Nov 26, 2011
Nov 25, 2011
LITTLE PIGS
"Have you ever had a single moment's thought about my responsibilities? Have you ever thought, for a single solitary moment, about my responsibilities to my employers? Has it ever occurred to you that I have agreed to look after the Overlook Hotel until May the First? Does it matter to you at all that the owners have placed their complete confidence and trust in me, and that I have signed a letter of agreement, a contract, in which I have accepted that responsibility? Do you have the slightest idea what a moral and ethical principle is? Do you? Has it ever occurred to you what would happen to my future if I were to fail to live up to my responsibilities? Has it ever occurred to you? Has it?"
If we don't, remember me.
Nov 22, 2011
Nov 21, 2011
SHITTY FLICKS: WEASELS RIP MY FLESH
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.
God knows where I first heard about Weasels Rip My Flesh. Whether it was Amazon’s “if you liked that bullshit, check out this bullshit” feature, or a friendly fellow bad movie connoisseur on a message board, all I can say is: I owe you a blow job. Weasels Rip My Flesh is, without a doubt, one of the greatest bad movies I have had the extreme pleasure of watching. Even that title — Weasels Rip My Flesh — who’s saying that? Who is the person acknowledging the ripping of their own flesh by weasels? Is there a person out there calmly recording their thoughts in a journal?
“Dear Diary: Mondays always suck. Weasels rip my flesh, and they leave pooooop tracks all over my bedspread. It’s cuz they walk in their poop and then walk on my bed. Mom’s gonna flip LMAO.”
The beauty of Weasels Rip My Flesh, much like all other bad movies that get it right, is that no matter how ridiculous and absurd onscreen action can get, everything is played 100% seriously. You start to wonder if director Nathan Schiff took a page from the whacked-out journal of Andy Kauffman and made this movie as a joke,to entertain the tens of people who made up the cast and crew of this abomination. In subsequent interviews, however, he comes across as such a pretentious and arrogant bastard that the joy comes in knowing he meant every goo-filled, out-of-focus second.
Nathan Schiff’s magnum opus begins with (I swear to God) a model rocket sitting in a sort of diorama, but please know this is supposed to be a real rocket. Called THE COURIER (we know this thanks to the adorning thick, black ,and crooked stick-on letters), this space rocket sits on an unknown planet, surrounded by flaming rocks and is on a very dangerous space mission (kitchen table): to collect sample of blue goo to bring back to Earth for God knows what reason.
 |
| Unbeknownst to the astronauts, their space mission was minutes from being aborted by their angry mother. |
One of the rocket’s flaps slowly opens to reveal a space crane (hair clip), which slowly extends out of the hatch on a hydraulic lift (branch cutter) to collect said goo. The crane then drips the goo into a toxic waste materials container (sippy cup), after which the Courier takes off, revealing its fire-spewing engine (light bulb) as it fades off into space and back to Earth.
After the director films a wall painted with stars (space), the Courier enters the Earth’s atmosphere (courtesy of a sloppy cut and some shots of spinning clouds), encounters a malfunction, and crash lands into a lake.
Two young boys, with thick Long Island accents and even filthier mouths, find the wreckage of the rocket, marked with a hilarious hand-scrawled “Danger: Radioactive Contents” warning. The boys retrieve what looks to be lcoffee thermoses from the water, all the while having this conversation:
BOY #1: Look what I found! [picks up thermos] What the hell is this?BOY #2: Bring ‘em up heeh! What’d ya foind?BOY #1: I dunno, dey was floatin’ around da wawda!BOY #2: I ain’t neva seen nothin’ like dis befoow.BOY #1: Open it!BOY #2: [seriously] Yah I might open dis.
Suddenly, and without warning (or even a shot of a weasel), the younger boy shrieks off-screen in pain.
BOY #2: What happ'd??BOY #1: Some’in just bit me in the leg!BOY #2: Holy shit ya see where it went?BOY #1: What if it has rabies or some’in?
 |
| DANGER: BEWARE OF INCOMPETENCE |
The older boy finds the hole that contains the biting creature and he decides that the best revenge is to fill it with the gunk he someone knows is inside the container. The younger boy protests, “Don’t go near it, ya’asshole!” Well, th’asshole does, and he pours the suddenly bright geen and liquid goo down into the hole. Then they leave, ignorant of the fact they have created a new breed of weasel too monstrous for words and too ridiculous for legitimate celluloid.
Meanwhile, down in the hole, a very fake or dead weasel lays surrounded by black newspaper that we’re supposed to think is cave wall, as an off-screen crew member feigns a living animal by rocking the weasel prop back and forth. The green goo pours directly onto the weasel’s face for a few moments, and thanks to some fancy-ass stop-motion animation, we are able to witness the terrifying transformation from non-flesh ripping weasels to Weasels Rip My Flesh. The transformation is horrendously out of focus, as is literally every other shot in the movie that is a close-up. An unblinking and obviously plastic looking eye gurgles around in a bit of jelly before we sloppily cut to the finished product: something that looks nothing at all like a weasel, and more like the head of a squid.
This new weasel monster bursts forth out of his hole and hauls-ass to the nearest street, where it is promptly run over by a dim-witted looking man, its arm being severed from its mutant body. After examining the odd appendage, the man quickly wraps the arm in a mattress cover from his trunk (?) and gets back in his car with it, leaving the audience to wonder just what this man up to, if perhaps he’s somehow abreast to the situation at hand, and if these filmmakers are kidding.
The man arrives home with his new meaty friend and he calls his pally named Jake, whom he tells to come over at once to witness whatever exciting thing he has for him.
My guess?
Brown mutant arm.
While waiting for Jake to show up, the man puts on some dish gloves, takes out some pliers, and begins to perform a severely half-assed dissection of the arm. We cut to a close-up, and wouldn’t you know it, one of his hands does not have a glove. But don’t worry, once we cut back to the medium shot, he does again.
Phew, that was close. This movie was almost questionable.
 |
| "Just tell the bully you're not afraid," Billy's mom had said. It was the last thing anyone had ever said to him not in Heaven. |
The man pries off a piece of bone, drops it in a mason jar, and brings it to his living room, where he pokes and prods at it with a series of instruments.
Say, I have a question, curious man: who the fuck are you?
Jake arrives and questions the man, whose name we find out is Fred, about the arm. Fred regales Jake with the story, and caps off the story with inviting Jake to come see the arm for himself.
But it’s missing.
“Who would believe this? An arm that…moved by itself?” Jake asks, and then looks dumbly offscreen, waiting for something to happen.
And then something does: the arm flops across the floor and scratches at Jake’s foot. Jake reaches down to his bloody wound and moans as Fred grabs the phone to call an ambulance.
“I would like to report an injury and some very strange goings-on,” Fred calmly explains into his phone. Jake, now completely taken over by weasel fever, grabs Fred by the throat and strangles him from behind, as he spews white foam and moans some more.
With an amusing cut in the soundtrack to allow one of our characters to emit a single “UGH,” crazy Jake grabs a knife and saws off one of Fred’s incredibly realistic (haha, right) looking arms. He then stumbles out into the wild and runs off into the wooded distance.
This is where we meet Boy in Blue Camp T-Shirt, and his dog, Rusty. As his canine companion runs off and discovers the dismembered bodies of our previous strongly-accented precocious boys, Blue Shirt runs off to, I assume, tell a fu-manchued policeman,. Meanwhile, Rusty continues to sniff at what used to be annoying Long Islanders.
 |
| "Late again, eh, Cameron? Probably smoking and shaving if know you." |
And then we meet Inspector Cameron, the bad-assiest bad ass in Weaseltown. Cameron likes to smoke cigars, shave, and strut. And strut he does, over to his holster to randomly whip out his gun, look adoringly at it, and then put it down again. Hmm, I guess he’s a cop. Thank God he did that. I mean, how the fuck would we know otherwise?
Cameron fields a call, assuring whoever it was that called that he would be right there. He dresses in a sharp blazer, gets in his car, and drives to a non-descript plain, “the scene of at least fifteen murders” according to Cameron himself.
Once there, Cameron and his partner are accosted by the goofiest looking man in the world with a gun so tiny it makes me uncomfortable. The movie makes no attempt to give this man an identity, so his name henceforth will be Goofy, because it's a pretty appropriate moniker.
He forces them to march to a hill of dirt, where he demands they dig until they reveal a hatch that leads into an underground lab. In a moment of pure amazement, and with the courtesy of a continuity-murdering cut, the exterior shot of the steel hatch magically transforms into an interior shot of someone’s very plain basement window that in no way resembles the hatch we just saw. You might as well shoot a scene where a character says “look at this egg,” show a close-up of an egg, and then in all other shots, use a banana.
“Go up deh staihs, and don’t do anything funny. I like killing people,” threatens Goofy. He sits them down in someone’s 70s shag living room, complete with wood-paneled walls and a red lamp. Truly, this is a secret scientific laboratory.
 |
| "Sally, isn't that the guy who finger-banged you at the prom?" |
“This place looks like some kind of laboratory,” lies Cameron, casually withdrawing a cigar from his jacket as if he was hanging out with old friends.
“Come with me,” says Goofy and leads them into the back to show them what he’s been working on: a very normal looking weasel. The men react as if they are seeing something bizarre and out of this world (I think we are supposed to think it looks huge), but all we see is really just a normal weasel.
Goofy sits them back down in the shag room, pours everyone a glass of whiskey, and details the exploits of his secret science stuff. His plan: to create many species of mutant creatures and, I guess, take over the world? He doesn’t really go into specifics.
Cameron expresses hesitation in drinking his booze, fearing a sinister plot to overpower him, but when Goofy downs his own cup, Cameron feels safe enough to proceed.
Fuck, it was drugged. Cameron and his partner pass out, and these two dolts are such horrid actors that they can’t even make passing out look realistic. Cameron chooses to lay his head on the table while his partner’s head falls back, and he slowly, slowly falls to his side.
Goofy smiles, leans into the camera way too close, and we...
CUT TO:
A body on a gurney. And not just any body. Cameron’s partner’s body.
Shit.
To think, we grew so attached to him, what with not knowing his name and everything.
Goofy enters, undresses his sinister plotting brown button-up shirt (shudder) and puts on his official doing science stuff blue button-up. He withdraws a syringe from a tin coffee cop (haha), collects a sample of tainted weasel blood, and injects the man’s body with the needle.
 |
| "I BIT BOY BUTT TODAY. BOY BUTT THIS BIG. IT WAS FULL OF SMELLING." |
Cameron awakes, shackled in some kind of boiler room. Being the master of Weaseltown that he is, he withdraws a cigar from his pocket with his mouth, lights the cigar with an open water heater flame, and then burns the rope off his arms, which, up close, looks like frayed underwear elastic. After he burns through what he could have just ripped apart by hand, he makes his escape. Grabbing a randomly placed butcher’s knife, he opens one of the canisters containing a weasel specimen and hacks it apart. It makes a weird moan noise and then bleeds out, just like my old ball-and-chain.
Cameron then grabs a can of gasoline, sniffs it to make sure he’s got the right stuff, and then splashes ALL of the canisters containing random bits of diseased weasel. He lights it up and watches it burn, as the sound of old war footage plays inexplicably in the background.
Goofy randomly talks to himself, convinced that the mutant weasels hold the key to eternal life, finally letting us know what he’s been up to.
But it’s too late.
Goofy sees his burned weasels and becomes enraged. A battle to end all battles ensues; Goofy with a crowbar, and Cameron with his gun. Only one will be victorious. Well, as one could assume, the guy with the gun wins.
Sort of.
After Cameron gets his cheek scratched with the crowbar, he shoots the fleeing Goofy in the back, who is then attached by his big mutant Frankenweasel monster. The monster rips a huge wound in his back, smashes his head against the wall, and spews goo all over the place. Goofy, making a last-ditch effort to save himself, inserts a surgical probe directly into the Hole of Weakness of Frankenweasel’s face.
And this works like gangbusters! Only not. Frankenweasel attacks Goofy again, this time ripping off his arm. Cameron, having had enough of this, opts to just leave the secret laboratory.
But his terror is not over yet.
ANOTHER monstrous weasel, the one the men earlier looked at in horror, bursts through the ground and rushes at Cameron, who takes out his gun, points it, and does that thing that cowboys do in movies where they use their palm to keep pulling back the hammer to shoot as fast as they can. The only problem is the gun doesn’t make a single bang or boom, so clearly John Wayne Cameron is not.
He grapples with the giant mole puppet for a little until Frankenweasel bursts through the ground and fights the giant weasel puppet to weasel death. Then they both suddenly catch fire.
Why?
Why not?
Weasels Rip My Flesh, ya know.
 |
| "Well, my specialty is in giant freak armadillos, Dave, but yeah, I definitely see some inflammation here..." |
Goofy, having survived his third brush with death, stumbles out of the lab and runs to the nearby lake. Cameron sees him and follows close behind, as Goofy looks longingly at the water, assuming this is his only means of escape. He wades out into the water, but alas, Cameron comes for him, ready to spread some Weaseltown justice.
“A boy like you has got to realize his limitations,” says Cameron, stealing a line directly from another movie about a bad ass cop fighting giant weasels: Magnum Force. The two men whip out their guns, but Cameron beats him to the draw, shooting Goofy twice in the chest, and rightfully assuming the threat is over. Instead, Goofy draws his gun and cheaply shoots Cameron in the leg. Cameron crashes to the ground, grasping his wound that pumps tomato soup. And just when we think it’s curtains for Cameron (and in one of the best "why the fuck did that just happen?" endings of all time), an unrealistically small Great White Shark LUNGES out of the water and RIPS Goofy’s arm off.
Cameron barely has a chance to stumble off into the sunset before THE END flies at the screen.
Stupid, violent, ludicrous, amateur, including sharks, and 64 minutes. That’s how I like ‘em.
Nov 19, 2011
TO MAKE US DESPAIR
“You don't blame us for being here, do you? After all, we have no place to go. No home... Incidentally, what an excellent day for an exorcism...”
Nov 18, 2011
MUSIC FOR FILM: RAVENOUS
Ravenous will be the subject of an upcoming Unsung Horrors post. In the meantime, listen to one track from one of my favorite film scores. Tonally, the score is all over the place - from goofy to vintage patriotic to adrenalin pumping to downright creepy (like this one).
Nov 17, 2011
EXORCISM
Anneliese Michel complained of seeing disturbing visions while saying her prayers. Later, evil voices giving her commands followed. Finally, Anneliese began showing an aversion to religious iconography. An older woman, a friend of the Michel family, noticed this while on a pilgrimage with Anneliese. She said that Anneliese smelled “hellishly bad” and took her to see some priests. Many of them said Anneliese needed a doctor. However, one eventually said Anneliese needed an exorcism and an exorcism was eventually granted.
In 1975, Anneliese Michel and her parents stopped seeking medical advice and gave over Anneliese’s fate to the Roman exorcism ritual ... Anneliese herself said that Judas, Nero, Hitler, Cain, Lucifer and others were inside of her. Over the next ten months, Father Arnold Renz and Pastor Ernst Alt performed 67 exorcisms for the tormented girl.
There are claims that Anneliese spoke several different languages (or the demons and evil souls that possessed her did) during the exorcisms ... She allegedly urinated and defecated on the floor frequently, also licking up her own urine. She ate insects, growled at religious icons and sat under her kitchen table barking for two days.
Anneliese Michel died of dehydration and malnutrition on July 1, 1976. The 23-year-old woman weighed 68 pounds at the time of her death ... Forty-two of the exorcisms were audio-recorded...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)