Creature
Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus
Director: Jack Perez
Written by: also Jack Perez
Runtime: 90 mins
Country: USA
Language: English
Certification: USA:R
Production Company: The Asylum
Watch it now on Netflix Streaming!
Another exploitation film from The Asylum, the studio that has brought us dozens of pop-culture rip-offs including Transmorphers (breview coming soon), The Terminators, and The Day Earth Stopped, MS vs GO is a fairly worthy entry into the giant-monster flick genre. Unfortunately, the movie as a whole obviously can’t cash the checks written by the box art.
Ice Spiders
Director: Tibor Takács
Language: English
Studio: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 86 min
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Certification: R
A group of “Olympic” skiers are taken to a remote ski lodge by their coach in the hopes that being cut off from a wireless signal, those internets, and friends and family back home will force them to keep their minds on the slopes. However, none of them could guess that there is a military base nearby performing experiments on giant spiders, and that those spiders are now running amuck across the frozen landscape. Oh yeah, you smell that? We got ourselves a B movie!
Ice Spiders starts off with an ample amount of promise. The title alone is spectacular, and although “giant spiders” has been done, the setting and ideas are fairly unique. Also, when we’re introduced to our first sequence involving Rocky and Bob, two overeager hunters who run into Read the rest of this entry »
Hammerhead
Directed By: Michael Oblowitz
Release Date: 18 June 2005 (USA)
Tagline: Half Man. Half Shark. Total Terror
Also Known As: Hammerhead (USA) (DVD box title), SharkMan (International: English title)
MPAA: Rated R for violence.
Runtime: 92 min / Germany:88 min (DVD version)
Country: Aruba / USA
Language: English
Color: Color
Certification: Germany:18 / Netherlands:16 / USA:R
Buy it now at Amazon.com!
Sharks have always held a special place in my heart. In fact, I have a vivid memory of the very first picture I ever drew that I was happy with: A wholesome little crayon piece detailing a shark sinking its teeth into a helpless recreational swimmer. At that moment I knew I wanted to be an artist. Read the rest of this entry »
Bottom Feeder
Directed By: Randy Daudlin
Tagline: Hunger Pains have a whole new meaning….
Country: Canada
Language: English
Color: Color
Buy it now at Amazon.com!
Sometimes I wish I could take a movie, chop out the excess fat, burn my own version, erase the entire experience from memory and watch it all over again. Such is the case with Randy Daudlin’s monster flick Bottom Feeder.
This almost-good creature feature begins with the story of a famous geneticist hired by a billionaire burn victim to develop a serum to regenerate dying cells. The geneticist ends up producing more theories than results, and gets an overdose of his own medicine forced into his jugular. He is thrown into the cellar of an old hospital and left to survive off nothing but rats. The side effects of his overdose make him acquire the genetic traits of his food and he begins mutating into a rather lame and not very scary looking Rat-Man. Read the rest of this entry »
Octopus 2
Director: Yossi Wein
Runtime: 94 min
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color
Sound Mix: 5.1 Dolby Digital
Certification: USA:R (but don’t ask me why)
Octopus 2 is a rather misleading monster-shlock. After reviewing the B-lariously awesome Octopus I confidently picked Octopus 2 out of the lineup of hack-jobs and Aliens / Predator / Abyss / Terminator amalgamations. However, much like the opening 20 minutes of the original Octopus, I found myself watching instead of pointing and laughing.
The major difference between the two movies is that this lack of giggles and guffaws never came to an end with ‘pus 2. Even though the story is much simpler in ‘pus 2, where we follow Nick, a member of New York’s scuba police squad, as he tries to make sense of a mysterious drowning / murder, this movie throws so much Read the rest of this entry »
Sasquatch Hunters
Director: Fred Tepper
Runtime: 88 minutes
Country: USA
Color: Color
Studio: Sony
Certification: R (but only because they say the word “F%$*” about 47 times for absolutely no reason, besides exciting 13 year-olds?)
Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever buy this on amazon.com!
It’s hard to begin this review. Hell, it’s hard to begin, continue, and end this review. The easiest part of the entire process will be giving Sasquatch Hunters a rating.
Story: Extremely large group of people go into the woods looking for “something”. “Something” eats a lot of them.
Even the worst of the worst B-monster flicks, including the ones churned out very quickly and very cheaply by more modern techniques, have at LEAST 2 storylines going on. This movie has just the one. It attempts a second by creating intrigue Read the rest of this entry »
Octopus
Director: John Eyres
Country: USA
Language: English
Run Time: 100 minutes
Color: Color
Certification: UK:15 / USA:PG-13
Filmed in: Sofia, Bulgaria
I’ll get right down to the essentials on this slightly off-classic, giant monster movie. You’ll have to wait at least 50 minutes before you can safely and resoundingly begin to snicker and giggle. Before you hit that mark, there is little to roll your eyes about beyond the horrendously produced musical tracks. I have never heard a score that took me out of the moment (as monster-movie-mundane as it may be) like the background tunes of Octopus However, the laughs continuously multiply and intensify tenfold over the following thirty minutes. The movie ends on such an hilarious high-note that I nearly threw my back out while bursting with laughter. Octopus fails to provide an enormous amount of misses, but when the misses do occur, Read the rest of this entry »
Revenge of the Rats (Ratten Sie Werden Dich Kriegen)
Directed by: Jörg Lühdorff
Runtime: Germany: 98 min / USA: 104 min
Country: Czech Republich / Germany
Language: German / English (US dvd)
Color: Color
Sound Mix: Stereo
Certification: Germany: 12 / USA:PG-13
Sigh… Revenge of the Rats is a German-made, perfectly A-typical “Attack of the _______” thriller. The plot is as follows: Rats infest city on a garbage strike, inhabitants struggle with the disease-filled rodents. Although this movie has the advantage of instilling a bit more immediacy due to it’s realistic antagonist (aka it’s got rats instead of mutant crabs or giant rabbits), it’s only marginally better than your average straight-to-vid. If this is the first of it’s kind for you, then you’ll probably think it’s pretty darn entertaining. Because you are 11. For the rest of us who have seen this archetype many, many times, there isn’t much intrigue. But, let’s sift through the mounting heaps of garbage, avoiding the terminal rat-bites, and see what we can salvage. Read the rest of this entry »
Baby Blood
Directed by: Alain Robak
AKA: The Evil Within
Runtime: 82 min
Country: France
Language: French
Color: Color
Sound Mix: Dolby
Certification: Argentina:18 / Chile:18 / France:-12 / USA:R / West Germany:18 / Peru:18
Buy it now at Amazon.com!
I feel like I need to take a shower.
In 1990, the year of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie, The Hubble Space Telescope, The Spin Doctors and Public Enemy’s legendary “Fear of a Black Planet,” a horri-B-ly appealing piece of cinema was released. Its title: Baby Blood.
The story of this French film follows a voluptuous young woman named Yanka. She begins as a lowly performer in some off-key circus, taking all kinds of verbal and physical abuse from her manager. Out of the blue, one of the leopards is found liquidated in its cage. While Yanka is sleeping, a slimy Read the rest of this entry »
Skinned Deep
Directed by: Gabriel Bartalos
Runtime: 97 min
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color (DeLuxe)
Certification: USA:R / Germany:18 / UK:18
This gem of a B-dazzling B-movie is initially a re-hash of classics much like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A group of travelers is welcomed into a freaky slasher country-house by a seemingly benign granny lady. Once they’re sufficiently deep within the crazy-pit all hell breaks loose and the weirdies come out of the woodwork slashing, biting, and.. plate-throwing?
Yes, you heard right. There is a character in this movie named Plates. He is so aptly named because of a unique ability to buff and launch his porcelain discs at high velocities. Plates is played by the science-fiction and horror veteran Warwick Davis, the only actual actor in the film that has been in Read the rest of this entry »
