Goth

Year of Release: 2003
Genre: Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 3.4 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 3 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

You really have to love those amazing horror movie collections you can find at your nearest grocery store. They lurk at the very depths of the bargain movie bins and you just never know what you’re going get, but whatever it is you know it won’t be good. Goth comes from just such a collection. Made on a shoe-string budget with a hand-held home video camera and actors who look like they’re freshly flunked out of drama school, this movie goes to show just how evil some directors can be. IMDB’s little blurb tells us that “Goth blurs the boundaries between reality-driven horror and the hallucinatory style of Requiem for a Dream…” It really doesn’t. It may blur the boundaries between reality and insanity (in a ‘I can’t believe I’m watching this crap’ kind of way), but any pretence that this movie attempts to follow in the heels of a well made film is an utter joke. I am proud of myself for watching it, however, because Tropical Mary, Stygian Mole and the Occult Specialist had to turn it off when they watched it together, proving once and for all that I am very hardcore 🙂

Goth, spelled G-A-Y C-L-U-B.

Come along and join us for an evening of gothic delights. Meet Crissy, the most girl-next-door goth you’ll ever meet. Crissy doesn’t say much in the beginning, but that’s because when she opens her mouth nothing but weird shit comes out. She’s going out with her boyfriend Boone, who’s gothic in a gay hipster kind of way. They’re super excited to be going to a concert at the local hell hole (note to the director: 20 drunk emo high school kids in a bar does not a concert make) where they’ll take an assortment of drugs, drink absinthe and have a generally gothic good time. While at the club Crissy meets her newest BFF, Goth. That’s her name: Goth. Why? Because she’s goth. I make the point that Goth is a goth because the movie itself likes to drive this point home every bit as emphatically. Goth is trying to find other goths who are as goth as she is. After saving Crissy and Boone from being mugged Goth gives the pair a drug called White Light and the party really begins to get underway.

Like, OMG! We’re, like, so TOTALLY goth right now!

After accepting a strange drug in a skull container from a complete stranger named Goth Crissy and Boone seem surprised to find themselves waking up in a strange van miles away from the club they started out at. Goth’s van is very goth, with skulls all over the place and a variety of drugs just littered about in old pizza boxes. Now the reason for this minor kidnapping is that Goth wants to see just how goth these two new goths are. This is because there are apparently two types of goths: goths like Goth, who are more akin to Satanists than anything else, and goths that are really just angsty teenagers who wear a lot of black. Goth has several goth rules that all goths should live by, and tonight will be a goth test to see if goth Crissy and goth Boone can be every bit as goth as Goth. You following me? Good. Thrown in at random intervals amongst all this gothness are several flashbacks to Crissy with her sister in a decidedly less goth fashion, just to keep you in suspense.

Mmm, AB negative, my favourite!

The evening begins to take a bit of a downward turn (or a turn for the better, depending on how goth you really are) when Goth decides to go all goth on people and telling Crissy that she needs to kill some people and that Boone needs to have sex with fat hookers. Why? Because that’s the goth thing to do. In essence what Goth is actually getting at is that you need to behave like a petulant child with a sharp knife, but somehow defining this as ‘goth’ will make it a lot more hardcore than it really is. Boone has his reservations about all this, but apparently Goth threatening to kill a room full of hookers is enough to change his mind. Crissy doesn’t question anything and is all game to go along for the ride, timidly chastising Boone whenever he cares to voice a thought. But the flashbacks keep coming at us, and it becomes somewhat clear that Crissy has ulterior motives for going along with all this and Goth (and her red pleather mini skirt) will have to watch out or suffer the wrath of a Crissy scorned.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Gothic sex tastes better when you have it on a dirty floor.
• Goths are really leading the peer pressure drive when it comes to taking mysterious drugs.
• Punk gothic dominatrixes are really trippy.
• Be on the lookout for gothic drug delivery vans, coming to a neighbourhood near you.
• Becoming a goth requires more intense training and dedication than becoming a Tibetan monk.
• Having a knife poked in your eye and pleather rubbing against you really isn’t a turn on.
• Being gothic is about experiencing true love and learning to tolerate people from all walks of life.
• Embracing the darkness includes having sex in front of a  gathering of goths and hookers.
• You can’t be a true goth if you attempted suicide and failed.
• A goth lesbian’s vagina is a portal to memories of happier times.

GOTH TRAILER

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Clownstrophobia

Year of Release: 2009
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 2.7 / 10
Level of Awful: High

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Oh sweet baby Jesus, what just happened? A bit of time has passed since my last z-grade clown movie, so I thought it was time to revisit my coulrophobia. Unfortunately Geraldine Winters, the fool behind Clownstrophobia, didn’t take 5 minutes to do a Google search to find out what the actual term for a fear of clowns was. It was all downhill from there really: the clown is quite frightening to look at but the actors are wooden, the storyline is so convoluted that Tolkien would have been confused and for the most part I’m hoping that Winters was on crack so that there is at least some excuse for this awful mess. I’m not entirely sure what was happening or what the whole point was meant to be, but if it made sense then it wouldn’t have earned its place here on the B-Horror Blog 🙂

Kindly note: Choose the clown for your child's birthday party well.

We begin our odd and confusing little tale in a mental hospital where one of the new nurses is being given instructions on how to care for Patient X, a female patient admitted to the hospital after she was found outside a carnival. Dubbed ‘Patient X’ because no one knows her name, this woman has repeatedly tried to commit suicide, believes she was a member of the circus and that the hospital staff have stolen a child that no one has seen. The new nurse’s job is to make notes on Patient X while making sure that she doesn’t further harm herself. In another ward in the hospital is Snuffles the Clown, another psychotic inmate who brutally murdered his parents when he was just a teenager. As a side thought, for a genuinely creepy clown, ‘Snuffles’ strikes me as a rather daft choice for a name, but if it was actually frightening the movie might have made a little more sense and the director seems to have tried her hardest to avoid that. Anyway, Snuffles’ irritating and whiny psychiatrist has decided that it’s time to give the clown a little more room to wander, the thought being that this will help him in his recovery. Nothing can go wrong with this plan…

This happened, I don't know why, and I wish it hadn't...

The only surviving member of Snuffles’ murderous rampage was his sister, who has now gone on to become a psychiatrist. Ironically her own psychiatrist is the same one as her brother’s, something that no one appears to think might be a conflict of interests. Since drugging herself with 5 horse tranquilisers a night doesn’t seem to be curing her of her past she decides on a more alternative form of treatment. In an attempt to fix herself she invites a group of juvenile criminals to her country estate who all share her clownstrophobia. The treatment plan? Lock everyone in the house, have a dinner of doughnuts and exchange creepy clown stories with one another. Since it isn’t the most orthodox plan in the world there doesn’t seem to be any intended outcome, but this doesn’t seem to be the point of doing it in the first place. Somewhere along the way between the good doctor tranquilising herself and the kids smoking pot Snuffles has managed to break into the house (how he did it or why no one noticed he escaped from the asylum are left unanswered) and is getting ready to play.

Finally, a killer with some heart!

So now we arrive at a point where there’s so much going on that it’s virtually impossible to keep track of it all. Back at the asylum Patient X is progressively becoming more agitated after once again slitting her wrists and seeing fat, hairy clowns where there aren’t any. Worried for her career the nurse doesn’t want to tell anyone that it happened on her watch and is desperately trying to calm the woman down. Back at the estate Snuffles is very quickly making his way through the kids and harvesting them for their organs which he stores in a jar. Dr Weathers has come out of her near-comatose sleep to don clown lipstick and stand in a doorway telling the kids not to leave until they are cured of their phobia. Oh yeah, and Patient X is begging stockings off of her nurse.

In the last 2 minutes of the movie a desperate attempt is made to bring all of this together in some semblance of order, but the possible interpretations of events are too numerous to list. Watch for yourself, if you dare, and let me know if it made any more sense to you than it did to me 🙂

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• You should always wear sunglasses when electrocuting someone.
• Half of all patients in a mental institution will have worked in a carnival at some point.
• Juvenile delinquents should always be escorted by juvenile policemen.
• You can land up in juvenile court for switching a girl’s shampoo with hair remover.
• Mental patients are often pitted against one another in cage battles for sport.
• A victim wrapped in the right wrapping paper will never escape.
• Nurses in mental hospitals aren’t trained to understand that their patients REALLY don’t know what reality is.
• Giving someone your heart metaphorically is romantic. Giving someone a heart literally is f*cking weird.

CLOWNSTROPHOBIA TRAILER