Tag Archives: gore o’clock

Absurdsworth

AbsurdVHS-2ABSURD

3 Stars  1981/X/90m

A.k.a. Anthropophagous II; The Grim Reaper 2; Horrible; Monster Hunter

Director: Joe D’Amato [as Peter Newton] / Writer: George Eastman [as John Cart] / Cast: George Eastman, Katya Berger, Annie Belle, Charles Borromel, Edmund Purdom, Hanja Kochansky, Ian Danby, Kasimir Berger.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “I’m no doctor, but that doesn’t look good.”


An as-yet un-re-submitted (!) resident of the infamous Video Nasties List of the early 80s, this sort-of sequel to the crappy Grim Reaper takes a lot of cues from Halloween, stirs in lashings of gore, and is therefore about 642% better than its predecessor.

Eastman is the beardy-loon on the run from Purdom’s priest Pleasence-clone when he is injured atop a spiked gate at the home of the “all-American” Bennett family: mom, dad, aggressively punchable brat-of-a-son Willy, and paralysed teenage sister Katya, who is confined to a cot-contraption upstairs until she can summon the strength to walk again. You can guess what’s coming later.

Beardy-loon is rushed to hospital where the doctors working on him comment that it’s “absurd” how his body repairs itself against the laws of science. He later wakes up and thanks the staff by driving a drill through the temple of a nurse and then feeding some other poor idiot’s bald head into a saw.

Naturally, he gravitates back to the Bennett house and does away with the stand-in babysitter before going after poor Katya and the replacement babysitter. All the while, Willy stands around like a tool and whines about things as everybody watching hopes that the reason this film found its way on to the Video Nasties List is because it did away with the insufferable little prick with extreme prejudice.

Alas, it doesn’t come to be. But Absurd is full of gratuitous violence all the same: the first two kills are the most splatterific, and things DO get tense towards the end as Katya – as we suspected – finds that inner strength to hobble around and takes on the maniac with a compass of all things and a game of hide and seek ensues.

Of all the Halloween Xeroxes out there, it’s certainly one of the most obvious, full of “I’ll go look, you stay here” dialogue, but it does pack some interesting moments, including a funny final shot, rendering it a fair retread through familiar surroundings and a mini Holy Grail for gorehounds and masochists who like to endure the presence of bad child actors who won’t fucking die.

Look out for Stagefright director Michele Soavi as the young biker victim.

Blurbs-of-interest: Purdom was also in Pieces and Don’t Open Til Christmas (which he also directed some of); Soavi also acted in A Blade in the Dark.

Hide and Day-Glo Shriek

HIDE AND GO SHRIEK

3 Stars  1987/18/91m

A.k.a. Close Your Eyes and Pray

“Close your eyes, count to ten, and run for your life!”

Director: Skip Schoolnik / Writer: Michael Kelly / Cast: Bunky Jones, Brittain Frye, George Thomas, Donna Balton, Annette Sinclair, Sean Kanan, Scott Fults, Ria Pavia, Scott Kubay, Jeff Levine.

Body Count: 7


By 1987, any surprises in the slasher movie were long dead and buried. I first read about Hide and Go Shriek in a film almanac that said it was better than most of its ilk due to “better than average acting” and then in another book that said it was worse than most of its ilk with “dreadful acting by a bunch of deserved unknowns”…

In the end, it falls somewhere in the middle. It’s alright. Once, anyway.

Eight teenagers with assorted sizes of hair – but in the XL range – celebrate the end of high school by partying after hours …in a FURNITURE STORE. Live it up, kids.

Once covertly therein, the kids regress in maturity and decide to act like pre-schoolers and have a game of hide and seek. Well, they had to pay homage to that deliciously pun-tastic title some way, right?

Amidst the games, jokes, and eventual sex-centric encounters, they begin to get wiped out by a shady killer who dresses up in the clothes of his most recent victim. Like in Terror Train. Teens are drowned, stabbed with mannequin limbs and tossed on to sharp arty thingies.

There are some gory murders but dim lighting becomes irritating as it grinds on, along with some of the surviving characters – FOUR of them in this film – all of whom have undergone personality bypass procedures. But there are a couple of creepy scenes: the cover gives away one such scene where a walking-bouffant hides under a bed as a scary pair of feet stride by and the decapitation-by-elevator is well done.

Sadly, in the final act, the film collapses into a downright strange propagandic, homophobic and rather wasteful piece of work. Too many characters survive and the identity of the killer pretty much pops up as an afterthought. That “better than average” acting? Yeah, it’s okay. There’s more room for tearful expositions with a reduced body count. Although, the fact that lead actress Jones is called Rebunkah has enabled me to call all people I meet called Rebecca by this name.

Worth a look if you’re a fan of enormous perms, banana clips, and day-glo fashion wear.

Blurbs-of-interest: Bunky Jones turned up in Grotesque under the name ‘Bunky Z’; Brittain Frye was later in Slumber Party Massacre III; Sean Kanan was in Hack!; Jeff Levine had bit parts in A Nightmare on Elm Street and Elm Street 4; Skip Schoolnik was the editor on Halloween II.

Be vewwy, vewwy quiet… I’m being hunted by wabbits

EASTER BUNNY, KILL! KILL!

3 Stars  2006/18/91m

“This year there will be no resurrection.”

Director/Writer: Chad Ferrin / Cast: Timothy Muskatell, Ricardo Gray, Charlotte Marie, David Z. Stamp, Amy Szychowski, Kele Ward, Jose I. Lopez, Ernesto Redarta, Marina Blumenthal, Trent Haaga.

Body Count: 8

Dire-logue: “I’d let him piss on my face just to see where it came from.”


In today’s alarmist over-politically correct society, it’s difficult to know when you can and can’t use particular words. Such a case presented itself to me in Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!, the protagonist of which is a mentally disabled teenager. Can we say retarded? Is that still allowed? I’m going to use it anyway, they said it plenty of times in the film.

That’s not all, EBK!K! is a no-budget horror experience that tosses a few dodgy themes right at ya: It’s not often you’re presented with a person charged with caring for said retarded kid phoning an obese paedophile and INVITING him over the “teach the boy a lesson”. But that’s what happens. Challenging stuff – this is horror of a different kind.

Rewinding back to the beginning, things kick off with a robber in the plastic bunny mask from the DVD cover holding up a convenience store and cruelly gunning down the clerk even after getting all the cash and promising not to harm him. The robber is Remington, a chubby, sleazy fella who’s somehow having it away with nice nurse Mindy, who cares for her retarded son Nicholas.

On “Easter Eve” (!?), a hobo gives Nicholas a pet rabbit, which the boy believes is the Easter Bunny. When Remington comes by to stay over, he threatens to kill the animal if Nicholas doesn’t tell Mindy that Rem can move in with them.

The next day, Mindy leaves for a hospital shift, foolishly placing him in Rem’s care. The moment she’s out of the door, Remington dials his kiddie-fiddling fat friend Ray Mann (it took me a while to get that too) and heads off to find a few hookers to amuse himself later in the evening.

Crutch-hobbling Ray begins down the corridor towards Nicholas’s room, calling to him, which is just fucking creepy. See the dire-logue for his grossest quip. Thankfully, as he squats to check under the bed for the absent kid, he gets a knife in the eye from the killer Easter Bunny instead and then a power drill through the back of the head. Ha.

Soon after, Mindy’s ex-maintenance guy (scared off by Remington earlier) drops by with a heavy to recover his tools from the house and pilfer anything else he fancies. Naturally, Bunny does them in too, buzz-saw dismemberment for one, repeated hammer blows to the skull for t’other.

Then Remington comes back with hookers Brooke and Candy and, yeah, they bite it first before the sleaze merchant is the only one left and the killer strikes him down before the grand unmasking and motive-bit. Was Nicholas capable of planning it all? What about the hobo who gave him the rabbit?

Actually, the revelation was quite unexpected but leaves questions as to events from earlier in the film and its effect is almost completely destroyed by an insanely stupid twist staple-gunned to the end. What the hell were they thinking with THAT?

It’s a shame because, until this point, Easter Bunny has overcome its budgetary constraints thanks to impressive editing that makes the most out of quick cuts that don’t linger on the grue like so many dollar store slasher flicks. It’s gory but fleeting, showing restraint where most opt for excess.

Strange really that Easter has been left on the shelf in terms of slashable calendar dates, I mean, Jesus ‘returned from the dead’ so why is there no zombie movie based around that??

Blurbs-of-interest: Director Ferrin and Muskatell were both involved in Unspeakable.

A shot of the good stuff

Needle-2NEEDLE

3.5 Stars  2010/15/86m

“Your fate has been chosen.”

Director: John V. Soto / Writers: Soto & Anthony Egan / Cast: Michael Dorman, Travis Fimmel, Tahyna Tozzi, Jessica Marais, Trilby Glover, Luke Carroll, Nathaniel Buzolic, Khan Chittenden, Jane Badler, John Jarratt, Ben Mendelsohn.

Body Count: 7


Imagination in the horror genre is often lacking and so this impressive little voodoo-slasher all the way from Australia deserves extra credit for the ambitions of its premise alone…

College kid Ben Rutherford receives a bizarre antique box – the last item remaining in his late father’s will – an ornate little contraption with ‘Le Vaudou Mort’ on the top. He doesn’t want it but is told by a college professor it could hold some worth and so hides it under his bed after showing his group of school friends.

When he finds the box is stolen, an event that coincides the return of his estranged police photographer brother, Ben isn’t so bothered until the mysterious fiend who has box-napped it begins using it for its created intentions: Killing.

Turns out the box is used to create mini wax figurines that are used for voodoo when the desired victim’s photograph is inserted and blood and wax poured in the top. Said victim hears the cranking of the in-box mechanics before whatever wounds the assailant wishes to inflict on the victim are carried out with various needles.

So it goes, the jock is first to find himself slashed to pieces from the inside out, then a wall-climber is literally broken into pieces. Ben and big-bro Marcus are forced into collaborating to work out what the box is, who has it and why their using it to take out a bunch of harmless college students.

There’s morgue investigations (in which Aussie horror staple John Jarratt plays the chipper coroner), a trip to the nuthouse to see one of the few witnesses to the box’s substantial killing abilities, and eventually ye olde back-to-the-beginning where the hands-free killer and their vengeful motive is revealed.

Needle takes it’s time in setting up the horror, a restraint too many slasher films are incapable of exercising. Though it commits the increasingly present sin of only including a gay couple who are a pair of hot girls (heaven forbid we see a couple of men kissing!), it’s interesting to cast two male leads – final boys? – is the lead roles, while nominal love-interest Mary is a possible suspect…

The eventual identity of the loon is revealed nicely, with gentle memories of Urban Legend and a believable “this is why I did it” jabber.

Aspects of Final Destination portents-of-doom are well played; the jogger who dies first runs past several lights that short out and fizzle in the distance and there’s that underlying question of who is next to hear the crankings of death? Gore is present without being OTT and there’s a certain charm about the interplay between the brothers that you don’t often get when the lead role is a traumatised cheerleader. That said, the writing isn’t too macho to have the guys run in ready for a fight: Ben is scared to go and explore the creepy old house. A refreshing change of pace.

Inject yourself with a shot of Needle, it’ll be quite the trip.

Blurbs-of-interest: John Jarratt was the Mick Dundee-heavy psycho in Wolf Creek and its sequel, plus the TV series, and was also in Next of Kin.

We are family

midnight1981-2MIDNIGHT

2 Stars  1980/88m

“…When the clock strikes death.”

A.k.a. Backwoods Massacre

Director/Writer: John Russo / Cast: Melanie Verlin, Lawrence Tierney, John Hall, Charles Jackson, Greg Besnak, John Amplas, Robin Walsh, David Marchick, Doris Hackney, Bob Johnson, LaChele Carl, Ellie Wyler, Maura Minteer.

Body Count: 14

Direlogue: “I hope you listen to what you told them and don’t go camping around here.”


Night of the Living Dead co-author Russo directs from his own novel of the same name this trite, misogynistic Texas Chain Saw photocopy in which a backwoods mama teaches her four children (three boys, one girl) that people are demons and must be sacrificed to Satan.

Into this redneck nightmare runs Nancy, a God-fearing Jamie Lee wannabe on the run from her abusive stepdad (Tierney). She hitches a ride with a couple of frat boys on their way to Fort Lauderdale. After giving a lift to a jive talking Reverend and his daughter – who prattle on about unsolved murders in the locale before they both meet nasty ends – the three teens make the mistake of camping out.

Both boys are shot dead by two of the psycho siblings, disguised as cops, and Nancy is taken prisoner to put on the conveyor belt to sacrifice at midnight along with two other young girls.

Russo makes the most of the bleak settings and the redneck style works well, but the narrative is driven by overlong, hammy expositions rather than action. There’s also little insight into the psychosis of the killer family other than the corpse of the mother held at blame, sis taking control, and why their sacrifices are exclusively teenage girls.

Add to this a horrible Euro-country theme song that crops up at every available opportunity and one might understand why the family were driven mad after all.

Blurbs-of-interest: John Russo co-produced The Majorettes and directed a seldom-seen sequel to Midnight in 1993.

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