1989 – Horror Ghouls

Puppet Master (1989)

Posted on June 23, 2023October 6, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

It’s time to take a dive into the dim-lighted, twisted, wacky and demented world of Full Moon from the mind of the master of puppets himself, Charles Band, where it’s Halloween 24/7.

Full Moon Features were established in the very late 80s and Mr. Band was already a veteran in the independent movie business, which had the Empire Pictures in his legacy of producing primarily low-budget horror/fantasy films spewed out for the blooming VHS market. Most of which are cheap schlocks aimed at a niche audience. Some notable titles from that era includes The Dungeonmaster, Troll, Ghoulies I and II, Trancers, Crawlspace, Rawhead Rex, TerrorVision, Re-Animator, From Beyond, Cellar Dweller and the list goes to the moon and back.

But with its brand new company after the financial collapse of Empire Pictures, it needed to get more serious and create a flagship film series to kickstart a new era where VHS was still king (and very expensive to buy). With Charles Band’s deep obsession with puppets and dolls, The Puppet Master became a long-lived franchise which, at the time being, has spawned over 14 sequels over the course of the 90s and 2000s. The last entry was released in 2022 with Puppet Master: Doktor Death and more are likely to come. An online video game based on the films was also launched this year.

All films are available on streaming at fullmoonfeatures.com, except for Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys (2004) because it’s owned by SyFy for some reason and Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018) for whatever reason. They’re available on other streaming sites though for those who have regional bullshit access.

Puppet Master starts back in 1939 at Bodega Bay Inn, a hotel on the Californian seacoast and the main location in most of the films in the series. The old puppeteer, André Toulon, is in his room surrounded by his dolls and puppets as he’s adding some colorpaint on his latest creation. He also has a mysterious elixir that brings the puppets to life, and no other than Hitler himself wants that elixir. Of course. Two Nazi spies enter the hotel as they are on the way to capture Toulon. Before they enter his room, Toulon has hidden the puppets away in a suitcase and committed suicide by a bullet in the skull.

We then jump to present time where four psychics are spiritually contacted by Neil Galahger. He’s the current owner of Bodega Bay Inn, and when they arrive they find out that he committed suicide. Why? Who really cares. The more important thing here is that there are murderous puppets creeping around and they don’t like these psychics, and understandably so when they have the nerve to trespass on their domain. So go kill’em, puppets!

The film has its flaws and rough edges but my biggest gripe here is the characters (the humans to be more specific) which drags the film to utter boredom on several places. There’s absolutely nothing to them as they have as much screen presence like a dead potato. They seem completely tuned out, bored out of their minds and there’s clearly no one home behind their eyes. Even the puppets look more alive. And yes, my ghoulish walnut-sized brain gets that they’re supposed to dip in-and-out of trances and whatnot like the weird psychics they are, but still… WAKE THE FUCK UP! SNAP-SNAP! One of the psychics, played by Paul Le Mat, looks like a young H.R. Giger, by the way.

Then we have the puppets which are just cute and adorable and always amusing to watch. They also have their own skills and weapons. Here we meet Jester the Clown with possibly the largest weapon pack that includes a knife, a handgun, razor-sharped scissors, exploding cigars filled with nitroglycerin, candy bazooka, smiling heart–shaped laughing gas bomb, flesh–eating bubble gum blower, explosive cyanide– acid stuffed Ice Cream pies, and even much more. Even John Wick would struggle here.

Leech Woman is the one with the gross-factor as she spews out leeches from her mouth upon her victims. Tunneller is an asian-looking puppet with a cone-shaped power drill on his head which speaks for itself. Blade is the leader of the puppets and pretty much the mascot for the whole Full Moon brand and which his name suggest, slashes his victims with his knife. My personal favorite is Pinhead, the one with the small head and the big knuckles. He’s just simple and a pure old-schooler who sucker-punches his victims into oblivion and oozes good old toxic masculinity. And the reason Pinhead’s fists looks more real in the elevator scene where he punches a woman is because it’s the fists of a dwarf stunt woman. In one of the sequels Pinhead also manages to rip someone’s head off with his hands. Savage!

The castle-style hotel of Bodega Bay Inn with its gothic surroundings mixed with POV shots from the puppets perspective creates an eerie atmosphere. There’s certainly some great production value here, despite its flaws, and it’s overall a decent-looking film with some clever camera work and steady directing from David Schmoeller (who also made the cult film Tourist Trap and Crawlspace with Klaus Kinski). The gore is minimal but we have at least some throat slashing, fingers that gets chopped off like small sausages and some other ghoulishness for dessert. Nothing too special but the fact that all kills are performed by a mix of stop-motion and puppets on strings surely adds to the charm.

Director: David Schmoeller
Writers: Charles Band, Kenneth J. Hall, David Schmoeller
Country & year: USA, 1989
Actors: Blade, Pinhead, Jester, Tunneler, Leech Woman, Gengie, Shreddar Khan, Paul Le Mat, William Hickey, Irene Miracle, Jimmie F. Skaggs, Robin Frates, Matt Roe, Kathryn O’Reilly
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0098143/

Redneck Zombies (1989)

Posted on August 27, 2021March 31, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Redneck Zombies is probably most known for being one of the first films that was shot entirely on videotape (VHS) and released direct-to-video. Combined with that the film was shot on video and the result being what it is: a complete trashy home-made schlockfest with amateur actors and a script that seems to have been scribbled on toilet paper as they went along, didn’t impress the distributors very much. They basically told director Pericles Lewnes to fuck off, and after having enough rounds of rejections, he finally decided to try his luck with Troma – which is pretty odd he didn’t do in the first place since Redneck Zombies feels like pure Troma from start to finish, and just the title itself could probably give Lloyd Kaufman an instant hard-on. Most of Troma’s trademarks are all over the place: the outlandish over-the-top looney tunes acting with dialogues that are so stupid you’ll lose some braincells while watching, a demented plot which makes no sense, blood, greasy gore, puke, and I wish I could say tits. Whatever.

The plot goes something like this: It’s a regular day in the middle of redneck-nowhere in ‘Merica where the soldier Tyrone is transporting a barrel full of toxic waste. As he drives along the bumpy hillroad, smokes a joint and talks shit to his passenger dog, the barrel suddenly rolls off the jeep and further down a valley. The valley of redneck Hell no-go zone that is. When he tries to retrieve it, he immediately gets gunpointed by Ferd, a redneck slob who wants the barrel, since it already trespassed on his “land”. After Ferd scares him away with a warning shot, in true second amendment-style, he trades the barrel with a clan of imbecile inbreds who mixes the waste with moonshine and starts to drink the damn thing like there’s no tomorrow. And you can’t in a million years guess what happens next … the liquid turns them into zombies. Who could possibly know. But they are not some regular zombies, no-no, they’re REDNECK zombies! Good lord.

At the same time, a group of city slickers are camping nearby, which seem to have the same level of IQ as the rednecks, or they are just as bad actors. The only thing that differentiates the rednecks from the “civilized people”, to use that word loosely, is really the dress code. And to no surprise they eventually stumbles upon the redneck zombies and a lot of weird, retarded, crazy shit happens. I can mention the scene where the rednecks start to drink the waste and the TV screen goes into a full psychedelic acid-trip, and the effects are just horrendous.

While the plot seems seemingly straightforward, the film throws in a lot of random filler scenes that gives us some nuggets of what the heartland has to offer, and to give a more authentic impression of the redneck community. Here we learn that The Elephant Man himself is still alive and well, but still covering his head with a burlap sack with one hole in it to peek through. The rednecks calls him Tobacco Man, since he sells tobaccos from his vendor van. He’s also some kind of a prophet which the rednecks worships, and rambles some weird, crazy nonsense with a dark baritone voice.

There’s also a complete random parody of the hitchhiker scene from Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Well, why not. And we get some scenes of a redneck lady with her beloved Perky the Pig, where she promises him that he won’t end up as bacon. When we thought we’ve seen it all in redneck hell, we jump right into a scene where two dudes are watching chickens getting slaughtered on TV, and who have a girl in the living-room, wrapped in duct tape. Of course. There’s some scenes that are shot like it was a sitcom where the only thing missing is fake laugh tracks. This film has some serious symptoms of schizophrenia, and I believe even Dr. Phil would agree on that.

The gore delivers, for the most part, at least. Heads are being scalped, beheaded with a shovel and crushed with bare hands, eyes gouged out, limbs ripped apart and so on. It’s juicy, greasy and at times, a little gruesome. Some looks cheap, others looks almost too competent for a film like this. It’s also hilarious that the zombie make-up was made by cornflakes. Yes, really. My final verdict? Get drunk, pretend to be a young teenager and you’ll probably have a blast with this one.

Director: Pericles Lewnes
Country & year: USA, 1989
Actors: Steve Sooy, Anthony M. Carr, Ken Davis, Stan Morrow, Brent Thurston-Rogers, Lisa M. DeHaven, Tyrone Taylor, Anthony Burlington-Smith, James H. Housely, Martin J. Wolfman, Boo Teasedale, Darla Deans
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0093833/

Tetsuo (1989)

Posted on February 18, 2021March 15, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

How to even start with this movie…Uhm, well…

It starts with a random, disturbed guy called “The Metal Fetishist” (played by the director himself) who’s wandering in some decayed urban area, barefoot. He enters a shack hoarded full of metal junk where he stabs himself in the foot, and injects himself with an iron pipe and goes through some kind of a metamorphosis. A glimpse of an everyday life of an extreme metal fetishist where it just went a little too far, I guess. He then screams and runs like a lunatic and gets hit by a car driven by a typical Japanese salaryman who then gets infected by a biomechanical virus. As the title screen rolls, he gives us the “Tetsuo Dance” before he wakes up in his apartment and gets ready for work. As he shaves, he notices a small metal point on his cheek, which pops out and starts shooting blood over his face as he touches it. Sounds weird, you say? You’ve seen nothing yet. I won’t spoil much more than this, other than our salaryman slowly transforms into a grotesque hybrid monster of flesh and metal with the desire to destroy the whole planet. And yeah, his penis also transforms into a big metal drill that no one would want to mess around with.

Tetsuo, aka The Iron man, is an explosive result of an inner frustration that the young director Shinya Tsukamoto had built up after an unstable relationship to his dad, growing up in heavily industrial surroundings, and the extreme pressure of the Japanese working culture. The environment is what makes a human, as they say, and Tetsuo is a prime example of that, and could be seen as a pretty alternative artistic view of the breaking point of the human mind, if you will – even though the film is open for countless interpretations. This is Tsukamoto’s fifth film, at the age of 29, after making some shorts and other projects he would never be satisfied with, and at the top of this his father kicked him out of the house right before the filming. Fortunately, due to the success and the cult-following of Tetsuo, he quickly became a prominent filmmaker in Japan with titles such as Bullet Ballet, A Snake in June, Nightmare Detective and also made two sequels to Tetsuo, called Tetsuo: Body Hammer and Tetsuo: Bullet Man, the last one with a soundtrack by Trent Reznor . He’s also known for his acting roles in Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer, Takashi Shimizu’s Marebito, and Martin Scorcese’s Silence. His dad should be proud by now.

Tetsuo is shot on 16 mm, in black and white, with a budget of his day job at that time. Mostly filmed in one of his co-workers cramped apartment over 18 months with hard and difficult conditions (which is not hard to imagine at all), where the cast and crew also lived during the production. The conditions came to a point where the actor who plays the salaryman got the urges to escape the set several times because of shooting days that never seemed to end, while crew-members just came and left. The whole production was such a nightmare, according to Tsukamoto, that he considered to burn all the negatives. And we should just be glad he didn’t, because Tetsuo is a truly insane, hyperactive, nightmarish cyber-punk/art-house/body-horror masterpiece that easily could be describes as Eraserhead on crack cocaine. Very aggressive, graphic, experimental and completely bizarre and truly one of a kind. It’s one of those “what the hell did I just watch-films“, and it’s clearly not for anyone, especially for those who’s epileptic. The technical aspects is from another planet (Planet Japan that is) with some really impressive stop-motion effects, camera work and costume designs. It has a great and sharp sound design and a really heavy, industrial soundtrack by Chu Ishikawa that fits the intense imagery perfectly.

So, what else is there to really say about this movie, other than: just watch it! Watch it on a big screen in a dark room with loud sound.

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
Country & year: Japan, 1989
Actors:Tomorô Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka, Shinya Tsukamoto, Naomasa Musaka, Renji Ishibashi
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0096251/

Violent Shit (1989)

Posted on April 18, 2019September 15, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

Somewhere in Germany we see a random boy who’s playing with a ball, and gets spanked by his mom for coming home late. The boy then kills her with a meat cleaver, and our new terrifying slasher villain “Karl the Butcher” (or simply “The Butcher”) is born. Then we skip twenty years later where The Butcher is being transported by the polizei from-or-to God knows. Then one of the transporters have to take a piss, and The Butcher manages to escape as soon they stop the car, and kills them all in the worst low budget-way which is pretty indescribable. And we’re only seven minutes in, so take this as a foretaste to what the rest of the movie will be.

Then we’re being introduced to a nameless blonde chick who drives to a gas station, parks the car and switches to an other car to continue driving. When she arrives at the countryside and into the woods, the car dies and she yells “scheisse”, which describes this movie pretty well so far. And now that it’s gotten dark and her being all alone, what could happen? We see The Butcher from pov-view while he halts and grunts like a pig, then attacks her, and cuts one of her titties off. Make me wonder if Lars Von Trier has seen this. However, he then butches her to pieces (off camera) and eats some of her entrails. Yummy, good night.

Next day, The Butcher hunts for more victims in the countryside when something unexpected happens: he suddenly collapses. Maybe food poisoning from the woman’s guts he ate last night? Or maybe the actor is simply tired of this (violent) shit and realized that his performance never would lead to any Oscar Nominations, and would rather go home and play Nintendo? Who knows. Movie over? No way! We haven’t even gotten halfway through its running time. Then we meet our next victim who by a coincidence spots The Butcher laying by the road. And, like nice and empathic people do, he checks if he needs help, which of course turns to be quite opposite when The Butcher grabs his meat cleaver and cuts his hand off. And his dick, which he don’t eat. Thank God. And in order to not waste any precious time, we’re jumping straight over to the next victim, an aggravated redneck, played by the director Andreas Schnaas himself, who yells (in German) “fucking shit”. At least, the movie seems to have a sense of self-awareness.

And at this point I think you know the drill: every new character who gets on camera is just set up to be the next victim and killed off as quickly as they came, like a fart in the wind. So yeah, Violent Shit couldn’t be a more blunt and fitting title: It’s Violent Shit and that’s exactly what you get. A bunch of death scenes filmed over four weeks, “directed” (to use that word loosely) by Andreas Schnaas, who is a part of the trinity of the underground horror scene from Germany, along with Olaf Ittenbach and Jörg Buttgereit. Shot with his friends and with a budget that was enough to buy some gallons of cranberry juice as fake blood, rent a low-fi Video-8 format-camera and buy a lot of Heineken. The result is something you would expect to see from some kids in their early teens made for shits and giggles in their back yard on a weekend without any goal, purpose, ambition or a script.

One thing’s for sure: if you’re a fan of non-budget-amateurish-splatter horror, Violent Shit won’t fail to entertain you. The witty German dialogue, which apparently are just improvised and dubbed in post-production, makes it even more funny. Also worth mentioning that Andreas Shnaaas did the impressive thing of actually managing to drag his Violent Shit to the movie theaters in Germany, but it was pulled shortly after when it got under the censor board’s radar. It eventually found its way over to the USA where it became an underground cult classic on VHS.

A “Five Films Collector’s Shitition” with all of the four Violent Shit-films and the zombie flick “Zombie ’90: Extreme Pestilence” is available from Synapse Films. Knock yourself out. I couldn’t find any trailer, but down below you can see a clip with Karl The Butcher in action showing no mercy.

Director: Andreas Schnaas
Country & year: Germany, 1989
Actors: Andreas Schnaas, Gabi Bäzner, Wolfgang Hinz, Volker Mechter, Christian Biallas, Uwe Boldt
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0094271/