because she’s an 8th grade biology teacher) cuts one of the spiders up and realises that they don’t have brains. If that’s true, what exactly is controlling the hordes that are busy rampaging through New Orleans, and will the army be able to kill it?

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• It’s never a good idea to be drinking and tour guiding.
• 30-year-old men can’t run to their dads every time they’re being attacked by giant, fire-breathing spiders.
• Certain spider species make Hanna-Barbera sounds when they fly through the air.
• People native to New Orleans are biologically incapable of stepping on a spider.
• Any rudimentary knowledge of high school biology qualifies you to lead a military campaign to eradicate giant insects.
• New Orleans albino spiders are huge fans of mariachi music. This explains their highly developed vocal chords.

ARACHNOQUAKE TRAILER

Piranhaconda

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Horror / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Where would we b-movie fans be without the Syfy channel? Stuck with the Asylum I guess, but that’s entirely beside the point. You know when they announce a new movie that it’s going to be a complete cheese factory of goodness and, whilst it doesn’t make me want to re-evaluate my opinion that the golden age of Syfy movies has past, Piranhaconda doesn’t disappoint. It raises so many questions that otherwise wouldn’t cross your mind: what exactly is swimming in the rivers of Hawaii? When exactly does a person become so blonde that they should be given a legal guardian? Do you really get b-movie groupies? And, of course, the question that stuck out in my head: who the hell would sing this movie’s theme song? Jasmin Poncelet, that’s who. Don’t worry, I haven’t heard of her either, but good on her for having the balls to do it anyway. Not afraid to rip itself to shreds, Piranhaconda is one of the best times you can have with bad CGI, a group of random mercenaries and a posse of scantily clad females.

The manual doesn’t REALLY cover this kind of situation.

So we’re somewhere in the middle of Hawaii with Jasmin Poncelet singing her little lungs out when a helicopter loaded with Prof. Lovegrove and two soon-to-be-eaten students descends from the sky. Lovegrove, a world-renowned herpetologist, is on the lookout for a nest of strange eggs. Now feels like a good time to break it to you that the title is misleading and the creature contains no piranha or anaconda. If this disappoints you, take solace in the fact that it’s a Polynesian snake demon. Feel better? Good. So Lovegrove finds one of the nests laden with many eggs. Intent on revealing the creature to the world he bags one of the eggs up in a plastic corn flakes container to take back to the helicopter. As one might expect the mummy piranhaconda took a while to shove that egg out and isn’t about to just let some silly human run off with it. Defying the laws of space she emerges from a body of water that couldn’t possibly hide something her size, eats three out of the four people in attendance while Lovegrove runs off into the forest with the egg.

These creatures are notoriously lax when it comes to flossing.

We now switch to another part of the forest where a group of scantily clad females are being stalked by a lunatic with a meat cleaver. For a moment I thought another movie had leaked into this one, but it turns out that we’re actually following a film crew around while they make the third installment in a slasher series that I’m fairly sure is poking fun at the Friday the 13th and Scream franchises. It’s here we meet Jack and Rose (if this is some strange homage to Titanic, I don’t get it, but I’m just gonna run with star struck lovers in the face of adversity), a stuntman and a script writer respectively. The two clearly have a thing for one another but, being the gentleman that he is, Jack just won’t let the movie’s slutty star Kimmy go without a thorough sun tan lotioning. This irritates Rose so much that she’s gonna tie that sarong so tight blood won’t flow to anything below the waist. Intense oiling up in the Hawaiian sun, however, is about to become the least of this little group’s problems.

In the cutthroat world of human hunting, it’s often piranhaconda against piranhaconda.

Not from the piranhaconda, mind you, but rather from a random group of mercenaries that have also been running around the Hawaiian jungle. They’ve already managed to kidnap the professor and now manage to grab a hold of Rose, Kimmy and the movie’s director as well. Jack and his explosives buddy have managed to make a daring escape into the undergrowth that took splitting up, running frantically from side to side and tripping over every piece of wood they could find to get right. When they miraculously manage to make their way back to the road they think it best not to go back into town and alert the proper authorities and settle on the decidedly more manly method of taking on a hostage situation with no weapons other than a bag of plastic explosives. But, dear viewer, let us not forget the angry mother piranhaconda in hot pursuit of her missing egg and the many humans she’s prepared to nom through to get it back…

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Piranhacondas are known to secure their eggs with anti-theft ooze.
• Nobody truly appreciates how difficult it is for a b-actress to be a sex bomb at 5 in the morning.
• $50 and some spare change is enough cash to secure a university professor’s safe release from a hostage situation.
• Mercenaries just prowl Hawaii’s forests kidnapping any random fool who walks by.
• Bands of rogue Hawaiian mercenaries are really just would-be directors and cameramen.
• Sometimes all a b-movie actress’s career needs is a hostage situation and threats of a violent death.
• Men sweat like pigs, sluts sweat like pound puppies.

PIRANHACONDA TRAILER

Piranha 3DD Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Comedy / Horror
IMDB Rating: 4.4 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: Off the charts

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Let me start off this review by stating the obvious: aaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!! I’m a great fan of the Piranha movies. I liked them when they were eating people in the 70s, I liked them when they learned to fly in the 80s, and I even thought that Piranha 3D was a lot of fun. This was not fun. Not even having Tropical Mary to watch it with me could undo the damage that this movie inflicts on a person. Made to cater to the absolute lowest common denominator, Piranha 3DD takes all the things that should make it fun (boobs, a water park and thousands of ferocious man-eating fish) and somehow manages to make it both horribly painful and tremendously boring to watch. If you’re a really randy 14-year-old boy who hasn’t quite figured out how internet porn works yet, then this is probably the movie for you. Anyone else, steer the hell away from this one.

It’s an underwater Christmas Tree decoration farm.

A whole year has passed since the tragic events at Lake Victoria. The lake has had every conceivable poison dumped into it to eradicate its piranha population and the whole area has been declared a disaster zone. Captain Obvious’ wife does a little voice over work as a news caster reporting on the incident, asking the audience that if this tragedy could happen here, could it happen somewhere else? It’s as though God himself heard this question and, to spite us little mortals, takes us to another lake where two farmers are trying to drag the corpse of a cow out of the water. The corpse is littered with piranha eggs falling out of every possible orifice and these are released when the farmers accidentally blow up the corpse. After a quick snack on the farmers the piranhas begin their journey to discover a new source of food.

Taking the concept of getting down on your knees for Jesus to a whole other level.

Spending time watching farmers and dead cows, of course, leaves us dangerously without gratuitous shots of naked females, something that this movie simply will not stand for, so we are now taken to a water park called Big Wet. Big Wet is owned by a man named Chet who plans to fill the park with water certified strippers and a gated-off adult swimming pool mainly aimed at those wanting to participate in a quick orgy. Maddy, Chet’s stepdaughter, isn’t overly taken by this idea, but she’s not the majority shareholder in the park so she just has to shut the hell up. When two of her friends mysteriously disappear and she herself is attacked by a group of piranhas in a nearby lake she takes it upon herself to find out what the chances of them rocking up at the water park are. We’re told something about sulphur dioxide in the lakes and the chlorine in the pools and suddenly it’s obvious where the fish will be heading next.

This speaks for itself.

Of course the chlorine in the pool is the least of their worries when it becomes apparent that Chet has discovered a better way to fill the pools in the park. Why pay for water when you can drain an underground lake? Maddy points out the obvious piranha problem that these underground lakes have, for which she is forcibly dragged away by her policeman ex-boyfriend who’s been taking bribes from Chet. After some poor homages to A Nightmare on Elm Street and Planet Terror, as well as a piranha eating a man’s penis, the park is suddenly inundated with these little fuckers. David Hasselhoff proves to be of little use in fighting the fish off, and the only thing that temporarily slows the little buggers down are the drains in the pool (which appear to be more powerful than the vacuum in outer space). By this point it all becomes such a confusing mess you couldn’t give two shits who makes it and who doesn’t; you’re just so busy praying to the heavens above that the end credits will roll soon.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Confession before fornication is a sign of a good Christian lady.
• Being a 49% shareholder in anything means you should sleep in a prison cell.
• ‘Fade to lake’ is never going to take off as an effective way to move between scenes.
• You really don’t want to know the things a young man can do with a water pump.
• A woman’s vagina is a perfect incubator for fish eggs.
• You deserve a Darwin Award if you can’t get out of a paddling pool.

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