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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Seeds of Destruction

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Sci-Fi / Action
IMDB Rating: 4.4 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

I do love an accidental find. Sitting at home, having done all the exciting things for the day (like washing dishes and cleaning out cat litter trays), I was channel surfing when I landed on the Universal Channel and saw that the movie coming on in 5 minutes was Seeds of Destruction. An awesome title, and when I saw that it starred Stefanie von Pfetten (of Odysseus and the Isle of Mists fame) I knew that I had found the perfect way to kill an hour and a half. From the ludicrous plotline to the horrible CGI and spending the whole movie’s duration trying to figure out how Ms von Pfetten’s surname is pronounced, Seeds of Destruction was a delightfully cheesy romp worthy of End of the World Month.

Oh dear God, more nature!

Let us all cast our minds back, dear reader, to a much simpler time at the dawn of creation. Adam and Eve are froliccing in their delightful Garden, God doesn’t have too many humans to manage and the air has never been so fresh (because, up until this point, it had never existed). It’s the plants that make the Garden of Eden so wonderful; they suck up any and all pollutants and leave Adam and Eve with the luxuriously clean air to which they’ve become accustomed. And then they screwed it up because someone just had to be tempted and eat the forbidden fruit. Now, what if Adam had had the foresight to steal some of the seeds from the Garden’s plants so that he could plant his own Eden 2.0 while in exile? What if some of those seeds were still lying around for us to find today? What if…

Virgins.

Well we can all stop with the ‘what if?’ questions because the movie is going to explain exactly what would happen in this kind of scenario. Jocelyn is a brilliant plant archaeologist who isn’t afraid to be blonde and biblical. She and her team were the people who discovered Adam’s urn containing the seeds and sent it back to her boss Frame to carefully open and inspect the seeds. Frame lied to Jocelyn and said the urn was empty when in fact he’s been experimenting on them ever since the discovery. Unfortunately Frame wasn’t very selective when it came to hiring his other staff and one of his lackies is now trying to sell one of the seeds on the black market. Environmentalist kids Joe and Kate are there when the whole deal goes down and, as often happens in these situations, mistakes are made, people are accidentally shot and seeds from the dawn of time are dropped on the ground and allowed to take root.

The dangers of improper garden maintenance.

Now, the world as we know it today is just slightly more polluted than when Adam and Eve were running around so the plant, doing what God made it to do, goes a little berserk in its growth. The bigger it is the better it is able to absorb all the pollutants in the atmosphere. While this is a very noble attempt on behalf of the plant some people aren’t so happy about the fact that it will have to bury most of the North American continent in order to do its job properly. Jocelyn, Agent Jack, Joe and Kate want to find a way to destroy the plant and stop its rapid-growth rampage across the country, but Frame has different ideas. He wants to study the plant and try and slow its growth, thinking that a modified version of the plant would be infinitely more useful to mankind. Either way someone’s gonna have to do something fast before it reaches the ocean and decides to go global and wreck everything. Only Stefanie von Pfetten can get us out of this mess of Biblical proportions!

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Adam and Eve were the very first international seed thieves.
• Government agents can’t develop a battle plan based on the Bible.
• Blonde plant scientists, however, are more than willing to base their theories on the Bible.
• In moments of extreme disaster you should always go with the plan that has virtually no chance of success and the most horrifying consequences.
• The whole point of having a safe haven is to keep innocent people out of it.
• The Bible has a very draconian approach to pollution and global warming.
• Dead boyfriends are of absolutely no use to anyone.
• Running blindly into a situation is the best way to find out if it will help you or kill you.
• There is a debate as to whether or not giant plants ravaging the Earth are a part of God’s greater plan.

SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION TRAILER

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Earth’s Final Hours

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 4.3 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Just look at that movie poster, it’s like something the Discovery Channel would use to advertise their latest documentary. While I remain sceptical so far as this movie’s educational benefits are concerned I can vouch for the fact that it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen this month. Not better in the sense that it has brilliant actors or deserves awards or anything, but better in that it’s a fun variety of cheese. If you like trashy sci-fi with a few good laughs then you could do far worse than Earth’s Final Hours.

Lovely day for an apocalypse, don’t you think?

What I like about this movie is that it’s very forward thinking in the end of the world department. Realising that black holes are very last season in the whole apocalyptic movie industry the guys behind this one decided to take the end of the world in an entirely different direction. What if the earth was hit, not by a black hole, but a white hole? It’s crazy, I know, but it was just the thing this movie needed to really make it stand out from its competitors; it adds a completely different dynamic to mankind’s absolute destruction. White holes, unlike their more emo counterparts, compress and then expel matter away from themselves. So, rather than the whole earth being compressed and vacuumed up into nothingness, Earth’s Final Hours has a small chunk of compressed matter blow straight through the planet. See? Very forward thinking movie.

Well, that’s slightly unusual…

Now I can hear you all asking, “But James, how would we know if a white hole had blown something right through the Earth?” That, dear reader, is very simple. All you have to do is let a rogue scientist (preferably one who’s trying to evade the US government) loose in a number of fields and let him go about collecting data on the phenomenon. He’ll set up a whole bunch of instruments and satellites to gather any information he can, but ultimately the best way to know when something’s happened is to keep an eye on him. First of all you’ll hear a giant explosion in the sky and the atmosphere will rip open slighty. Now atmospheric rip can obviously be the result of a number of things, so you now need to look at the scientist’s chest. If it is a piece of expelled white hole matter it will find its way to him, blow through his chest and then through the Earth. If this happens, you will know that you are witnessing a genuine apocalypse by way of a white hole.

Green Peace resorted to some weird shit in those desperate days.

By this point you all probably have 1000 different questions, not least being what kind of effect all this would have on the Earth. Well, the thing is, something that compressed and hitting the planet at that speed would not only go straight through but would also exert enough energy to completely halt the planet’s rotation. Not only is this hugely inconvenient because of the effect it would have on daylight savings but it would also result in the complete collapse of the magnetosphere, the layer created by the Earth’s rotation that protects us from solar radiation. All we can hope for in these dark days is that somewhere, somehow, there’s a mad scientist locked in an institution with knowledge of a satellite system that can restart the Earth and a rogue CIA agent and his family who care enough about humanity to help the mad scientist out. Will such a hero answer our desperate call? Watch and be amazed!

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Driving through a big open field is very different to working in Washington DC.
• You know you’re a good person if you hack into a city’s financial system to save old ladies from being evicted from their houses.
• Turns out that if you dig straight through the Earth you actually land up in Australia, not China.
• When a child becomes too old to be sent to his room a parent’s next best option is to send him to prison.
• Just because the world’s coming to an end doesn’t mean you can’t go visit your aunt.
• Millions of dollars worth of security devices can easily be bypassed by hiding behind a bin.
• The lack of computers with floppy disk drives will be mankind’s downfall.

EARTH’S FINAL HOURS 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

Sharktopus

Year of Release: 2010
Genre: Sci-Fi / Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.8 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium

WHAT IT’S ABOUT

It doesn’t get much cheesier than a SyFy creature-feature produced by Roger Corman, which is exactly why I was drawn to this one 🙂 Admittedly it is more of a sci-fi movie than a horror one, but when you have the opportunity to watch a half-shark, half-octopus creature swimming around and eating its way through Mexicans you really can’t pass up an opportunity like that. This is a perfect example of a b-movie because it’s not the acting (Julia Roberts must be so proud of her brother for being in this)  that makes it bad but rather the complete absurdity of the monster the characters are faced with and the microscopic budget the effects must have been made on. I enjoyed a good few giggles staring at the screen while this played while constantly muttering ‘no, no way’ to myself.

♫ Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming swimming swimming swimming ♫

The military’s up to its old tricks again: not content with nuclear weapons, missiles or allowing Justin Bieber to go platinum they’ve decided that they need something better, something that can take out pirates (aargh matie!). So what better plan than to genetically combine a shark and an octopus? It can have the shark’s teeth and ferociousness with the octopus’ tentacles and intelligence. Of course if you’re working in a corporation like Blue Water and need to prove that the billions of dollars used to fund this little f**k you to nature was worthwhile you need to take the creature, codename S11, for a test run. And what better way to test a creature with an antenna lightly strapped onto its head that allows you to control its movements (the only thing, in fact, that stops it from escaping) than making it chase after a small boat with rapidly spinning propeller blades? As is usually the case when idiots are testing mutant man-eaters the propeller blades cut through the strap and dislodge the antenna, making it impossible to control S11, who now gladly swims away while the people back at mission control sit and vaguely ponder what should be done next.

Yeah, the pistol will succeed where the grenade launcher failed...

Now you obviously can’t just let the escaped sharktopus run around the ocean on its own little mission down along the Mexican coastline so Blue Water needs to find someone with a knowledge of the waters to help them bring it back to the lab. Enter Andy Flynn, a one-time disgruntled employee of Blue Water until he asked Nathan Sands, the boss, for a raise. Thinking that asking for a pay increase is an insult Nathan fired Andy, who has been living happily in Mexico drinking tequila and swimming in the pool. Joining him and his $300 000 pay cheque on this little mission are Nicole, Nathan’s daughter, and his best friend Santos. The plan: to dive underwater, tranquilise the sharktopus, bring it to the surface and launch darts into its head that will allow Nicole to interface with its brain again and command it to stop eating everyone.

There really is nothing nicer than a tentacle buffet...

There are several problems with this search and recovery mission, however. For a start this thing is really fast and can quickly grab a snack in the shallows by throwing its tentacles onto the beach to grab someone. If that doesn’t prove to be effective the sharktopus can also walk on land (water? fish? anyone?) and chase after people that way. Its skin appears to act like a forcefield and repels bullets or anything else you shoot at it and, perhaps the saddest of all, nobody in Mexico takes you seriously when you tell them a half-shark, half-octopus is coming their way to eat them, so civilian casualties are rather high. Add to this the fact that Nicole’s daddy went behind her back and altered the sharktopus’ brain to make it a killer rather than just a hunter (meaning that it kills at random rather than just for food) and you’ve got an enormous list of odds stacked against you. It’s now up to Andy, armed with a machine gun and against ever wearing a shirt, and Nicole, sweet and brilliant, to save the day and take down the sharktopus before more people get eaten and before daddy gets really mad.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED:

• There really are fish in the ocean.
• Sharktopodes speak whale.
• Sharktopodes shoot ink despite having no squid in them.
• Mexican women don’t own clothes, just bikinis.
• A woman’s breasts will not get up and dance.
• The military does not need to get any form of permission from government to fund really weird genetic experiments.
• Chum should be used as a last resort when hunting a giant man-eating sea creature; try diving after it first.
• You should shoot giant man-eating sea creatures after they’ve eaten your friend, not as an attempt to save him.

SHARKTOPUS TRAILER