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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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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Virus X

Year of Release: 2010
Genre:  Horror / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 2.6 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

There’s nothing quite like a movie made to capitalise on the general populace’s fear in the face of a worldwide swine flu pandemic. There’s also nothing quite like a movie made to capitalise on the general populace’s fear in the face of a worldwide swine flu pandemic that fails miserably at its objective. A note to the director: in order to make this kind of movie, where the fate of humanity itself hangs in the balance and our future rests in the hands of a few brave scientists, there needs to be an atmosphere of tension. We need to care that humanity might be wiped out. We shouldn’t be bored to the point where the swine flu seems like the easier option than sitting through the remaining bit of the movie. Just a thought – use it, don’t use it.

I do creepy and I do it well!

It’s a well-known fact that women with enormous mansions, wild ambition and a bank balance greater than that of some third world countries often dream about world domination as a means of further increasing their social profile. Danita Herrington is no different, and she has one doozy of a plan up her sleeve. She’s hired Dr Gravamen, one of those dark and brooding doctors, and is paying him exorbitant amounts of money to develop a particularly strong strain of the H1N1 virus that she can release on the world. As the infection takes hold and people begin to panic she’ll miraculously come up with the cure and be hailed as a hero to all mankind whilst making a tidy little profit on the side. Not that she has delusions of grandeur or anything.

Typical woman! It's always 'I have a headache' or 'I'm dying of mutated swine flu'.

Danita’s not exactly thrilled with the good doctor’s work, however. With test subjects only dying in a period of 26 days or so she’s pushing him to come up with a much faster and crippling strain. To help shift the project along he hires Malcolm Burr, a blonde and studly doctor with a peculiar looking face. A brilliant man with a lot of field experience, Burr thinks he’s being brought on board to help develop vaccines against swine flu. His field experience exposed him to people dying deaths that look more like they contracted the Ebola virus than swine flu and he’s determined to do his best so that no one else should ever have to suffer a death like those he’s seen. He’s also the only person to question the good doctor’s methods of deliberately mutating H1N1 samples to create particularly virulent strains of the virus without concocting antidotes for them, something that the rest of the staff find nothing strange with.

Oh dear God, no! Not the tragic irony!

Of course this whole plan falls to shit when one of the human guinea pigs decides to make a break for it. As a hooker she’s experienced in taking on groups of men and easily overpowers the hired goons and the good doctor’s creepy assistant with the synthesized voice. After climbing through one of the air ducts and into the main lab where the staff are relaxing she’s shot in the head by the creepy assistant. As jets of blood shoot all over the room the various members of staff are exposed to the latest H1N1 strain, forcing the good doctor (who’s been watching everything through the lab’s hidden camera system) to put the facility on lockdown to prevent anyone with the virus from escaping. As the crew become more and more sick and the doctor uses this as one great opportunity to test of the strength of the new strain our poor, trapped Dr Burr must do what he can to either cure himself and his fellow captives or find a way to break the lockdown and escape.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• There’s nothing like a nice bubble bath with champagne, strawberries, soft music and live video stream to a tortured human guinea pig to wind down after a long day.
• Doctors must do what they are paid to do, even if it violently breaks the Hippocratic Oath.
• The best way to stop aggressive viral mutations is to beat nature to it and mutate the virus yourself.
• A single door really isn’t enough security to keep a prisoner with a deadly virus safely contained.
• There’s no real rush to make vaccines for the horrible viral mutations you produce.
• The ‘ladies first’ rule can only be ignored when climbing through air ducts.
• It is necessary for every doctor to have a very creepy, white-haired lackey.
• Doctors and their creepy, white-haired lackeys should always have a strongly homoerotic relationship.

VIRUS X TRAILER

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