The Horror Geek – News, Rants and Reviews From The Horror Geek!

In the realm of Jaws knock-offs, two films stand above all others Enzo Castellari’s Great White – which never got a legitimate American release because Universal sued Castellari and company and won – and Joe Dante’s Piranha. Piranha also felt Universal’s legal wrath according to legend, but the studio apparently backed down after Jaws director Steven Spielberg saw the film and loved it. Of the two films, I really love Castellari’s more – but Dante’s Piranha is a lot of fun as well.

When two kids decide to skinny dip in a pool at an abandoned military facility, they get more than they bargained for. The pool isn’t empty – it’s home to a pack of genetically mutated piranha. Seems Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy) has been carrying on his research even after the government pulled the plug. When a skip tracer, Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is sent to find the missing kids, she meets alcoholic mountain man Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman). Dillman is coerced into taking her to the military base and before you can say “eco disaster”, Maggie’s drained the pond and released the carnivorous fish into the nearby river. The fish (which can also live in salt water) eat their way toward the ocean (including run-ins with kids at a summer camp and a rich folk at a swanky new resort on the river) while Paul and Maggie race desperately to keep them from getting to the sea and the world beyond.. Oh yeah, the military isn’t really all that interested in stopping this threat – nor is the evil doctor played by genre legend Barbara Steele.

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Forbidden World, the third film in producer Roger Corman’s unofficial trilogy of Alien clones (following Inseminoid and Galaxy of Terror), is arguably the sleaziest of the bunch. Featuring naked women, a slimy tentacle monster who feels like the inspiration for nearly every hentai anime film to emerge in the past two decades, and some surprisingly decent gore, these are fine examples of why Corman’s productions are still revered when so many other cheapie exploitation films from the same era have faded into obscurity.

In typical Corman fashion, Forbidden World was made fast and cheap. The sets from Galaxy of Terror had yet to be torn down, so the maverick producer gave editor Allan Holzman a challenge – take a day and see if he could shoot something interesting. Holzman, looking to break into directing, ran with the opportunity. He recruited actor Jesse Vint and shot over 90 set-ups in a single day. Corman then viewed the footage and liked what he saw – and Forbidden World was given the greenlight.

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It’s hard to believe that Death Race 2000 is 35 years old now, but it’s still just as much campy fun as it was back in 1975. It’s a relic of a bygone era, yet its odd social commentary is just as relevant today as it was back then – perhaps even moreso. In this regard, Death Race 2000 is sort of like Romero’s Dawn of the Dead – it’s not as good a film overall, but it is eerily prescient in predicting the future.

While we’ve passed the year 2000 without an event like the Transcontinental Road Race – a cross country rally where cartoonish drivers and their navigators travel from one coast to the other while scoring points for running down innocent pedestrians – the film’s commentary on the media and sensationalism of violence as entertainment seem quite valid. Maybe that’s a stretch on my part, but I don’t think so – I think some of the most profound commentary on our society was reflected in the cult films of that era.

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It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Platinum Dunes. The company, who continues to remake classic horror films (usually poorly) has demonstrated repeatedly that they don’t really get what made the films they’re remaking so beloved in the first place. I feel bad about that, because producer Brad Fuller seems like a nice guy and as though his heart is in the right place. The problem is that I get the feeling that he loves these movies but doesn’t really understand them. The company’s new remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street seems to bear this out.

To be fair, the Elm Street reboot is arguably the closest the PD guys have come to getting one of these things right – and that it comes on the heels of last year’s tolerable rebooting of Friday the 13^th almost makes me feel optimistic that maybe they’re starting to figure it out. Unfortunately, for every thing that Sam Bayer’s Elm Street update gets right, there’s at least one other thing it screws up.

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Horror author Stephen King has had more than a few of his novels and short stories adapted to film—normally with disastrous results (Maximum Overdrive, anyone? How about Graveyard Shift?) However, the one that fans are most divided over is The Shining—which King purists dislike because of the liberties it takes with the novel’s plotline, and the rest of us site as one of the rare examples of a film being better than the book it was based on. Now, before I start getting hate mail from the King contigent, allow me to interject a personal opinion. I like King’s book—in fact, it’s one of my favorite horror novels. I also like Kubrick’s film—which I find to be slightly more interesting than the novel. Personally, I’ve never seen the reason for the divisiveness. Both are finely crafted works that should be appreciated on their own merits, not linked to each other. End of editorial.

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When The Blair Witch Project took the world by storm a decade ago, everyone predicted huge things for directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. The two guys would be able to “write their own ticket” many scribes predicted—but it never really happened. I’m not sure why Myrick and Sanchez didn’t parlay their indie success into lucrative studio careers. If I had to guess, I’d say it was probably because both guys seemed more interested in making horror films that appealed to them than just working in the mercenary studio system. However, they have made other films. Today we’re taking a look at Sanchez’s Altered—one of the better alien movies to emerge in recent years.

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As a bonafide lover of all things nasty nun related, I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me so long to get around to writing about Joe D’Amato’s 1979 nunsploitation classic, Images in a Convent. I first experienced the film years ago, but it was on a grainy multigenerational bootleg and I didn’t think it was fair to tell everyone about a title most people would never be able to track down in the first place. However, Media Blasters gifted us all with a very nice two-disc special edition back in 2005—and I have no excuse for why it’s taken me five years since then to finally get around to talking about this unforgettable piece of European sleaze. I get sidetracked easily, what can I say?

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There have been many attempts made over the years to bring HP Lovecraft’s fiction to the big screen. Some of them have been more successful than others (oddly enough, what may be the most successful attempt—John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness—wasn’t actually based on a Lovecraft story at all…), but none has managed to perfectly capture the feelings of dread and terror inspired by the author’s work. That changed back in 2005—not with a big budget effects-laden Hollywood extravaganza, but instead thanks to a short film put together by the HP Lovecraft society. The Call of Cthulhu is not only the greatest HPL adaptation to date, it’s an amazing cinematic achievement regardless of subject matter.

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I wasn’t sure what to expect going into Travis Betz’s Lo. All I really knew was that it was about a guy who summoned a demon. Having seen about a bazillion horror movies during my life and career, this vague plot synopsis could have gone one of a hundred ways. I was pretty cocky—figuring I could guess where it was headed. I was also completely wrong. Lo is a film about a guy who summons a demon, but it’s more than that—it’s a romantic drama with horror undertones, a comedy with gore, a musical, and a stage play captured on film. It’s not without flaws—some serious, others forgivable—but it’s difficult to look at what Betz has achieved on what was surely a miniscule budget and hold those negatives against him.

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On the surface (and after being assaulted with a seemingly never-ending barrage of commercials, internet banner ads, and pop-ups) it would be easy to think of John Stockwell’s new film Turistas as a sort of spiritual brother to Eli Roth’s Hostel. In some ways, this is true—both films feature American lead characters acting like morons in a foreign locale—sort of the inverse of the whole “Borat equation”. Unlike Hostel, which was a balls-out exploitation flick with some super gore FX, Turistas is really only related to Hostel in terms of thematic content—which will be either a blessing or a condemnation depending on how big a fan you were of Roth’s brutal little film.

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