SHITTY FLICKS: SAVAGE PLANET

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant, camp-girl penis. 

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

I've seen a lot of dreck. I've seen dreck from low-rent filmmakers, and I've seen dreck made by established directors with access to multi-million budgets. I've sought dreck and gotten quality; and, in turn, I've sought quality, and boy oh boy, did I get dreck. It happens. It's unavoidable. And all during this, Savage Planet comes along - a cinematic equivalent of a really, really bad liar - comes up right behind us all, and says, "Sorry I'm late. I forgot how doors worked.”

Savage Planet is pretty special. Not just because it's "ha ha" bad, and not just because it was made by the Sci-Fi Channel back when their original television movies were bad by accident instead of kitschy bad-on-purpose nonsense like Sharknado, but for a very different and special reason. We'll get to that reason in a bit. I suppose it should be considered a spoiler - not because it will ruin the "plot," but because it would ruin the moment during the film that you would be struck by the sheer stupidity of its "villain" and be so utterly taken aback in joy that I kind of don't want to let the air out of your tires.

But, if you choose to keep reading, that's on you.

The film opens with a group of scientists on another "planet" machetteing their way through a thick wood. The leader takes readings with a gizmo and mentions how the levels of whatever on this planet are better than on Earth. It's really important that the film establish right away that these guys are most def NOT on earth, because what are clearly very plain woodsy areas of Canada should at NO point be mistaken for Planet Earth.

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 1

Lead guy gets his hand hacked off by a machete completely by accident and falls into a hole, where he burns his hand stump in a puddle of radioactive green goo. His hand grows back (kind of), and he is then viciously attacked by a space alien. This poor man's fear is paramount. Never, back on Planet Earth, had he ever encountered such an otherworldly monster, but yet here he is, facing something harvested from his nightmares, something so indescribable and beyond comprehension that H.P. Lovecraft would have needed two volumes and limitless cognac to properly describe every detail. 

On a planet that savage, aliens look like this:

Okay, you got me. It’s bears. And not just plain old bears, but "mutant" alien bears. This is also something they will say over and over to Jedi-mind-trick you into believing you're seeing, like, gigantic mutant bears. But, you're not. Even the DVD packaging goes very far out of the way to avoid dropping the "b" word. The front cover is a picture of a mossy-looking planet, on the back is nary a photo of a bear, and the summary reads:

Earth is declared uninhabitable from years of toxic pollution and ecological damage. A team of scientists are sent to visit an unknown planet in hopes of finding a new, safe, world. But within the lush and verdant landscape of the new planet they find a mutated species that turns their expedition deadly. They expected and needed utopia but instead found something more deadly than what they left behind.  

Bears are what they found. 

They found bears.

Sean Patrick Flannery plays Randall Cain, a sad earthling with a haunted past who has a giant scar across his chest that looks like an even gianter Cronenbergian sex bug. It's off-putting to look at, and even more off-putting to pet. He lives in a "Dystopian" future, which means everything looks exactly the same as it does now, except for the first establishing shot of the city, which is a 3D generation of smoothed-over metallic building blocks probably designed by the guys who made Candy Crush while they were each on their own toilet. 

Cain's vacation of looking sad and lying in a future cot with that weird bug-looking scar thing across his person is interrupted by his superiors and is brought on to be briefed on a very important mission that he apparently has no choice but to endure. There, he is told that a planet nearly identical to Earth (let's just get that established as soon as possible) has been discovered and I guess some dudes and dudettes need to go there and do some science stuff to determine if the people of Earth can go live there. The planet is called Planet Oxygen, which is just as imaginative as the person whosever idea it was to film a movie set on an alien planet in the not-so-alien looking woods of Ontario. (See, because there's a whole bunch more vegetation on this planet, and hence, a whole bunch more oxygen.)

Cain and his rag-tag group of colleagues, including Not Stephen Moyer, Guy Who Looks Like A Grown-Up Baby, Token Black Guy, and Almost Lisa Kudrow are beamed directly onto Planet Oxygen using an invention called DST (standing for distance travel). 

Each time someone is beamed onto the planet, the director is quick to use split screen, so we can see everyone's understandably amazed faces while the person disappears right before their eyes!

If they think that's amazing, wait till they see how LARGE these bears are!

Alien Bear steps on a Lego.

One of the last people to beam through - and also the guy in charge of security - dies during transference. He hilariously makes pain sounds identical to that of a monkey's, his bones disappear, and he crumbles into a pile of thin, blankety, wet man. Carlson says, "We all agree this is a tragedy," without looking all that bothered by it, and then he--

Oh, shit!

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 2

Where were we? 

Oh, right.

So, these scientists, I guess, are about to--

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 3

Jeeze. 

So, the scientists begin their expedition--

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 4

Right.

During their recon, they locate the body of a dead bear.

"What the hell is it?" asks one of the many people claiming to be a scientist.

After an autopsy of sorts, this amazing exchange takes place:

"It's a prehistoric cave bear; been extinct on Earth for over ten thousand years...The most formidable predator in its day." 

"How does an extinct bear come to get on this planet?"

"Somehow its DNA sequence regressed. No modern bear, even full-grown, has claws this big, or a hide this dense...Their only known enemy was man."

Later, everyone has a philosophical conversation about whether or not the lives of those already lost are worth whatever discoveries they might find on Planet Oxygen. If this were real life, of course the lives lost would be deemed irrelevant, but since this is television - brainless, brainless television - these scientists have hearts and decide it's not worth it and everyone wants to go home. Not Carlson, though, because he's the movie's resident money/fame-driven penis head.

"For a scientist, you know a lot about death, but nothing about life," someone says to Carlson, and god damn does he look SHUT DOWN.

(No he doesn't.)

Also:

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 5

One of the scientists decides it would be best to go off on her own. I think her name was Bird Seed(?)

Weird, right?

Then this happens:

It was quite a sight to see!

Cain attempts to take control of the mission, since the whole science part of it seems to have gone out the window and now it's more about survival, which means Carlson can be 100% dick. Bears come and Cain asks Carlson to shoot some of them, but Carlson says "fuck that" and him and his eyebrows peace out of the scene. Cain promptly falls and hits his head on a gigantic rock.

I don't blame him. Maybe he accidentally watched a little bit of his own movie.

As everyone makes plans to spelunk down a cave wall, let's all pause for a moment of out-of-context dialog:

"Okay, here's the plan: I'm gonna go down first, followed by the two girls." 

Day dims, night comes, and it's almost too easy to take out these attacking bears with a shot gun. A perfect juxtaposition of: stock footage of roaring bear, man with shot gun, stock footage of roaring bear calmly lowering from two feet down to all four = man successfully killed bear with a shotgun. 

Movie magic.

After one of the dudes' girlfriends gets dragged from her tent and eaten perfectly in half, the other scientists begin to really doubt their own faith in science. Talk about horror!

- "And in my dreams, the bear and I were one."
- "Okay.”

The bears continue to take out our scientist characters one by one, and shockingly, Token Black Guy is still hanging in. Even Harold Perrineau was bear meat at this point in The Edge. 

Have you seen The Edge? 

It's great.

Anyway, this shit has gotten far too complicated for a killer alien film where the aliens are played by bears. There's something happening now about "life serums" and Planet Oxygen's habitat becoming "increasingly unstable." All I know is: more bears, please. Token Black Guy is still breathing, as is Guy Who Looks Like A Grown-Up Baby.

Whoop. Never mind.

As the bear viciously attacks Token Black Guy and begins tearing apart his innards and ripping off one limb after another, he screams for Cain to shoot him and put him out of his misery. Count how long Cain stands there holding his shot gun with a stupid look on his face before he actually does anything to alleviate Token Black Guy's suffering, and then convert that to Bear Time. 

Rest in peace, Token Black Guy!

Dear god, I've never seen a more boring film where bears play aliens and aliens rip apart really terrible dummies filled with gooey balloons that play the people. My time would've been better spent digging a hole in my backyard and shitting directly into it, and when my one neighbor called the cops and the cops came and asked, "Just what on Earth were you thinking?" I would say, "Well, it was either that or watch Savage Planet," and they would be like, "Say no more, we totally get it. Please shit some more into that hole you dug," and I would say "Thanks, officer," and I might even buy a couple tickets to their Policeman's Ball, even though I'd have no one to go with, because who's gonna go to a ball with someone who shits in the backyard?

No one. :(

Carlson gets his head beared off and things begin to look really dire for our remaining heroes. Almost Lisa Kudrow manages to beam herself back to earth while Cain falls down for something like the hundredth time, and then a large mutant alien bear with regressed DNA, bigger claws, and a denser hide (read: normal bear) attacks Cain before he can beam back to Earth.

The scene cuts to several days (weeks? months?) into the future at a press conference where it's revealed that Cain somehow survived his attack even though I'm pretty sure he was within the snares of a bear and moments away from having his fake head slapped off. I couldn't tell you what happened during this scene because I was already ejecting the disc and dreaming of the fifty cents I'd get for it at MovieStop.

Production is underway on Savage Planet 2: Beary Scary, and it will star Norman Reedus from "The Walking Dead," which is both a stupid joke I just made up and also an excuse to put the words "Norman Reedus" and "The Walking Dead" into this review, just so a bunch of pre-teen girls and lonely moms can find it by accident when Googling the phrases "Norman Reedus no shirt" and "Norman Reedus kiss me" and "Norman Reedus friend bear movie."

Sean Patrick Flannery was in the movie Powder. He played 'Powder.'

Good night.

HEY, KNOW WHAT'S A REAL MOVIE?

(aka: The Headless Ghost)

MADE OF STONE

ACCORDING to Dante, the Styx is not just a river but a vast, deathly swamp filling the entire fifth circle of hell. Perhaps the staff of New Scientist will see it when our time comes but, until then, Lake Natron in northern Tanzania does a pretty good job of illustrating Dante's vision.

Unless you are an alkaline tilapia (Alcolapia alcalica) – an extremophile fish adapted to the harsh conditions – it is not the best place to live. Temperatures in the lake can reach 60 °C, and its alkalinity is between pH 9 and pH 10.5.

The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate, with a bit of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) thrown in. Here, this has come from volcanic ash, accumulated from the Great Rift valley. Animals that become immersed in the water die and are calcified.

Source/more.

CRAPPYPASTA: DARK BEES

legands talk for bees about in past that didd horrble things and had the curses but nobody belived silly story and laugh at them but they would be wrong and pay for it with death

it was at the farm and sam the farmer went to his bee area of te farm and fed them some honey “good bees” he said but then one got in his anti bee suit and stung him “ouch stop that hurt” he sout and then the bee went inside his skin and made a bee hive in his body and it hurted but he thought it was just cold “i go dinner and bed” said sam

sam ate the dinner and went to bed and heard buzzing “what is buzzing” he say and then he felt sore and his chest burst and bees came out and the bees started eating him and he was sekelton and then the bees open a window and go to city.

at the city people where shoping and having fun and ice cream and it was ghood day “ouch daddy a bee stung me” said a girl and the dad patted her on head “it alright bees just want friends” said the dad but it was too late because she was a bee hive and die and bees eated her and her dad and there was screaming and death as city was bee city now

a man kiss his wife “let me love you forever” said the wife and then she turn into bees and cover the man in bees and he die

on a hill there was a blue man in gas mask and it was leader of the bees and creator of creepypasteas mrcreepypasta “remember live good life or bees find you to” he laugh

the police got to city nexct day but there was no sign of bees and they decise that everyone just had car accdants and forgot what happen but there was scary legands about bees but nobody belive them which was foolash of them but people never laern.

the end
 
by megamangx

Quite possibly my favorite CrappyPasta...ever.

Source.

REVIEW: WORLD OF TROUBLE (BOOK 3 OF THE LAST POLICEMAN TRILOGY)

 

"...But on the core fact there is one consensus: the asteroid 2011GV₁, known as Maia, measuring six and a half kilometers in diameter and traveling at a speed of between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand miles per hour, will make landfall in Indonesia at an angle from horizontal of nineteen degrees. This will happen on October 3. A week from Wednesday, around lunchtime."

Detective Henry Palace returns in the third and final entry in the Last Policeman trilogy, Ben H. Winters' "existential detective series" about one man and the last few cases that fall in his lap leading to the end of days, caused by an asteroid that is on an unavoidable destructive path with the earth. In the first novel, The Last Policeman, Palace's case was his job; in the second, Countdown City, his case was a favor; and in this, the final hurrah for Henry Palace and all the other earthlings, his case is his most personal yet: his sister, Nico, has gone missing, and he's got to find her, desperate to make amends before Maia the asteroid comes along and puts an end to everything. Believing Nico to be in the company of other like-minded folks who are convinced they have found a way destroy the asteroid before it can touch down, Palace, along with his unlikely team of companions - Cortez, a man who'd attempted to kill him with a staple gun in the previous book, and Palace's rescue dog, Houdini - travel the ruined landscapes of America in an effort to find his missing sister. But, as is usually the case, there's more than just a missing sibling. There's two bloody trails leading in and out of an abandoned Ohio police station. There's the barely-alive young girl with the slit throat Palace found in the woods. And there's the missing scientist who may or may not be with this end-of-the-world group of would-be heroes insistent they know how to avert the apocalypse.

World of Trouble is a solid finale for a solid series. The world has continued to regress since the last book, and different factions of people are acting in different ways. Some have taken to the streets in groups of vigilantes to take over stores filled with potential rations; others hide in their homes behind drawn shades, clutching shotguns and nervously peering out windows. Two particular well-meaning teens let all the animals out of the zoo to prevent them from starving to death in captivity, and one of them being immediately cornered by a tiger. These details and the many more flesh out this pre-apocalyptic world and turn it into something both surreal but also entirely believable.

For his swan song, Winters has embraced an almost-The Road type device for his tale, which puts Hank Palace on a rather innocuous task (finding a sledgehammer to bust through a suspicious and newly-installed hatch in a police station parking garage floor), but during which Palace, instead, crosses paths with several different characters, all of whom are reacting to the end of times in very different ways. In prior Last Policeman novels, the characters with whom Palace interacted were all part of the larger mystery - the "point" of the respective novel. But now, instead, there is less of a focus on unraveling a mystery than there is immersing in the drama of this environment. The mystery is still front, center, and fully accounted for, but Winters is instead weaving human experience in and out of Palace's mystery. Each character provides a missing piece of the puzzle, sure, but they're also there to provide something else: humanity.

World of Trouble's ending is bittersweet, and obviously while I won't reveal if the world comes to an end, or if Nico's band of anti-asteroid misfits manage to come through and destroy the means in which the world will end, there's still an ending here:

Hank Palace has solved his last mystery.

Buy it.

OVERBOARD

SCREAMED MY NAME

I moonlight as a paramedic and working EMS you will see all kinds of creepy and fucked up things. Every shift I go in I do so with the knowledge that there is a good chance my face will be the last or first thing a person sees as they leave or enter this world. The one that sends a chill up my spine though happened last year while I was still doing clinicals. We received a call to a nursing home for a unresponsive 87-year-old woman. When we picked her up it was obvious she was not long for this world. She coded three times on us before we got her to the ER. What freaked me out though was when she became responsive briefly during transport. I was starting an IV and she just sprang to life, grabbed my arm with a strength unholy for a frail old woman, looked me square in the eye and in a raspy, guttural way quietly screamed my name. The look in her eyes was unlike anything I had seen before or since. It felt like she was staring straight into my soul.

What is so disturbing about that is that during no point had I introduced myself to her as she was unresponsive. Also being a dumb student I had forgotten my ID badge that day as well. I had never worked her before as a patient, nor meet her that I can recall in any capacity. Could be she mistook me for somebody else by the same name but it sure seemed meant for me. She died less than an hour after admission. To this day I still remember everything about that call like it just happened and it makes my blood run cold to remember her face and the way she called to me. Sometimes I close my eyes and still see that face.

Story source.

CABIN FEVER

"It's a slang term for the claustrophobic reaction that can occur when people are shut in together over long periods of time. The feeling of claustrophobia is externalized as dislike for the people you happen to be shut in with. In extreme cases it can result in hallucinations and violence—murder […]."

REVIEW: SONNO PROFONDO (AKA DEEP SLEEP)

I love revival films. I love this idea of resurrecting a time period from cinema history and finding ways to cleverly and lovingly recreate it in ways that are both genuine homage but still effective enough to create a strong and competent standalone film.

I've explored this art of imitation in a previous post, in which I highlighted certain modern horror films that lovingly revisited every major horror movement in cinematic history, starting with the silent era, and up to and including the 1980s. Sonno Profondo, produced by Italian filmmakers (though lensed in Argentina) is as successful an homage I've seen since Ti West's '70s satanic thriller House of the Devil.

The giallo was a sub-genre of which I have always been aware and always respected for its ability to combine often graphic horror, hypersexuality, and poetry of the camera to create an altogether different and revolutionary cinematic experience. Though my previous experience of the giallo resides entirely within the confines of Dario Argento and the brutal masterpiece of absurdity that is Pieces (it totally counts), it's not hard to have developed at least a rudimentary idea of what defines a giallo film: the killer's point of view, the leather gloves, the rich red blood, the discotheque score, the unrestrained sexuality, and the abstract non-linear sense of time. Add a killer with a whacked background and fixations on the fairer sex, and, well:

Giallo is back, and its name is Sonno Profondo.

Written/directed/resurrected by Luciano Onetti, Sonno Profondo is not just a love letter to the giallo movement. It's a fever-dream art house exploration of madness – what it is, what feeds it, and the chaos it creates. There is very little dialogue outside of some television reports; lacking (though not suffering because of it) are any kind of "big picture" shots. No sweeping exterior scenes of *coughcough*Italy, no day or night establishing shots. As was often the case in previous giallo films, and in the case of Sonno Profondo, scenes of murder and mayhem were always shot from the killer's point of view, but would often cut back either to the protagonist as she or he dealt with the repercussions of the killer's presence, or the inevitable detective hot on the trail of the killer. Not the case here. Similar to last year's Maniac redux, the entire film takes place behind the killers' eyes (and no, my apostrophe is not in the wrong place - we're dealing with two killers, here: the first killer [black leather gloves] responsible for the murder and mayhem, and the second killer [white surgical gloves] who begins to methodically blackmail and stalk the first). 

Sonno Profondo preserves the sensibilities of '70s-era European filmmakers – Michelangelo Antonioni, for example, who assumed his audience was prepared to have patience for the journey he was about reveal to them – even going as far as dirtying up the film's negative to add all the cracks and pops one would come to expect from a forty-year-old film. Manufactured to look like it was both produced as well as set in the 1970s, Sonno Profondo is as immersive an homage you're likely to find in the independent scene. Lots of filmmakers are pledging to make films in the vein of paranoid-at-home thrillers of the 1970s and cheese-ball gimmick dead-teenager flicks of the 1980s; very few have endeavored to recreate the giallo, a movement that likened the horror genre as close to pornography (in terms of tastelessness) as it could get until the VCR boom of the mid-1980s, in which it actually did kind of become the kind of pornography as we know it today. (The Astron-6 crew [Manborg, Bio-Cop, Father's Day] are also working on their own giallo homage: The Editor.)

The first giallo trend would continue for some time and travel to American shores, even becoming embraced by Hollywood powerhouse directors like Hitchcock, though the style would become so watered down that it barely resembled everything that had directly inspired it. Psycho first, and then Halloween later, would both be termed as variations of the giallo movement; Carpenter would state for years he had been a big fan of Argento's Suspiria, around which he had modeled portions of Halloween.

Make no mistake, Sonno Profondo is not a film for the uninitiated. If you've never seen any giallo films before, don't start here. Start with the very first credited entry - Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much - and continue on with Argento (but skip the Adrian Brody film Giallo while you're at it), whose collaborations with composers Ennio Morricone and Goblin would soon cement the importance of the soundtrack on the giallo movement. Only when you're immersed in the movement can you truly appreciate the homage.

If Sonno Profondo is successful or unsuccessful just on the merits of being a film alone, I couldn't say. When you have no choice but to experience the murderous exploits of either one or both off-screen killers, you've got no one to root for. You've got no sympathetic protagonist to whom you're supposed to relate. Some audiences don't know how to respond to such an idea.

And that's how you know if you're ready.

Buy it now.

JAWSESES

THE SOFA CORPSE

Samantha Clairmont, 11, was a girl with Muscular Dystrophy who was beaten to death with a kettle and hammer by her grandmother and a nun in 1974, then stuffed into a sofa, because she would not eat her chocolate pudding. The body was found when they dropped it off at a garage sale to be auctioned and a man's dog sniffed it out.

LEVITY: THE USUAL SUSPECTS

BUNDY

SANE, SANE, SANE

“Then she did see it there - just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly, but it wasn’t a mask, it couldn’t be. The skin had been powdered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. It wasn’t a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman. Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.”

SURPRISE ROOMMATE

Tokyo Homeless Woman Lived in Stranger's Cupboard for a Year

A homeless woman has been arrested after living undetected for almost a year in a tiny cupboard in a man's house in Japan.

The woman, identified as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found by police searching the home of the man, who believed he lived alone in Fukuoka.

The resident of the house, who has not been named, became suspicious that he was the victim of repeat burglaries after he noticed food was going missing from his refrigerator.

The man decided to install security cameras linked to his mobile phone and on Wednesday caught images of a woman walking around the house while he was out.

Believing he had detected the burglar, the man contacted police and, after an exhaustive search of the property, officers found the woman hiding in the top of a built-in cupboard designed to store bedding and mattresses.

Behind the sliding door, she had laid out a thin futon and had several plastic drinks bottles, police said. There was just enough room for her to lay down, they added.

"We searched the house, checking everywhere that someone could possibly hide," said Hiroki Itakura, a police spokesman. "When we slid open the closet door, there she was, curled up nervously on her side."

Horikawa told police that she had nowhere to live and had first taken up residence in the cupboard, in a room that the man rarely used, about one year previously when the owner of the house had gone out and not locked the door.

Source.

ROADKILL

DANCING

There once lived a lonely man on the 6th floor of an apartment building. One day, he noticed the figure of a woman dancing in a swaying motion in an apartment across from his building. The curtain was drawn, so he could only see the shadow. Everyday he looked out his window, he would see her dancing. Finally, the lonely man fell in love with the dancing woman and decided to pay her a visit. He bought a bouquet of fresh flowers and went to her building, climbing the steps to her floor.

He knocked on the door many times, but no one answered. He could have sworn that he had just seen her dancing in the window. Worried that something had happened to her, he kicked the door open and was heart broken by what he saw.

The woman was hanging from the ceiling in front of the window, her body swaying from side to side as if she were dancing.

WHAT'S THAT? YOU'D LIKE A CREEPY CLOWN?

Well, all right.

READ: COUNTDOWN CITY (BOOK 2 IN THE LAST POLICEMAN SERIES)

The post-asteroid-announcement world sure has changed since we last saw Detective Henry Palace in The Last Policeman, the first book in Ben H. Winters' apocalyptic existential detective mystery series. He's no longer employed by the Concorde Police Department (though he hasn't given up on detecting, either). The populace has grown more savage; animal-like. Survival has become the name of the game, though with an asteroid hurtling toward earth and ready to make contact in 77 days, there is little hope for anyone withstanding its inevitable landing. Palace's former lover is still dead, his last official case as a Concorde detective nearly forgotten by everyone but himself, and he's still holing up in a ramshackle unfurnished house with his adopted dog, Houdini. 

His newest case, taken on gratis in order to help, of all people, the person who used to babysit him and his sister, Nico, when they were kids, involves a missing husband, a strange anti-government conspiracy group, and an anticipated breakdown of society. Familiar characters make reappearances and are along for the ride, some making more significant contributions than others, but all of whom provide a surreal feeling of comfort by proving that Palace hasn't become the isolationist that he considers himself.

Though there wasn't much that needed improving in the series' first book, Countdown City still manages to be a far better read and far more captivating story. Perhaps it's because, by now, the end of days looming over everyone's heads is very established. The dismantling of humankind continues, as it was already well underway, only now this dismantling has achieved a disturbing yet morbidly realistic rapidity. Much like the most basic tenet of mystery-noir, the ground-level crime that Detective Palace is investigating leads him to a path that opens up his eyes to something far more shocking that's occurring, only this time the two events are connected only by a single character, as opposed to an all-encompassing conspiracy under which Palace's crime unfolded, and by which it was directly or inadvertently inspired. What that all means, essentially, is author Ben H. Winters is having fun playing around with genre expectations. 

I love the subtle changes in this world from the first book to this one. I love that law enforcement positions went from being the most rewarded with that old outdated concept called money to the world of Countdown City, in which money has become irrelevant, and essential law enforcement officers are instead paid with rations: bottled water, non-perishable foods. (And god love you if you can find some coffee.) I love that rioting has become so common place so close to the end that our lead character has the ability to turn away from such sights occurring before him on the street with a level of nonchalant indifference that it should be repulsive, only it's somehow instead relieving. 

The ending of Countdown City promises a rather intimate and personal final case for Detective Palace to solve before Maia comes to end everything, which will unfold in the series' final book. The Last Policeman trilogy concludes with World of Trouble (review coming soon).

NIGHT VISITOR

UNNECESSARY SURGERY

In late 1951, the hills on the outskirts of the small German town were surveyed for the future construction of a NATO military site. The military base was to consist of a series of deep underground bunkers and weapons supplies in case a Soviet invasion occurred. In February of 1952, construction began. Just four weeks later, the crew began digging a massive two-hundred foot deep hole for the future underground storage bunkers. It was during this time that the crew made a morbid discovery. As they neared the end of the digging operation, a human hand was seen sticking out of the bottom of the hole. Upon future examination, twenty-seven bodies were discovered at the bottom of the two-hundred foot deep hole, dressed in Prisoner of War uniforms worn by the allies in Nazi war camps.

A  NATO officer ordered for the bodies to be exhumed immediately. As the medical team slowly carried out the bodies, they looked on in puzzlement. The bodies were remarkably well-preserved. Furthermore, the POW uniforms bore a strange insignia which was unlike any the men had seen before; an orange circle with a single black dash in the middle. However, the most unsettling characteristic were the faces of the men who were exhumed. Their eyes were wide open, and their mouths were sealed shut with an unknown adhesive. The bodies were then dispatched to the local morgue for immediate identification and autopsies.

That night, the local mortician began his work. However, he found it difficult to concentrate on his task. The eyes of the first man he was to begin work on seemed to be staring back at the mortician from the autopsy table. He shook his head and just rationalized the sight as the imagining of his over-active mind. The mortician took his scalpel and began his first cut into the body’s chest. Blood poured out of the incision with staggering force. The mortician backed away from the table in shock. The red liquid began running down the table, pooling on the floor below. The eyes of the body began watering, and streaks of tears ran down its face. Soon, the eyes rolled back into the body’s head, and the bleeding ceased. In horror, the mortician began to make his way to the door on the verge of nausea, but not before catching a glance at the twenty-six other bodies lying out on separate tables. Their eyes looked back at the doctor’s with tangible fear. 

The men were still alive.

EDIBLE BABY HEADS

'Nuff said.

REVIEW: THE FORBIDDEN GIRL

I was just saying to my mother the other day, "You know what I could go for? One of those sexy, witchy, witch-sex movies."

Then I came home, looked in my mailbox, and grinned. Inception Media had heard my utterances on the late-summer wind and sent me a copy of The Forbidden Girl to review.

My pants were never the same.

A late-night rendezvous between Toby, the son of an apparent religious fanatic, and his girlfriend, Katie, goes pretty sour after she shows him the locket that she's wearing around her neck, which attracts some kind of black-smoke demon that comes and takes her away. See, it was really important to Toby's priest pops that Toby remain all chaste and stuff, so obviously sneaking off to see Katie, Kewpie-doll-voice seductress that she is, was a horrendous idea. With Toby's father newly headless and Katie kidnapped, poor Toby goes rather mad from this and spends the next six years in a mental institution while simultaneously and miraculously not aging whatsoever. After fibbing his way through a gab session with his doctor, Toby is released to salvage the rest of his young life. He begins a tutoring job for a very eccentric couple who live in an isolated old mansion, throughout which Toby seems to sense Katie attempting to communicate with him. When Toby meets his student, Laura, who to him appears to be his missing beloved Katie, well, things get real awkward real fast.

The Forbidden Girl is a beautifully photographed film with better-than-average special effects that unfortunately still ends up being kind of a mess. Creepy visuals and impressive set designs promise a story engaging and unique that, though it tries, never manages to be more than almost perfunctory. Tonally, the film is similar to William Malone's Parasomnia, though it shares that film's woes as well - essentially, both are impressively realized dreamscape films that exist solely to show off the interesting and disturbing visuals on display. There's no doubt about it that Till Hastreiter knows how to direct, present a beautiful image, and work within his budget (though the day-for-night shooting needs a little work). For once the acting in a low budget horror film isn't entirely deplorable. Our lead (Peter Gadiot) is earnest and likable, and his strange new employer is suitably a big creep. But again, both seem committed to a story that never quite established what it wants to be. Horror? Whimsical fantasy? Teen love? (Gross.)

Never would I accuse The Forbidden Girl of being artistically hollow, as there is a genuine attempt to present a story as engaging as the visuals are compelling, but the script never manages to be more than this thing that ultimately ends up getting in the way of the next creepy or stunning set-piece.

It hits video tomorrow.

NICE LEGS

THE FEEJEE MERMAID

Mermaids had been presented at shows for centuries. These were often dugongs or people afflicted with sirenomelia. During the Renaissance and the Baroque eras, the remains of mermaids were a staple of cabinets of curiosities. However the exhibit which created the Fiji mermaid concept was popularized by P. T. Barnum, but has since been copied many times in other attractions, including the collection of Robert Ripley. The original exhibit was shown around the United States, but was lost in the 1860s when Barnum's museum caught fire. The exhibit has since been acquired by Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and is currently housed in the museum's attic storage area. 

The Fiji mermaid came into Barnum's possession via his Boston counterpart Moses Kimball, who brought it down to Barnum in late spring of 1842. On June 18, Barnum and Kimball entered into a written agreement to exploit this "curiosity supposed to be a mermaid." Kimball would remain the creature's sole owner and Barnum would lease it for $12.50 a week. Barnum christened his artifact "The Feejee Mermaid." In Barnum's exhibit, the creature was allegedly caught in 1842 by a "Dr. J. Griffin." Griffin was actually Levi Lyman, one of Barnum's close associates.

THAT'S SOME WORM

This giant (4-foot-long) killer worm was discovered in an aquarium (Newquay’s Blue Reef Aquarium) in the UK. They found Barry, the giant killer worm, when they were trying to find out what was eating the prize fish and attacking the coral. Experts say that this worm can permanently numb a human with its sting.

THE DEVILS ARE ANGELS

"The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you. They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth."

PRESERVED

This indigenous Mexican woman’s memory is literally preserved, as she – following her death in 1860 – was stuffed and put on display the very way she had been while alive. Also born with hypertrichosis, her features were more characteristic of a gorilla than a dog; her nose and ears were especially large, her face was covered with hair, and she had a double pair of teeth which pronounced her mouth as such. She had a husband named Theodor Lent – who had originally purchased her and taught her to be a performer – and eventually a child of the same affliction, who died after three days. She died five days after that (complications from birth), and her exploitative husband had both her and the baby mummified and placed in a glass cabinet. Lent went on to marry another woman with a similar condition, and was later admitted to a mental hospital.

 

CLOWNS

WINE SNAKE

A Chinese woman, surnamed Liu, in Shuangcheng, Heilongjiang Province, needed hospital treatment after being bitten on the hand by a snake that jumped out of a bottle of wine.

Ms. Liu bought a live snake and preserved it in wine to cure her rheumatism. However, the snake was still alive after spending three months in an alcohol-filled bottle.

Alcohols containing preserved snakes boasting medicinal properties are common in China. When Ms. Liu opened the bottle to add more spirits, the snake attacked her. She received treatment for inflammation.

A similar case involving a serpent resurrection occurred in 2009 when a Hubei Province resident, surnamed Zhang, was bit two months after he attempted a similar brew. Zhang was not severely injured, unlike a villager from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in April 2001 who died a day after being bitten from a preserved wine snake.

SHITTY FLICKS: DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

Horror movies in the late 70’s and early 80’s were really bossy. You weren’t really allowed to go anywhere or do anything.

Don’t Go in the Woods. Don’t Go in the Basement. Don’t Go to Sleep. Don’t Go Near the Park. Don’t Go in the Bedroom. Don't Answer the Phone. Don't Play with your Peeno at Grandmother's.

Preeetty sure you were allowed to go in the house, though.

Don’t Go in the House.

Ah, farts.

Don’t Go in the House is about a man named Donny who is obsessed with fire. So much that he works in a factory whose job is to burn things. One day on the job, Donny tosses a can of something—maybe spray paint— into one of the furnaces just to see it explode. It doesn’t, however, so Donny walks away, disappointed.

And then BOOMO.

The can explodes right in the face of a hapless worker who walked over to do whatever it is these people do to the furnace. Donny watches as the man, covered in flames, twirls around helplessly. People quickly come to his aid as Donny continues to be useless.

“A man goes up in flames and you just stand there like a faggot!” yells his boss later in the locker room.

“I am not a faggot,” Donny says, defending himself, as if one has anything to do with the other. “It covered him up. He wasn’t evil, but it covered it up.”

That’s crazy if you ask me.

“You’re crazy,” agrees the boss. “I always said you were crazy.”

"I think YOU and ME oughta go OUT some time
because we would MAKE a good COUPLE."

Donny, who isn't crazy, thinks fire has thought patterns and seeks out evil to purify it.

But he isn't crazy.

He drives home to his sick mother, as several disembodied thoughts whisper in his mind.

But he isn’t crazy.

Donny prepares chamomile tea for his mother who sleeps softly in the chair. After a few gentle jostles, mother does not stir. Donny fruitlessly tries to wake his sleeping mother, but it’s too late for her. She’s a fucking dead corpse. He paces the room and tries to convince himself that she is merely sleeping and that she will wake up soon.

“I MADE YOU TEA I MADE YOU TEA,” insists Donny at her dead body.

The voices then begin talking to Donny, trying to calm him. They whisper sweet nothings in his ear and promise that things will be okay, that they will take care of him.

“Can I play my music loud?” asks Donny. He then immediately puts on some disco (loud) and begins jumping on chairs and smoking inside the house.

What a life for Donny this is! Adios, dead mother!

A la better movies about sons who had formerly-abusive and now-dead mothers, Donny begins to hear her voice yelling at him. Donny inspects his dead mother and sees that she’s still dead, but the voices tell him that she must be burned to be purified. Donny doesn’t ask too many questions as he gathers up a box of matches. He then has a flashback of the time his mother the asshole flipped out because her husband left them and she blamed Donny for it, telling him he was evil, and she pulled Donny’s little arms over a stove flame.

Think that’s what made Donny crazy about fire?

Me neither.

We're pretty dumb, though.

The next morning, Donny calls out of work and begins to build something in his house. It’s too soon to tell what it is, but knowing Donny, it’s probably a roller rink.

You know. For disco.

Then he runs off to a store to buy a flame-retardant suit complete with overly-dramatic and creepy face mask.

Later, he charms his way into a closed flower store, telling the girl he would like a small arrangement for his sick mother. He pays for the flowers and then hesitantly leaves, looking disappointed at himself in his truck parked outside the store. Whether it was because he didn’t have the balls to ask her out or kill her remains unseen, although, he does manage to coerce her into accepting a ride from him after she misses the bus.

“Why don’t you come inside and say hello to Mother?” Donny asks along the way.

The girl agrees for some reason and off they go.

Back at the house, Donny leaves, telling the flower store woman that he will be right back. Donny disappears momentarily in the kitchen, but then comes back.

“Mother must be upstairs! I’ll be right back!”

Donny runs up the steps excitedly.

“Mother!” he calls, as flower store woman looks nervous, regretting having agreed to come into the house of a man she doesn’t know and who clearly has issues. He then comes out a few moments later looking worried.

“Mother’s even sicker than I thought! I’ve gotta call the doctor!”

Donny, what the fuck is your plan?

After Donny makes a fake phone call to the doctor, flower store woman insists on calling a cab. She begins to make said call before Donny helps her to be asleep with the aid of a blunt instrument.

She groggily awakes, nice and naked and strung up in a strange, metal, windowless room.

Donny, meanwhile, sits in his own room, staring at the box he schlepped home from his night errands. I wonder what it is.

Oh, that’s right—the flame-retardant suit complete with overly-dramatic face mask.

He walks into his new dungeon of sorts, pours a can of gasoline over the naked body of the flower store woman, and then proceeds to blast her with a fucking flame thrower. She screams in bloody agony as she burns to death, which is almost as painful as having to sit through this movie.

Lars von Trier's remake of Schindler's List was
banned almost immediately, but some critics
secretly hailed it as "fucking bad ass."

Donny watches inside his big astronaut suit, pleased with how his burn room is faring.

The next day, Donny pulls up alongside a woman on the side of the road experiencing car trouble.

“Would you like a lift to the next gas station?” he asks innocently enough.

aka

"Would you like to feel my flames on your cheeks?"

The woman gratefully gets in the truck with him.

“Mind if we drop some stuff off at my house? It’s on the way!”

“Sure!” the woman happily obliges.

Later, as her smoking body hangs from chains and hand-shackles, Donny continues to look more and more pleased with himself.

At a nearby convenience store, Donny spies an attractive woman paying for some items. He blocks her attempt to exit by offering such manly services as, “some help” carrying her groceries, as well as “a ride home.”

The woman clearly isn’t interested and brushes past him, as Donny becomes more insistent.

The clerk intervenes, telling Donny that he’s only bothering her.

“You’re right,” Donny exclaims. “I better go apologize!”

Later, Donny carries that woman's body into his mother’s room and he introduces the two of them. Then, despite how things have been going, Donny begins going even crazier, having spotted his mother’s ghost’s reflection in the mirror behind him, which is genuinely creepy thanks to an intrusive music sting.

He then hears all of his burned women, whose skeletons he keeps in rocking chairs in a room in his house, giggling and laughing at him.

“You bitches!” he screams at them, slapping their charred faces. “You think you can laugh at me? Well…no more laughing!”

He then goes downstairs and puts on his music. Loud.

Despite this loudness, he falls asleep and dreams of women grabbing at him from crevices in a blue desert. He shakes himself awake and sees his flaming, green-faced mother at the top of the stairs, bellowing, “I’ll get you, Donald! I’ll get you!”

Boy, asleep or awake, Donny’s life is the pits.

Donny goes to church to steal holy water to ward off his insane mother, I guess, and has a philosophical argument with the priest about evil. Donny makes his confession and then comes home to forgive his mother. He anoints her face with holy water, making the sign of the cross.

There. All better.

Donny almost doubled-back after leaving the house, having
forgotten to turn on the humidifier for his mother, but then he
remembered she was a burnt corpse, and he smiled, relieved.

Donny calls his boyfriend from work and the two make plans to take some girlies to—you guessed it—a disco!

I love the '70s!

Donny goes to buy a shirt, which takes years. Every second he spends on screen not burning naked women makes this movie that many seconds too long.

He goes to the disco to meet his pallies for the evening, and if you can make it through this scene without checking your watch or e-mail, then you’re a stronger person than I am. To say that nothing even remotely interesting happens in this whole scene would be an insult to nothing.

Donny proceeds to sit and watch everyone dance as he looks boring and nervous. When his date for the evening sachets over and tries to yank him to the dance floor, Donny picks up the candle off the table and smashes it into girl’s face, which is a perfectly acceptable way of declining to dance.

He makes his escape and drives home, as the voices in his head whisper that everything is okay, and that he did good.

Then he picks up two giggling girls along the side of the road.

Jesus, Donny. How do you do it? Is the secret to your success setting women on fire?

Because I’m willing to try that…

Donny takes the girls home and they wander around admiring his big house. Then he shoves them into his secret burn room, and introduces them to his fire. However, he grows distracted in his room of bodies and doesn’t finish the job of burning them alive, which disappoints me greatly, because why else am I watching this movie?

Donny’s boyfriend, concerned about his friend’s growing insanity, goes to get the priest, and together they go to Donny’s house. They rescue the sadly unhurt girls, and the priest wanders upstairs to find Donny.

And find Donny he does. Along with Donny’s flamethrower.

Say, what do you get when you set a priest on fire?

The end of this movie, thankfully?

Almost.

Disco Inferno, anyone? ZING!

Donny's collection of burned women get up off their chairs, and in another genuinely creepy scene, slowly creep toward him, their skeleton arms outstretched. If only this movie didn’t have that whole thing called the “beginning” and “middle” to drag it down...

Donny flips shit and burns them—and himself—to death.

The movie ends with a lame attempt at setting up a sequel as a completely unrelated boy gets smacked around by his mother, hears creepy voices in his head, and stares dumbly at the camera.

Cut to Black.

AND DISCO!

HEY, KNOW WHAT'S A REAL MOVIE?

HANGING COFFINS OF CHINA

Hanging coffins are an ancient funeral custom of some minority groups, especially the Bo people of southern China. Coffins of various shapes were mostly carved from one whole piece of wood. Hanging coffins either lie on beams projecting outward from vertical faces such as mountains, are placed in caves in the face of cliffs, or sit on natural rock projections on mountain faces.

It was said that the hanging coffins could prevent bodies from being taken by beasts and also bless the soul eternally.

 

JUST FYI

 

Sorry?

REVIEW: PRESIDENT WOLFMAN

President Wolfman is less of a narrative and more of a film-making experiment. It asks the questions: Can a coherent AND entertaining film be made from existing material and stock footage? Can you overdub nearly all of this original footage with new voice actors and maintain consistency? Conceptually based primarily on 1973's Werewolf of Washington starring Dean Stockwell, upon which a large portion of this new film's footage has been assembled, President Wolfman manages to revitalize an older obscure title, re-imagine it in the goofiest of ways possible, actually manage to carry forward a cohesive plot, and even lampoon the current political climate all at the same time. (It also has its own theme song!)

President John Wolfman (pronounced Wolfmin, and still played by Dean Stockwell) has a problem: not only do a majority of Americans support the Chimerica proposal (which is essentially China buying the United States flat-out [tell me that hasn't happened already]), and not only has he been saddled with a do-nothing congress (hey, wait a minute!), but he's also a fucking werewolf. Hilarity ensues as he deals with those problems.

Anyone who knows me and my weird film habits knows that I am a sucker for a stupid title, especially when it comes to so-bad-it's-good cinema. It's the reason why I've actually sat through stuff like Ninja Terminator and Crazy Fat Ethel 2. With those kinds of titles comes a certain kind of expectation: to be goofy, amusing, never boring, and despite all good intentions, misfiring by 100%. Films like these are novelty; they exist in their own strange sub-sub-sub-genre of horror where nothing else will ever be quite like it, and they carry such ill-conceived concepts that one has to wonder how on earth they ever made it to celluloid. It was because of this I enthusiastically sat down with President Wolfman, expecting to see a rather straightforward film about the President of the United States of America suffering from lycanthropy. And while I did kinda-sorta see that, I saw this other thing, too: a sort of "Mystery Science Theater 3000"/Black Dynamite/Kentucky Fried Movie hybrid boasting a very specific kind of humor: immature. 

Have a sample below:

- "67%. That's what the polls say."

- "I don't listen to polls. They are tall pieces of wood that can't talk, used for holding telephone wires and escaped bears."

Or:

"No wonder they call you Speaker of the House. You never shut the fuck up."

Or maybe:

"You got the lucky shift. You're assigned to President John Wolfman himself. You have to shave his balls, take his butt temperature in his butt, and get a penis sample."

That's the caliber of humor you'll be getting with President Wolfman.

While obviously not for everyone, it's certainly for someone. I'm not going to say I laughed at every gag, but I definitely had a good time.

Fans of immature, off-color, politically incorrect, and flat-out fucked up humor should definitely check this out.  

PRIMITIVE PHOTOSHOP

 

People got bored at work in the 1800s, too.

CRAPPYPASTA: LATE NIGHT AT JEFFERSON JR. HIGH

Johnny was a very forgetful student, but he was pretty much average. Like everyone in his neighborhood he went to Jefferson Jr. High. He has few friends. Their names are Bill, Joe, and Nick.

One day after school Johnny forgot his cellphone in his homeroom. He and his three friends went to get it. When they went up the stairs they heard the doors close. They had been locked in the school. They thought nothing of it at first but just as they turned around they saw a shadowy figure bolt across the hall. They all stood for what seemed like forever in fear. Then they went over to Johnny’s homeroom. Johnny walked to his phone on the desk but before he grabbed it he saw a text appear from an unknown number. The text read “I know that you are all here and your friend Joe will die next.” Johnny looked to his friends, but there he saw that something was… missing. Then it hit him. Joe was gone!

They all went to search for him. When they got to the second floor hallway Bill felt something drip onto his nose. Then another. He looked up to see red liquid dropping from the vent above. When they opened the vent Joe’s lifeless body fell to the ground. The three that were left disposed of the body out a window into a bush. They continued to the media lab. Nick saw a single computer on. A note was left and it read “Dear Johnny, I killed Joe. Nick and Bill are next. Nick looked to Johnny and said it’s for you. When he finished reading he looked back at the two but again one was missing. This time it was Bill. Nick and Johnny continued on again. Just then Nick said “Why don’t we call the police?” Johnny said “Great idea!” He dialed 911. It ringed and noone answered. He thought it to be odd because they should always pick up. When he glanced at the phone he saw the words “number not avalible.” Nick was petrified with fear because he was next.

Johnny told Nick he was sorry that he couldn’t help. Nick was beginning to give up. Then Johnny continued on. He heard Nick scream “Help!” When Johnny looked back he saw Nick laying there with a stab wound in his throat and a note left on his head reading “All of your friends are dead. I would have gotten you but the busses are pulling in. If you do not want to go to prison leave through the back door. P.S. It was unlocked the whole time.” Johnny left the school crying because he now knows he could have saved his only friends the whole time.

Every night after that day Johnny reads the text he had gotten that read “I know that you are all here and your friend Joe will die next.” And exactly one year from that night Johnny got another text from the killer of his friends bodies sat down in front of a wall that had a smiley face drawn in blood above each one with a message underneath reading “Here is a picture for you to remember your friends by. Goodbye.”

Credit To – Jacob Roof

Run!

(Crappypasta.)

INSANITY

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”