Seance: The Summoning

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.2 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0.5 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

First off, I’d like to apologise for my recent silence and lack of reviews. I’m in a mad, desperate rush to submit my MA dissertation before the end of the year, and my guess is that it’s gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better, but I’m gonna try to update things as often as possible. All work and no play makes James a dull boy, after all 😉

Anyways, what to say about Seance: The Summoning. In all the years I’ve been watching shitty horror I’ve never come across a movie quite like this one. To say that it was a rollercoaster to watch is an understatement, and at no point did I ever know how to feel about what I was watching. It’s either one of the most bigoted movies against Christianity ever made, or it’s one of the greatest pieces of Christian propaganda that’s not so cleverly masquerading as a horror movie. At points it’s painful to watch, other times it’s a fun b-movie, and there are also times when you feel it’s pulling itself together nicely. The actors seemed to learn how to act as they went along, so on that front it starts painfully and ends somewhere that’s slightly above average. On the whole I really just don’t know how to feel, but for putting me through so many ups and downs I declare it to be a High Level of Awful. Take that movie crew et al.!

OK, who forgot to pack the malevolent spirit?

Sara is a delightful born again Christian girl who just wants to make the world a better place through Christ’s love. To do this, she’s going to help her friend Eva out with a seance. Because Jesus wants you to summon up the spirits of the damned. Eva comes from a long line of psychic mediums who have perfected their craft over the generations. Her grandmother was burned as a witch by the Catholic Church, but those were less tolerant times and you make do with the hand you’ve been dealt. While the two girlfriends are sitting in a park chatting about life Eva decides to give Sara a tarot card reading. What follows is the most vague and subjective insight into the nether realms you’ve ever heard, but it serves to inform us that, before being reborn, Sara was a very, VERY bad girl. Not that that should come back to haunt her or anything later on…

“Have a seance” you said. “It’ll be fun!” you said. Stupid bitch.

The girls meet up with Joey and Marcus in the park, whereupon they hatch this ingenious plan: they’ll drive a hearse to the morgue for uncollected bodies (hobos, druggies, prostitutes etc., so you know these are some angry spirits) and hold a seance after they’ve inspected the corpse freezer. Joey, in addition to being a security guard at said morgue, is busy doing his unspecified degree in something paranormal and wants to record Eva contacting the dead. Marcus is a stone cold atheist and is only tagging along because a) he wants to bang Lisa and b) if Eva can’t summon up a spirit, she has to dance in a bikini at all of his DJ gigs for a specified amount of time that I can’t quite recall. I reiterate: awesome plan guys!

Now you might experience a slight sensation of extreme agony…

Now, as every reasonable person knows, it’s never a party until someone goes home devastated. In the process of summoning the dead it comes out that Marcus isn’t so much an atheist as he is a closeted psychic. It explains so much really. With the secret out and his friends telling him that it’s OK, that they don’t care if he’s interested in talking to the dead, and that there’s nothing to be ashamed of because he was born that way, the resident evil spirit (see what I did there?) sees a soft target and possesses him. Armed with the powers of hell and an ability to roll his ‘r’s with such power it would intimidate the most hardened latino, Marcus is intent on controlling the whole world. It’ll be up to Eva and Sara to use a concoction of psychic power and Christianity (and a little rubber tubing) to banish this evil back to the hole it crawled out of.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• No seance is complete without some Satanic apple juice.
• Satan has his own brand of seance-ready candles.
• Blondes think that a red flashing light is the highest form of security for a building.
• Sending a woman with a camera to a toilet next to the corpse freezer in a morgue is an excellent way to come on to her.
• Why does a morgue for unclaimed bodies need a family waiting area?
• Good Christian girls have a really powerful right hook.
• There’s nothing more unattractive than a closeted spirit channeler.
• There’s no high quite as good as an embalming fluid high.
• Demons are trained to be back up strippers in case times get tough in Hell.
• Never tell a demon your secrets – he’ll be running all over town airing your dirty laundry.
• In the event of friend’s demonic possession, sex is your best weapon against them.

SEANCE: THE SUMMONING TRAILER

BUY SEANCE: THE SUMMONING AT AMAZON.COM

Hookers in a Haunted House

Year of Release: 1999
Genre: Horror / Comedy
IMDB Rating: 2.7 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: 10 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Sometimes life just kind of happens, and for the past few weeks I have been completely unable to dedicate any time to watching awful movies. As a result I felt I should come back with a bang and chose the spectacular sounding Hookers in a Haunted House. Now, while it is the only movie I’ve reviewed so far that has managed to match Witch’s Sabbath‘s Breast-O-Meter reading, unlike the previous breast fest Hookers in a Haunted House barely makes any attempt at actually being a movie. It’s a very thinly veiled softcore porno with horrendous jokes thrown in to pad the time out a bit. If you ever feel the sudden urge to watch this movie, consider yourself warned.

She has the strength of a thousand hookers!

In what really is the setup to a poorly conceived joke, a blonde, brunette and red-headed hooker are about to spend an evening in a haunted house. IMDB swears blindly that these women have names but I don’t recall any of them being used in the actual movie. All the ‘action’ has already taken place and we are being told what happened through a series of flash backs from the blonde hooker as she details her harrowing evening to a rather strange TV journalist. The girls landed up in their frightening predicament when they decided to sell their wares out on a country road, the idea being that there would be less competition here from the other inner-city hookers. As luck would have it a group of Trekkies just happened to be driving by at that point and are more than happy for the girls to raise their shields to full power (or some pun along those lines).

So here's the plot in a nutshell.

The evening starts off with the nerdiest of the Trekkies trying to impress the hookers with his collection of human eyes in a jar and other bizarre paraphernalia. Perhaps as a result of this the girls don’t really take much of a shining to him, choosing instead to play around with his two friends. What follows is a slow strip tease, a lot of breast action and some ass shots that reveal some truly horrible thighs. The ego dented from the lack of attention the head Trekkie decides to whip out a Ouija board and play around with demons from another dimension. By randomly waving his hands over the board and muttering some old school song lyrics he manages to invoke, and I quote, “hideous, vile, ill-tempered and excessively butch spirits from beyond the grave”. This is actually misleading as he only summons one spirit, the ghost of a deranged bag packing boy, and nothing about this spirit suggests in any way that he is particularly butch.

Even in Hell you can't find the receipt you're looking for.

Obviously terrified by the presence of this hideous, vile, ill-tempered and excessively butch spirit from beyond the grave the girls do the only logical thing you can do in these kinds of situations: have more sex and look for food. While they’re doing this and a smoke machine mysteriously puffs away the bag boy goes about killing people with boxes of Corn Flakes and a pricing gun. It will take the blonde hooker a trip into hell to visit her long-deceased ancestor to discover the powers she has hidden deep within her that will help them escape from the clutches of this terrifying spirit. It will also take her posing topless for the camera for the news crew’s ratings to stay high enough for her to finish telling her terrible tale.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Credits should contain as many breasts as humanly possible.
• B-movies hinder a hooker’s ability to make money.
• Smeared makeup is a traumatic thing for a hooker to go through.
• Female journalists and hookers share a deep, spiritual bond.
• Ouija boards can double up as a crystal ball in the event of emergency incantations.
• Evil spirits are known to return hookers to their fully clothed states.
• A good nipple licking and pinching will resuscitate a fainted hooker.
• A family sized box of Corn Flakes can be used as a brutal and effective weapon.
• Terrified hookers will often do a strip tease for the malevolent spirits stalking them.
• Professional hookers should, in the interest of political correctness, be referred to as Pleasure Oriented Care Givers.

BUY HOOKERS IN A HAUNTED HOUSE AT AMAZON.COM

Death On Demand

Year of Release: 2008
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.3 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium

THIS POST CONTAINS STRONG ADULT CONTENT

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

I was determined to break the recent spate of so-so horror movies that I’ve been watching (Flu Birds provided a nice little respite) and stumbled upon this little gem. Death on Demand is perfect b-grade horror: college jocks, slutty co-eds, bicurious emo nerds, ghosts, abandoned houses and a so-so storyline to tie it all together. It’s a little bit slasher, a little bit mystery, a little bit softcore porn. There’s nothing at all original about the movie and the horror aspect really only serves as an excuse for women to run around topless and in leather skirts, but if you’re a fan of that kind of thing and a good b-grade piece of cheese, Death on Demand is just for you!

Porn star Ouija Board delivery at your service!

20 years ago father-of-two Sean McIntyre went off the rails and murdered his sherpa while on a hiking trip up Mount Everest. Delusional with altitude sickness he mistook the sherpa for a Yeti and brutally murdered him in what he believed to be self-defense. Back at home thing’s aren’t going much better for him: troubled by the unintentional murder and slowly losing touch with reality he snaps during a Thanksgiving dinner and murders his wife, 2 daughters and his mother-in-law before hanging himself. 20 years later college student Richard Sachs is planning on having a little fun on Halloween. In a manner very similar to Halloween: Resurrection (minus the iconic Michael Myers) Richard is setting up the old McIntyre house with cameras and daring 3 couples to stay in it on Halloween night with the winning couple winning a $5000 reward. ‘Cause nothing can go wrong when you spend Halloween in a house that was the scene of a tragic mass murder, right?

So, do you just wanna talk or....?

So into our little haunted suburban house wanders Darla and Biff, our sympathetic and likeable couple. What Darla does with her life is left unanswered but what we do know is that she’s handy with a pack of Tarot cards and knows her way around a Ouija board. Biff is a likeable jock who’s recently been kicked off the local college team and is taking part in the webcast in hopes of winning the money to replace his scholarship. Our second couple is Tammy and Brad, the standard muscles and no-brains combo. Tammy is blonde, constantly horny and protective of her man in a Jerry Springer, white trash kinda way. Brad, big and jockish, is having problems in the bedroom after he took a direct hit from Biff during a game. To round the group off is Haydn, an emo nerd with lesbian tendencies who speaks out of her nose. Her partner couldn’t take part in all the fun so in her place is Velvet Luv, a porn star who’s not shy of anything. Richard offered her a $500 bonus for anyone she manages to have sex with. You know, to liven things up a little.

Breast cancer awareness was taking a strange turn at this point...

The rules of the game: each couple will be given different clues scattered around the house and the first couple to find all the clues and find the key to the front door wins the $5000 prize. But it’s Halloween and they’re on the internet and there’s a porn star in the room so, to liven things up, the group whips out a Ouija board and conjures up the pissed off spirit of Sean McIntyre. Still in the confused state he was in when he died the remarkably solid spirit begins to roam around the house looking for the Yeti that’s determined to stop him from reaching the peak of Everest. Armed with all the necessary ice climbing equipment he manages to make quick and gruesome work of the kids he comes across. Of course it’s quite easy to find a victim when they handcuff themselves to the bed and make loud and strange comments while banging in the bathroom. Can Darla use the small print in hell’s contracts of the damned to save the group? Can Velvet keep herself in her top for more than 5 minutes? Can Richard break even on this little venture with his group being killed off one by one? All will be revealed by watching Death on Demand.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Sherpas are only 4 feet tall.
• A simpler name for a Ouija board is a Talking Board.
• Ghosts are completely solid and subject to pain like normal humans.
• Say ANYTHING bad about a man’s penis and he’ll think you’re calling him gay.
• Webcasts will bring out everyone’s homoerotic fantasies.
• Lesbian sex will bring an entire campus together in a way that nothing else could.
• Ghosts see things in a kind of greyish blue.
• Everyone on a football team is stone-cold gay. Porn stars are doing their best to fix this.

DEATH ON DEMAND TRAILER

Black Devil Doll

Year of Release: 2007
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 4.2 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy

THIS POST CONTAINS STRONG ADULT CONTENT

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Sweet baby Jesus what just happened? I apologise profusely to Bad Biology for every bad word I said about it because this is so, SO much worse. I came across this movie after reading a review for the original Black Devil Doll from Hell over at The Deadly Doll’s House and thought that it sounded just too good to be true. After doing a little research and not wanting to rip off another blogger’s good work I put every film-finding skill I had into hunting down this piece of crap, a very loose remake of the 80’s original. I say loose because, judging from what I’ve read, the original had a storyline of some sort with some evil doll sex thrown into the mixture. THIS movie, however, is something else entirely. It’s quite remarkable that one movie can be so disgusting and so offensive to ABSOLUTELY everyone that anyone can walk away from it feeling insulted. In a nutshell it’s and hour and a bit’s worth of softcore porn veiled in a b-grade horror movie disguise. But since it’s my mission to watch some of the worst horrors out there I give myself a pat on the back for making it all the way through this one.

How to truly and effectively wash your car.

Heather, our rather busty lead, is bored. After flipping through a bunch of channels and finding nothing interesting on other than cock socks for sale and some guy named Mubia Abul-Jama being electrocuted for the murder of 15 Caucasian women (emphasis on Caucasian – this becomes Heather’s big word of the day and, like any child who’s learned something new, will say it every chance she gets), she decides to play with a Ouija board to pass the time (as so many of us do). As often happens at the stroke of midnight when serial killers are being executed the Ouija board vomits up the soul of Mubia and places it in the very Caucasian dummy (if Heather can say it a thousand times so can I 🙂 ) and transforms it into a very black dummy. Within instants of talking about his various sadistic murders Heather falls madly in love with Mubia and the two begin a very strange and graphic relationship with one another.

You know your friends aren't listening to a word you say when...

Despite the beauty of their relationship any man (as we are told) will eventually get bored and begin to show some interest in other women. Mubia decides that he needs to spread himself around a little more but promises that Heather will always be his #1 bitch and, enjoying his more tender side, Heather promises (after having the crap beaten out of her) to call some of her equally slutty Caucasian friends and have them come over so that Mubia can take advantage of them. After devising their cunning plan (not really – you don’t need a cunning plan when every female character has a bag of frozen peas for a brain) Heather’s friends Natasha, Candi, Buffy and Bambi pull up with breasts thrusting and proceed to dance and wash their car in a very seductive manner before coming inside. After some chitchat and feeling one another up Heather keeps to her end of the deal and goes to McDonald’s where she will eat her weight in burgers while Mubia satiates his lust with, on, over, under, on top of and next to her friends.

Deals made when experiencing the after glow never tend to work out well...

Of course, as the saying goes, once a serial killer, always a serial killer. Stemming from his lack of self-esteem at having become a dummy Mubia decides that he will have to kill Heather’s friends before having sex with them for fear of having them reject him. This is a relatively simple process in a house full of pointy counter tops where every woman is naked and, for one or other reason, oiled up and incredibly slippery. As a lesson to us all, however, the movie does teach us that even when being chased and hunted by a demonic doll if a guy pulls his pants down any woman will go weak at the knees and grant him his every sexual desire. We also learn that once these desires have been met a demonic doll will kill you and make a human pyramid on the Twister board that’s lying in the living room. As her friends are bumped off one-by-one and Heather eventually gets home after clearing out McDonald’s supply of food she is understandably upset that Mubia took it a step further than she had agreed to by killing her friends instead of just having sex with them. It is now up to our busty heroine to put a stop to his rampage of sexual terror once and for all.

A note to myself: If, in the future, your reasoning behind watching a remake is ‘now that we’re in 2011 standards have relaxed and there’ll be more obscenity and gore in it’, please take a moment and think about what you’re doing.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED:

• All answering machine messages should be made in your best porn star voice.
• Along with magazines every coffee table should have a Ouija board on it.
• Saying ‘nigger’ 100 times a day is a very romantic gesture and will make Caucasian women fall madly in love with you in moments.
• Nobody thinks having sex with a doll is odd.
• Nobody can distinguish between a midget and a ventriloquist’s dummy.
• When you get out of a car you should always do a XXX-rated version of the Pussycat Doll’s ‘When I Grow Up’ dance routine.
• A car isn’t clean unless it’s been washed with breasts.
• It is quite common for women to check the quality of their boob jobs by fondling one another.
• A game of twister inevitably leads to some lesbian experimentation.
• Women should always pull their breasts out before shooting a demonic doll.
• A regular hand pistol holds, on average, 372 bullets.

Black Devil Doll Trailer

 

Drive-Thru

Year of Release: 2007
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 4.5 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

I had an internal debate with myself about how to rate this movie. For the most part I was inclined to give it a ‘Low’ rating, mainly because the film is cohesive, it does deliver a few good scares and the clown is frightening as hell. I ultimately settled on a ‘Medium’ rating, however, for several reasons: the movie relies on more than the average amount of horror clichés and, for the most part, feels like a combination of Killer Klowns from Outer Space and I Know What You Did Last Summer. It is more predictable than most b-horrors (watch for about 15 minutes and you’ll have figured out what’s going on) and the killer swaps between being human and something more supernatural a little more than would be regularly admissible. Despite this, when all is said and done, the movie is very watchable provided you can ignore some of the inconsistencies that creep in and Leighton Meester’s singing.

Fast food: It really does kill.

Hella-Burger is the biggest fast-food chain in the city of Blanca Carne (Spanish for ‘white meat’ – clever right?) and its mascot, Horny the Clown, is a town institution. Unfortunately for the town’s teenagers the drive-thru speaker has grown a body and has started going on a killing spree. The clown has amazing speed, a giant meat cleaver and a demonic metallic voice that all adds up to being a rather cool and effective horror villain. While he’s taking out the 2 town wiggers and their hos Mackenzie Carpenter (Leighton Meester) is having a little house party to celebrate her and her friends’ upcoming high school graduation. As most of the people begin to leave the party Mackenzie, her boyfriend Fisher and their inner circle go upstairs to partake in a little weed smoking and playing with a Ouija board. When Mackenzie and Fisher are alone the board begins to write all on its own and the two are left to try and decipher what the meaning of the board’s message is.

WARNING: Choose the venue for your kid's birthday party wisely.

Unfortunately for Mackenzie messages from the beyond begin to appear in more and more places and, after escaping Horny’s attacks once, she needs to try and figure out who is communicating with her and who is next on Horny’s hit list. And all of this needs to be done while Fisher constantly tries to get into her pants. As the killings become more elaborate and closer to home Mackenzie begins to see a pattern in Horny’s murderous rampage and realises that a dark secret lies beneath this sudden outburst of clown terror. The police don’t believe her, her parents are obsessively worried about her and her friends are constantly high and wanting to split up to go and look for the killer. Despite these odds Mackenzie needs to quickly come up with a plan to stop Horny before her head lands up on his delightfully evil chopping block.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED:

• In a town called Blanca Carne you aren’t going to see a black person anywhere.
• Due to the absence of black people 50% of all white teenagers are wiggers.
• The other 50% of white teenagers are all stoners.
• When placing your order at the drive-thru if the speaker gets it wrong, leave it alone. Otherwise it might kill you.
• When a Ouija board starts to write things on its own, take very little notice. It probably isn’t that important.
• A plastic tent stake is not an effective tool against a demonic clown.
• Police never trust the one person who actually knows what’s going on.
• When a demonic clown is on the loose killing people it’s an ideal time to set up a haunted house.
• Lying with your face in boiling oil is not an advisable exfoliation method.
• Fast food kills. One way or another.

Drive-Thru Trailer