S.N.U.B!

Year of Release: 2010
Genre: Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 3.1 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0.5 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

I know I say this quite often when I start off my reviews, but I feel that this movie warrants me saying it again: running this blog has forced me to come into contact with some very strange films, but S.N.U.B! takes the really bizarre biscuit. And before you think I might be overreacting, I would like you to consider what I believe to be the train of thought that went into making it: take people who look like, act like, and have the social sophistication of the cast of The Only Way Is Essex, tell them to do their best impersonation of the cast from Downton Abbey, and then put them in a situation that is more than just a little reminiscent of the plot from James Herbert’s Domain (minus the giant mutated rats). This, essentially, is what you will be dedicating the next 85 minutes of your life to should you decide to watch this movie. Now, that isn’t to say that it isn’t worth watching just to see how it all pans out, but I do like people to be prepared before they go walking off blindly into something.

Compact atomic bombs – for the nuclear terrorist on the go.

We begin our misdirected adventure by following a group of soldiers out on an anti-terrorism assignment who are being hotly pursued by an under-prepared orchestra. The government has received word that someone might have planted a 20-megaton nuclear bomb somewhere in down town London (because it’s dead easy to just carry one of those around on you), and these highly untrained men are going to do their best to save the population, should the threat prove to be real. It turns out the threat is real, and the soldiers discover the bomb hidden inside a tiny metal briefcase. They bring in their most panicky and shaky member of staff to try and diffuse the bomb, but he’s never come across something like this before (again, because people don’t usually just leave nuclear weapons lying around, I imagine training with them is a little bit tricky), so he cuts the wrong wire. KABOOM!!! There goes London, all in one giant mushroom cloud.

Oops!

Thankfully, while the British government doesn’t appear to have trained soldiers, an emergency plan, or an evacuation plan, they do happen to have a terribly unprepared Secret Underground Nuclear Bunker. All of the equipment in there is still from the Cold War so, while it isn’t tremendously helpful in keeping people alive, I imagine it would appeal to all of the hipster survivors who managed to make it inside. Having managed to get all of 7 people inside when the bomb went off (one of which is a minor government functionary who immediately tries to take control of the situation), these survivors band together with the three soldiers,  the one communications director, and the one maintenance man who were already inside and try to figure out how they are going to weather this particular hell storm.

Shoot the director before he can make more movies!

Oh yeah – the other problem with the bunker? It didn’t really come with a maintenance plan, so the life support machinery is REALLY old and gets clogged at the first sign of a human corpse falling into it. So there’s the problem of not being able to breathe when the 11 survivors use up all the oxygen in the labyrinthine bunker in a matter of hours (how heavily are they breathing?). Then there’s the issue of hierarchy, which really teaches us that, in the event of nuclear war, paper pushers with God complexes should be the first to be thrown into the mushroom cloud. Yet another issue is the prison right near by which housed Britain’s most dangerous criminals. They’ve escaped the prison thanks to the blast and have suffered from some minor instantaneous mutations and are now trying to push their way into the bunker through its many, many unsealed openings. But not to worry, if all of this becomes too tense for you to watch, it’s intermittently broken by scenes of two of the survivors indulging in flirtation that’s as subtle as being slapped through the face with a wet trout.

If all of this doesn’t convince you to watch it, then I don’t know what will 🙂

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Americans do like their underground bunkers to be up to date with the latest trends in home décor.
• The British Ministry of Defence never thinks to take steps to out-manoeuvre people with laminated pieces of paper getting past security check points.
• Underground government facilities are no place for children or goldfish.
• The easiest way to control the rodent population in an underground bunker is with a military-issued machine gun.
• Bureaucracy dictates that if bunker survivor quotas are surpassed, excess survivors must be jettisoned into the radioactive wasteland.
• Despite spending so much time on their backs, sluts still need plenty of rest.
• During times of crisis it is incredibly important to revert to Victorian-style gender differences.
• If you pedal a bike fast enough you can easily out-ride radiation poisoning.
• There’s absolutely no security risk in letting the country’s most dangerous criminals help set up top-secret underground government facilities.
• Government focus groups indicate that children make excellent decoys when mutated prisoners are invading your underground bunker.

S.N.U.B! TRAILER

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Creepozoids

Year of Release: 1987
Genre: Horror / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 2.8 / 10
Level of Awful: High

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

No 1987-themed month would be complete without throwing in a little post-apocalyptic sci-fi gem and I think the devil himself might have sent this one up just to play with me a little. Thankfully Satan and I can have a good laugh about these things so when he tripled dared me to watch Creepozoids starring Linnea Quigley I told him it was on! And so I sat for 70 or so minutes with highly processed butter-flavoured popcorn at the ready and watched with great amusement as this little movie tried to limp itself along to a place called ‘something half-decent’. Sadly it never quite made it to its destination and all that remains is the rotting corpse of half-a-dozen people’s acting careers.

If you need this explained to you, you shouldn't be reading my blog.

The year is 1998 and, in the wise words of Crow T Robot, we’re trapped in our old future. 6 years have passed since the outbreak of World War III and planet Earth is in a very sorry state indeed. Playing on what I imagine must have been the fears surrounding the USSR the Super Powers of the world have declared all-out nuclear warfare, devastating the planet and leaving enormous parts of it completely uninhabitable. Apart from the obvious problems like trying to secure a reliable food source most parts of the world are now being ravaged by highly caustic acid rain that destroys absolutely everything it comes into contact with. To keep the war going the US, whose centre of government is New Los Angeles (no word on what happened to the old one), simply drafts people into the army and sends them to the frontline. Those unwilling to fight are lined up and shot. This is kind of where the storyline takes off and we are introduced to 5 military deserters making their way through a ruined city of some sort. They need to stay low to ensure that nobody catches them but, unfortunately, they find themselves right in the path of a rather nasty acid storm, whereupon they seek shelter in one of the many abandoned buildings around them. While they are hopelessly trapped in there until the storm passes they seem to have been in a little luck as the place is quite well kitted out with all of the essentials: food, clothing, bedding, electricity and, most importantly, a two-man shower (see photo). To begin with everything seems to be absolutely perfect but, as is always the case in a b-grade movie, this building holds a very dark secret of its own down in its cave of a basement.

Cujo and the Hulk should never have had that one-night stand...

As it turns out the reason this building is so well kitted out is because it used to be a military seat of operation where they were carrying out some experiments that may not have been entirely ethical. In an attempt to make the ultimate soldier the scientists based here were trying to make it so that their human guinea pigs could synthesise their own amino acids, meaning that the soldiers would no longer be reliant on a food source because they could make everything they needed in their own bodies. The side effect of this little experiment is a hideously deformed and violently territorial creature living in the basement who occasionally pops up through the air conditioning ducts to attack someone with its enormous mandibles and razor-sharp, see-through teeth. It doesn’t necessarily seem to want to kill anyone but rather inject them with the same serum it was. It would appear, however, that second-hand monster serum has some troubling side effects of its own and anyone infected starts to blow up like a balloon and ooze blood and bile from everywhere. In a toss-up between that fate or being slowly melted by the acid rain our intrepid little band of deserters needs to find a way to kill the beast before finding the password to the highly advanced computer system and playing a game of Pong.

This movie was shot in 15 days in an abandoned warehouse on a budget of $150 000. Now by 1987 standards that’s not necessarily bad money, but then make a slasher. This movie needed special effects, not some guy in a plastic bug suit and harness suspended from the roof (58 minutes in – take a look).

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Despite the complete collapse of society and acid rain everywhere electrical equipment will remain perfectly functional for decades.
• Having World War III break out in 1992 tragically means that computer technology will never have the chance to develop to any useful stage.
• “Let’s shag it!” is not a good general catch phrase when all you really want is for people to move quickly.
• In troubled times an open air vent will provide some lonely soul with the only answers he’s ever had.
• During troubled times and an imminent attack by mutant rats women just want to have a quick shower.
• A 286 DOS computer requires years of expert training in order to use it properly.
• The armies of our old future will be filled with soldiers who can never hear when danger is coming.

CREEPOZOIDS TRAILER

Flu Birds

Year of Release: 2008
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.1 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

After my two recent reviews featuring the kind of good but not quite great Vanishing on 7th Street and Plague Town I felt that I needed to go all-out with this one and watch something really bad to bring this blog back to its main purpose: to review and critique the worst horror movies out there. Obviously intended to capitalise on the fear and uncertainty during the recent swine flu outbreak, this fails on virtually every level. The acting is horrible (!!!) and so wooden you could build a log cabin out of it. The characters are nothing original and at most points actually grate against your nerves like nails running down a chalk board. But I’m not just going to moan about this movie, not at all. I’m going to tell you what went on in it, some of the brave among you may even decide to watch it, and you can decide for yourself after that 🙂

"Really? You want to discuss this with me right now?"

Deep, deep in the woods where the SyFy Channel makes all of its movies a group of juvenile delinquents is on a little court-ordered retreat to try and get them to do stupid group exercises in an attempt to get them to function like normal members of society. How blindfolding someone and making them walk through a forest will achieve this is anyone’s guess, but that seems to be the plan. In this group we have your usual stock characters: hooker, girl who did what she had to do to survive her abusive father, blonde guy, fat guy, douche bag and wigger. Surprisingly the rest of the group isn’t taking the fat guy’s walk in the forest very seriously so, eventually giving up, the camp councilor goes after him to bring him back to camp while the others are told to make food and set up tents. Before you can even try to get over all the cringing you’ve been doing at the dialogue and the initial setting the group is attacked by enormous, carnivorous, fugly birds that more closely resemble a pterodactyl than anything you usually see in the sky. What do you do in this kind of situation? Run into the woods of course!

Hai! We wants noms!

Now, in addition to being irritating, our little group of miniature criminals is rather useless when it comes to survival tactics. Not only do they constantly bicker with one another but, in making their escape, they manage to run into an old abandoned fort that was built on a gas deposit. While inside they manage to break the seal that would have kept most of the gas stored and then successfully set fire to blonde guy. To their credit they do manage to formulate a rudimentary democracy whereby they vote on everything they do. Unfortunately this system is flawed in that those that are about to be used as bird bait (fat guy – bitten during the initial attack and now looking rather ill from whatever it is that mutated the birds) are not allowed to vote for fear that it might sway the group’s decision. Can’t imagine why.

Here's beak in your eye!

While the kids are trying to survive things aren’t going very well at the forest’s local hospital either. A hunter that was attacked by one of the birds is getting very, VERY sick, leading to his ward being quarantined. When it turns out that the virus is a mutated form of the H1N1 Avian Flu virus the government is called in to completely quarantine the hospital to stop the infection from spreading. A separate wing is brought in to help take out the birds before they migrate to the nearest town in search of a new food source. When girl who did what she had to do to survive her abusive father manages to get her hands on a child’s walkie talkie it falls to our heroic park ranger and his doctor ex-wife to find the remaining juvenile delinquents before the birds manage to turn them into their next meal.

My honest opinion? I think the kids are actual juvenile delinquents and ‘starring’ in this movie was their punishment.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• If you can hack into a school’s computer you’re only a step away from being able to hack into the Pentagon.
• People don’t scream when they’re on fire.
• Bird flu spreads because chicken farmers in Laos insist on having sex with their poultry.
• A ‘nobody enters, nobody leaves’ policy is really awkward for people stuck standing in the parking lot.
• Kissing should involve swallowing half of the other person’s face.
• A child’s walkie talkie is very useful for when you want to get in touch with your local park ranger.

FLU BIRDS TRAILER

Mutants

Year of Release: 2008
Genre: Horror / Action
IMDB Rating: 2.5 / 10
Level of Awful: High

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

In my humble opinion I think there’s something terribly tragic about a movie when a director gets so caught up in the filming and the actors that he forgets to have things happen. In fact so very little happens in this movie that if you watched the last 25 minutes of it you’d catch the entire story of the movie. It’s meant to be a zombie movie of sorts, but to describe the creatures in Mutants as zombies would be stretching the meaning of the term to its very limits. As a matter of fact to call them ‘mutants’ at all is a bit of a stretch. Taking a shot in the dark I’m gonna say that it’s probably meant to be a message about the poor eating habits of America and any other country where a McDonald’s can be found on every street corner, but it falls more than a little flat in the general mess that this movie is. I wouldn’t even give it half a brain for effort in zombie madness – it’s just a long, drawn out, boring mess. And for that reason it has earned its place here – after all, there couldn’t be a B-Horror Blog without pieces of cheese to review!

"Add 18 cups of genetically altered mutant sugar? Doesn't sound right..."

As many of us have suspected over the years, sugar truly is addictive, but the Just Rite Sugar Company wants to take the deliciousness and necessity of sugar to a completely different level – they’re genetically modifying it so that it becomes as addictive as heroine and crack. As is the case when you’re trying to rule the world in such an obscure way getting the formula for the crack sugar has taken some time to get right and sometimes you have to get things wrong before you land up getting them right. A number of problems have arisen during the testing stages of this new brand of must-have sugar: the test subjects have had this irritating tendency to develop warts and boils and then either descend into madness or begin to melt. To avoid raising any questions resulting from mass disappearances Just Rite Sugar has a dedicated team of vagrant catchers, the thinking being that if they only abduct homeless people and runaways then no one will miss them (this point is drilled into your head at the beginning – I think it’s a social commentary, but again this was definitely not the best vehicle for it).

When zombies go on a sugar binge...

From here on out it all starts to get a little murky and unnecessarily drawn-out. During one of the most recent raids the wrong people were abducted, proving that even trained vagrant catchers get it wrong sometimes. The team accidentally abducted Ryan and Hannah, two people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ryan’s abduction complicates Just Rite Sugar’s plans because he is the brother of their head secretary Erin and she is on a mission to find out what happened to him. Thrown into the mixture is their alcoholic and depressed father (who doesn’t look any older than Erin does). At work Erin begins to receive cryptic self-deleting e-mails (from someone who has taken the codename Cinderella) that give her clues about the more morally questionable actions of her company. With dad in tow the two manage to make their way to the abandoned sugar mill where the test subjects are being held.

"Now ma'am, I promise that if you don't develop diabetes within 13 seconds I will personally ship another crate of our sugar directly to you!"

Thinking that they’ve finally perfected the formula for their crack sugar Just Rite Sugar has begun shipping the product to various outlets across the country. Unfortunately their head (and only) scientist Sergei (who has the worst fake Russian accent I have ever heard) discovers that the test subjects they thought were infection-free had, in fact, developed a new strain of the same virus that had simply been lying dormant for 3 months. This news couldn’t come at a more inconvenient time since Just Rite’s other managers are touring the facilities and admiring the general misery that the company’s managed to inflict on its test subjects. While checking in on one of the subjects that was thought to be clean they are attacked and the mutants stage a break out. They’re not really a major threat since, although violent, they aren’t interested in eating brains like other zombies: all these guys want is a sugar fix. Also, they don’t need to be shot in the head to bring them down, so they’re easy targets. With Erin & Co. running around the complex breaking Ryan out, various security guards (which are fighting in factions) trying to kill one another and the mutants and Just Rite CEOs trying to escape the scene is set for an incredibly unremarkable zombie showdown.

All in all this movie is more painful than the comedown from a sugar high or a caffeine withdrawal headache. 50-odd minutes of it is told in flashbacks (often with a flashback within a flashback), the mutants only come in after about an hour and only one person is actually bitten by any of the creatures. Zombie movie? Social commentary? Fails on both counts. Hot zombie mess? Perfect 🙂

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Cocaine + caffeine = the ultimate addiction.
• Druggies, bums, illegals, ex-cons and the like are ideal mutant sugar test subjects.
• There’s nothing like being held captive by a sugar company to help form a budding romance.
• Companies see no need to cover their paper trail when converting abandoned sugar mills into labs for genetic experimentation.
• There’s nowhere you can’t get into with a hairpin.
• An over-sized pizza oven works just as well as an incinerator.
• An over-sized outhouse is just as effective as any hi-tech science laboratory.

MUTANTS TRAILER

Tokyo Gore Police

Year of Release: 2008
Genre: Horror / Action / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 6.1 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy

THIS POST CONTAINS STRONG ADULT CONTENT

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Few are the times that I am truly lost for words, but this has got to be one of those few times. Clearly the fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki had much greater long-term effects than the world initially realised because something is very, VERY wrong in Japan. I’m not scared of gore and I’m not scared of weird shit but if a movie’s gonna have them there has to be some kind of purpose to it. Not here, not here at all. This movie is just under two hours of non-stop blood and guts and boobs and butts. Thankfully I watched it with a good friend of mine so we spent most of the movie in stitches laughing because if I hadn’t I don’t know if I’d would’ve come out alright on the other side. Who the people at IMDB are that think this movie deserves a 6.1 / 10 I don’t know and to show the levels of weird I’m not going to review this movie in the normal 3-pictures-and-text fashion. This is for two reasons: firstly the storyline is too thin to properly write about (near-future Japan, police are privatised, mutants are on the run, one girl one destiny – all there is to it) and I feel a pictorial review best illuminates this movie’s oddest qualities.

In a privatised future, all police dispatchers are required to be slutty blondes who like to dance.

You should always carry an umbrella around in case you decide to cut someone’s arms off. No amount of washing will get blood out of a silk mini kimono.

In the future your fondest memories will be of you and your best friends sitting together for an afternoon performing group mutilation.

The rare and elusive vagigator is a worthy and honourable foe.

Ever been so horny that your penis just blew right off?

I’m just eternally grateful that it turned out to be a laser gun rather than some other kind of ammunition.

For the ultimate fetish enthusiast: The Golden Shower Breathing Chair

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Don’t visit Japan. EVER.

TOKYO GORE POLICE TRAILER