Bite Marks

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Horror / Comedy
IMDB Rating: 3.6 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!
Breast-O-Meter: 1 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

IMDB is a wonderful thing. Without it finding the movies for this blog would be incredibly difficult and the rating system gives you a vague idea of just how much pain you’re about to experience. Every now and then, though, I disagree with that rating system. It happened with Bikini Girls on Ice and now it’s happened with Bite Marks. This movie was actually really good and fun to watch and, unlike some other movies I’ve seen, it was intentionally funny. I’ll be the first to admit that I have low standards and if you throw in a waitress with a strong southern twang I’m happy but if you’re in the mood for some light-hearted horror then I suggest giving this one a spin.

Flaming (torch). Swallows (t-shirt).

Cary and Vogel are a nice young gay couple out on a backpacking adventure trying to rediscover some of the fire in their relationship. Cary is the nice, calm, down-to-earth guy and Vogel is, well, a slut. Vogel also doesn’t seem overly keen on this little adventure in the woods so when he manages to flag down a truck that’ll give them a ride he seems a little more content with life. Behind the wheel of the truck is Brewster, your typical rugged, unrefined but incredibly friendly truck driver. Not that he’s actually a truck driver but his brother went missing before he was meant to deliver some coffins to a funeral home so Brewster’s filling in for him. Not out of the kindness of his heart so much as he needs the money to keep up his affair with his brother’s wife but a favour is a favour. The three of them are soon on the road together, one to deliver coffins and two to see where the hell the road will take them.

Backstreet Boys: the later years.

Sadly Brewster, for all his rugged manliness, has been having troubles satisfying the ladies recently. Just can’t quite seem to keep the momentum going so to speak. The reason for this becomes glitteringly obvious when he spies Cary and Vogel getting in on in the filthy restroom of a restaurant they’ve stopped at along the way. Brewster’s not gay in any way, of course, but he does take the time to see how Cary and Vogel are doing and then feel himself up a little bit outside the door. Sexing and spying over it’s time to hit the road again and, as luck would have it, a car nearly crashes into them right outside their destination. If it hadn’t who knows how long they would’ve kept on driving.

Here's Jesus in your eye!

When the GPS tells them they’ve reached their destination our threesome is understandably confused. The coffins in the back are supposed to be going to a funeral home but the address they’ve been given is for a junk yard. Even more confusing are the noises coming from the back of the truck: sounds like someone’s playing a squash tournament back there. It becomes even more confusing when they open the back of the truck to discover only one coffin instead of the five listed on the inventory. This strangeness all comes to a head when suddenly, from out of nowhere, five ripped and bloody vampires appear and start nibbling on the owner of the junkyard. The truck’s axle is broken so nobody’s going anywhere so, armed with a cross, a toy Jesus, some holy water and a bible, Cary, Vogel and Brewster must lock themselves in the cab and try and stay alive until dawn, all the while trying to make sure the confined space and all that testosterone doesn’t get the better of them.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Sex is sex, so long as a lady gets her booze money.
• Some cell phones are so poorly made that their only practical use is as a butt plug.
• It’s quite common for waitresses to forget their panties in a public restroom.
• The best thing about being a man is that the whole world is your toilet.
• A torch is too small if you can’t even give a hamster a decent colonoscopy with it.
• Being trapped in a truck by vampires offers the perfect excuse for some same-sex experimentation.
• Good dogs make even better snacks.
• A burning vampire smells like a bag of spicy dog shit.

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Road Train

Year of Release: 2010
Genre:  Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 3.8 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

There have been times in the past where I have accused directors of forgetting to have things happen in their movies. As some form of karmic retribution for that comment I was subjected to Road Train (a.k.a. Road Kill), a movie where there’s just far too much going on. We have angry couples, cheating couples, a haunted truck, madmen with guns, road trips, the Australian outback, Cerberus and what I believe to be an unintentional homoerotic subtext. With so much going on the movie never really has time to explain anything properly, and a truck really isn’t as menacing a killer as the director was probably hoping it would be. It’s an interesting idea, but one that isn’t properly developed and one that doesn’t really have the effect you can feel the movie was going for.

1 minute, 28 seconds in. That's when it happens in the movie too.

I’m always a bit concerned when a movie opens with a sex scene. It gives you the sense that this isn’t a very confident movie because it’s not saving the nudity for later when the plot might be taking a little dip and it needs to keep the audience’s attention. Since this isn’t Dead Boyz Don’t Scream I was also a little perplexed as to why we saw more naked man than woman, since this is very uncommon in the horror world. The sexing twosome are Nina and Craig, and a little bit off from their tent is the non-sexing couple Liz and Marcus. Craig, Liz and Marcus have been friends for donkey’s years and they go on little camping excursions into the outback every year and Nina’s just tagged along for the ride. There’s also a very strong Brokeback feeling going on between Marcus and Craig. Whether it’s meant to be there or not I’m not sure, but something’s just odd between them. Anyways, having sexed themselves out and had coffee the group heads on to find even more nothing in the great outback for them to enjoy and camp in.

After the gold rush part of the outback was sold to Hell.

Whilst driving and looking for more nothing the group spots a road train coming up the road. A road train is a really enormous truck and the kids are pretty excited because apparently being overtaken by one is the ultimate road trip high. Things take a little turn for the worse when, instead of overtaking them, the truck plows into the back of them. After trying a few evasive manoeuvres the truck eventually rams into them again, forcing their car off the road and sending it flying. The car ends up being completely wrecked and Craig has a little bit of bone sticking out of his arm, but other than that the group is left reasonably unharmed. Marcus and Liz notice that the truck has stopped just off in the distance, so they decide to go and have a little chat with the driver while Nina tries to calm Craig down about the excruciating agony he’s in.

The rare and elusive Outback Killing Stud.

The rest of the movie is just a mix and match of ideas that desperately try to hold onto one another. When Marcus and Liz get to the truck they find that there’s no driver to be found anywhere. When Craig and Nina join them a madman appears out of nowhere and starts shooting at them, so the four jump in the truck and drive it off. The truck then puts them all to sleep and drives them into a dead-end where it starts pitting them all against one another. Nina also discovers that the truck has no fuel, and judging by the smell of its fuel tanks it never has, so how it actually manages to drive is another story that no one gives much thought to. Cerberus also seems to be locked in one of the trailers at the very back and lures Craig in there and possesses him. Everyone’s fighting with one another, the madman at one point passes the torch onto Marcus, there’s a cult of sorts in an abandoned house, who’s been cheating on who comes out and leads to more arguments, water runs out, heads are placed under tyres and so on and so on and so forth. By the end you don’t actually care what’s happening, you’re just begging for it all to end.

Road Train was clearly made on a decent budget but its whole premise was just poorly executed. Without all the bickering and the inclusion of Cerberus (which really doesn’t make sense and is never explained) it may have worked, but this was really painful to sit through.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Women who hear other people having sex instantly want to have sex themselves.
• Being part of an enormous accident where the car flies off the road and flips will only result in mild bruising.
• Even with absolutely no experience it’s dead easy to drive an enormous truck.
• Independent women are often threatened with becoming dingo food by Australian men.
• Women think you can flag down a commercial plane and ask them for help.
• When your best friend sleeps with your girlfriend a homoerotic bromance is bound to break out.
• Women are oblivious to things like miraculous healing, a blood-stained muscular torso and Satanic possession.

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Bunnyman

Year of Release: 2009
Genre:  Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.1 / 10
Level of Awful: Low
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Oddly enough, for a movie called Bunnyman with a psycho killer running around dressed in a bunny suit, this movie wasn’t half bad. It has a sort of Wrong Turn feel to it, but without the rampant inbred lunatics. The guys in this movie are just your regular, run-of-the-mill, possibly slightly inbred lunatics. It’s main failings are in some of the characters the audience is meant to sympathise with, and it’s a problem that befalls many movies like this one: in an attempt to create an atmosphere of tension and fear amongst the characters the outcome is a group of 5 people who are constantly sniping and bitching at one another. But before you make up your mind on whether to watch this or not, let’s have a look at what happens.

What the Easter Bunny does to fill the other 364 days of the year.

As with any great story about a maniac killing off random victims we have to travel out into the middle of absolutely nowhere, miles from civilisation where nothing but desert and a mysterious forest thrives. Evil stalks this part of the world, and that evil is dressed in a bunny suit. He finds young women along the highway and stores them in enormous cooler boxes before letting them run around in an abandoned junk yard where he slowly stalks them for fun. On one particular day the girl hides in the back of his truck, which suits him just fine. He drives out to a little bit of forest, ties her to a tree and the truck and drives off, ripping the poor girl in half before going out to look for more victims.

Fortunately victims are in abundance along the long stretch of empty highway. When our little group of friends tries to overtake the bunnyman’s truck they severely piss him off, whereupon he tries to drive them off the road. They pull over, hoping to apologise for whatever it is they’ve done, but this only seems to infuriate our killer even more. Apparently unable to appease his anger, the bunnyman drives on to set a trap for our little group of co-eds: just a little bit up the track he parks his truck with half of it sticking out into the road. Noticing it too late the kids crash their car in an attempt to avoid the truck and the bunnyman drives on, his day of tormenting these kids having only just begun.

Riverside picnics are never as romantic as books would have you believe.

So when one of our little group decides to try and fix the car the bunnyman returns, smashing into the back of the car and crushing the young man underneath. This is when the group figures out that they’ve run into more than just another pissed off trucker and they need to find a phone and try to make it back to civilisation. But the woods are a dangerous place filled with drunken, gun-toting hicks, upside down crosses, bags of human bones hanging from trees, weird log cabins and one oddly seductive woman with serious anger management issues. And, of course, chainsaw wielding lunatics in bunny costumes rarely work alone and our group of constantly bickering friends is about to discover that they’ve walked into a demented family affair and it’s gonna take all their best survival skills to get out of this forest in (literally) one piece.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• If someone tries to drive you off the road you should be sure to apologise for pissing him off.
• Some women have no fight or flight instinct. Their only instinct is to faint.
• The easiest way to check if a car is broken is to see if it’s dirty under the hood.
• There’s always a logical explanation for bags of human bones being hung from trees.
• If you can’t identify whose bones they are it’s perfectly alright to hang them from a tree.
• There’s not much you can do to help a dead friend.
• Even psychopaths in bunny suits listen to classical music to centre themselves before beginning their daily torture rounds.
• Psychopathic women may have their issues but one thing they won’t stand for is a slut.

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