Two kids visit an ice cream truck and discover a dark secret.
Who’s Hungry is an animated horror short that is definitely not for little children!
Director: David Ochs
Country & year: USA, 2009
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt7245360/
We are in one of the darker corners of Hollywood, Los Angeles, where the young man Raymond Everett (Lenny Von Dohlen) owns a horror-themed wax museum. One day he gets some new deliveries, all the way from Romania, one of which is a casket that contains something you’ll never guess what – Vanessa, Dracula’s widow (Sylvia Kristel). Yes, a living, bloodsucking vampire. So why has she gotten herself all the way over to Los Angeles, you may wonder? No one knows. She doesn’t know, the script doesn’t know, even the Man Who Knows poster we see on the wall on Raymond’s apartment, doesn’t know. So where do we go from here? Who knows.
Anyway, as soon she rises from the casket, she goes straight to a bar where she hooks up a random, sleazy guy who will become her first victim to feed her need for human blood. At the same time, two men breaks into the wax museum while Raymond is upstairs sipping red wine and watching Nosferatu. After Vanessa kills one of the men, she goes up to Raymond and claims him as her slave before she puts her teeth in his neck, and wants him to take her back to her husband in Romania.
Instead of just giving her a one-way ticket and wish her the best, he tells her the shocking fact that Dracula is dead, and she’s a widow. Now she wants to know who killed him, so she can have her revenge. And guess what – Van Helsing’s grandson, simply named Dr. Helsing, coincidentally lives in Hollywood. Of course. And even though he’s old and fragile, and should rather be at a nursing home, he’s still determined and pretty eager to continue the legacy of his grandfather to hunt down vampires.
And no joking here, this is the plot so far. We also get a crime investigation side-plot with Lt. Lannon (Josef Sommer) when Vanessa starts to leave more dead bodies around after her ongoing killing spree in Hollywood. When she’s not transforming herself into a bat, she uses her long fingers as daggers to kill her prey. There’s a pretty pointless, yet funny massacre scene with a group of devil-worshippers who are about to sacrifice a naked blond chick to Satan, where the B-movie glory skyrockets all up to eleven. We see Vanessa turn into a monstrous creature with some really cool prosthetic makeup, as she kills off the whole group which leaves another gory crime scene to Lt. Lannon. He, of course, eventually gets in touch with Dr. Helsing, who easily convinces Hannon that all the killing is done by a vampire.
It’s noteworthy to mention that Dracula’s Widow is written and directed by Christopher Coppola, nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, who also made a certain Dracula film some years later. It’s easy to crap all over the film by comparing Christopher to his superior uncle, but Dracula’s Widow isn’t completely hopeless when it comes to cheap entertaining value, with some good old ’80s cheese. It’s a sleazy, gory and just a plain silly popcorn flick to kill off a Wednesday night. Nothing more, nothing less. The funniest moments here is of course the comical over-acting by Silvia Kristel, with her goofy facial expressions that she displays when she tries to look intimidating when she’s not wearing the monster make-up. Lenny Won Dohlen, known from Twin Peaks, has the same angsty look he always portrays. I also like the scenes with Dr. Helsing, that old geezer cracks me up. The guy who plays Lt. Lennon is the only one who takes his role dead serious, even though there’s absolutely nothing to take seriously here.
Dracula’s Widow is available on DVD after a quick search.
Director: Christopher Coppola
Country & year: USA, 1988
Actors: Sylvia Kristel, Josef Sommer, Lenny von Dohlen, Marc Coppola, Stefan Schnabel, Rachel Jones, Duke Ernsberger, G.F. Rowe, Richard K. Olsen, Lucius Houghton, J. Michael Hunter, Traber Burns
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0097230/
Jessica is a recently widowed woman, who has decided to move on with her life and start afresh. While traveling, she encounters a suspicious-looking guy multiple times. Hoping that it’s all a coincidence, things become pretty evident when she crashes her car due to a slashed tire. The creep who has been stalking her manages to drug and kidnap her, and the cat ‘n mouse game has started.
Alone is a thriller movie released in 2020, directed by John Hyams. It is a remake of a Swedish thriller called Gone (aka Försvunnen) from 2011, by Mattias Olsson and Henrik JP Åkesson. Mattias was also credited as writer for Alone, and Henrik as producer. I haven’t seen the original, so I can make no comparisons in that regard, and the movie seems to be quite rare and hard to get a hold of. Still, the storyline seems to be pretty much the same.
At first, the movie builds up to be some kind of Duel-like movie, until it turns into a classic serial-killer hunting game. While there isn’t anything truly shocking or groundbreaking to witness here, and it’s obvious from the start who is hunted and who is the hunter, it’s still keeping your attention from the get-go. It’s somewhat predictable, but still suspenseful enough to keep you on the edge of the seat. The heroine, Jessica, is also not a character who is easily fooled, and she’s smelling something fishy very early on. Despite this, the serial killer still gets her. Sometimes, it doesn’t help if the mouse is aware that the cat is dangerous.
There’s a lot of running through the forest and a good amount of action, and the actress, Jules Willcox, actually broke her foot while shooting one of the first action scenes. She finished the shoot while wearing a boot and with the help of a stunt, but naturally this delayed things with a few months as some scenes couldn’t be finished until she was fully healed.
Like already mentioned, Alone doesn’t bring anything new to the table, it is a straight-forward cat ‘n mouse thriller where a woman tries to escape a serial killer. Yes, it’s formulaic and doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s still a thrilling ride. So overall, Alone is a simple thriller without any big twists and turns, but the suspense makes up for it and turns it into an enjoyable viewing experience.
WARNING: The trailer includes major spoilers. Watch at your own risk (if you haven’t seen the movie and plan to do so, I recommend to avoid the trailer completely).
Director: John Hyamns
Country & year: USA, 2020
Actors: Jules Willcox, Marc Menchaca, Anthony Heald, Jonathan Rosenthal, Katie O’Grady, Betty Moyer, Shelly Lipkin, Emily Sahler, Laura Duyn, Brenton Montgomery, Nico Floresca
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt7711170/
Racing desperately against the setting of the sun as if pursued by the very devil, a man sprints through a barren field seeking the safe haven of a derelict farmhouse. What is he afraid of and what happens when darkness comes?
Darkness Comes is a suspenseful and creepy horror short!
Director: John Marsh
Country & year: Australia, 2013
Actors: David ‘Wolfman’ Williams
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt3399950/
More Violence – more Shit!
In the third chapter of the Violent Shit franchise we follow a group of random dudes who gets shipwrecked on an island. It’s not the island of Lost, nor is it of Dr. Moreau, but the island of Karl The Butcher and his zombiefied dad, Karl Sr. Here they’ve created their own community, protected by a horde of metal-masked butchers, who execute everyone who dares to trespass their land as they worship Karl as Der Meister.
The three men gets taken to the butcher’s camp where Karl gives the longest villain-speech ever, while giving us some brutal executions to show us how much of an intimidating badass he is. He looks more like someone cosplaying a villain from Mad Max who wouldn’t survive one day beyond Thunderdome. Anyway, when one of the guys spits in his face, he gets brutally tortured and killed off by a stake through his ribcage. The other two trespassers gets thrown into a cat-and-mouse game in the woods where they get hunted by Karls’ army of butchers, followed by a series of gag-reels with violent kills in the same old Andreas Schnaas fashion we’re used to. Meanwhile, the mad-like scientist Dr. Senius, with his funny Hitler mustache, is under Karl’s command to experiment on some fresh cadavers to make a new breed of super soldiers to replace the butchers who would get killed during battle.
We also get introduced to some Asian guys who are former members of Karl’s troops, which teams up with the other guys. Luckily they have some high levels of Kung-Fu skills, which comes good in hand when the strange zombie creations of Dr. Senius starts to pop up in the woods. Also watch out for some random Ninjas (!)
So… what’s new here? Schnaas has actually hired a composer for this one, instead of getting sued for adding copyrighted 80’s heavy metal songs. Gregor Adolf Hartz gives us some repetitive stock music and some really out-of-place and cheap RPG tunes that would fit better in a Nintendo game. The gore effects are better, at least. Faces gets ripped apart by hooks, torsos split in half, someone’s spine ripped through the asshole, and gory cadavers with open ribcages and shit like that. The technical aspects, however, remains on the same level as the last one with its muddy image quality and the whole amateurish nature with the shot-in-the-backyard-look, and not much sense of filmmaking in general. It’s basically the same old, same old. Considering that this was made right after Violent Shit II (released six years after it was finished) and Andreas Schnaas had no time to waste, other than improve some of the effects, it shouldn’t be no surprise. It’s still a highly entertaining shitfest, though, with a lot of crazy, amateur action and overall a lot of vile and outlandish over-the-top splatter porn to keep your attention. If you’ve already seen the first two, you know exactly what you’re in for.
And, yeah, I almost forgot there’s a drinking game: Take a shot for each time someone says scheisse …!
I also have to mention that there’s two versions of the film: the original with German dubbed dialogue, and an older US DVD version with the title Zombie Doom, which is most known for its far more hilariously bad and out-of-sync English dubbing. The original German version with subtitles is available from Synapse Films.
Director: Andreas Schnaas
Country & year: Germany, 1999
Actors: Andreas Schnaas, Marc Trinkhaus, Steve Aquilina, Beate Brüggmann, Uwe Grüntjes, Winni Holl, Mirco Hölling, Matthias Kerl, Giang Le, Son Le, Heiko Leesch, Xiu-Yong Lin, Joe Neumann, Andreas Sroka, Hagen van de Viven
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0203185/
Sequel:
– Violent Shit 4: Karl the Butcher vs Axe (2010)
Prequels:
– Violent Shit II (1992)
– Violent Shit (1989)
A young woman is told the secrets of the world through an art gallery issued audio guide.
Audio Guide is using a pretty interesting idea, making it a creative little horror short!
Director: Chris Elena
Country & year: Australia, 2020
Actors: Emma Wright, Nyx Calder, Matthew Knight, Lisa Malouf, Rachel Baikie, Jaimie Conlon, Simon Convard
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt11719638/
We are in an open field somewhere at the countryside, where a drug deal between two gangs is about to take place, which quickly goes terribly wrong and ends up in some ridiculous martial-art fight scenes. Suddenly another threatening figure with an iron mask appears on the horizon, and finishes the whole match by cutting the throat of the last man standing with a machete, before he breaks the fourth wall by introducing himself with a guttural voice in the most beautiful German: Du Warst Gut! Aber Ich Bin Besser! ICH BIN KARL THE BUTCHER JUNIOR!!!
Then the opening credit sequence rolls with some heavy metal tunes with vocals performed by the director himself, Andreas Schnaas, as we see clips from the first film which gives a clear prediction that you should expect much of the same (violent) shit.
After the opening scene, the movie switches to some unexpected, and out-of-place documentary-ish mode in Hamburg, where journalist Paul Glas investigates a variety of brutal murders that is out “of the ordinary”. He gives a quick history lesson of the city and of course mentions the greatest, infamous, tourist attraction star, Fritz Honka. He interviews some random people on the street, who obviously think they are in a legit documentary about serial killers and not in some amateurish, zero-budget, shits-for-giggles, underground splatter titled Violent Shit 2, (a.k.a Violent Shit II: Mother Hold My Hand) made just to piss off the conservative bureaucrats at the censor boards in Germany. Hardy-har-har.
Anyway, a new killer is on the loose and Paul Glas is seeing similarities between Karl (I forgot his last name, but he was the killer in the first film), and ask an anonymous informant who supposedly has some secret information about the killings, and blah, blah, blah… To just cut it short and get to the point; Karl The Butcher is Son of Karl Senior and he’s out on a mission to avenge his father by wandering on a murderous rampage and kill everyone in his way with his machete. That’s everything we need to know, and enough of a plot that a film like this is able to comprehend, especially if you’re half-drunk while watching this shit already.
After the halting docu-sequence, we’re back at the countryside where Karl Junior lives with his deranged mother. She has a murder fetish, and looks like Hillary Clinton with Freddy Krueger make-up. And of course, she has taught her boy to become an equally retarded, redneck sadist just like his father, so he can entertain her with torturing and killing random victims to feed her fetish and get her pussy wet. Afterwards she drinks the blood of the victims from a bowel that Karl serves her. Karl also forces one of the victims to eat his own shit, just to make us pretty ensured once and for all that it’s still Violent and it’s still Shit, and still one of the most self-aware titles ever.
And from here it’s basically the first film all over again, just with a longer runtime. So if you liked the first one, you’ll love this one, for sure. It’s gag-reel after gal-reel with close-ups showing limbs getting sawed off, heads shoveled off and blown to pieces by a handgun. Entrails getting ripped out of the victims stomach, and we get a pretty nasty scene where someones ballsack gets ripped apart by a hook. Andreas Schnaas is also very careful to shoot the scenes in broad daylight so we can enjoy some of of the nasty details among the muddy image quality. We get a little time to catch our breath with a training montage, Rocky-style, where he levels himself up to hunt victims at a more rapid pace. The film also slips into pornographic territory with some fugly vagina-close-ups just to give the final middle-finger to Germany’s censor board.
Violent Shit II is available from Synapse Fims and has been remastered with some silly, cartoonish sound effects, and replaced the copyrighted music from the original VHS version with its new, own soundtrack. The added subtitles are as hilarious as the first one. It’s also stretched to widescreen to reduce the raw, unfiltered and amateurish home video quality. It still makes Bad Taste look like a glossy Hollywood production by comparison, though.
Director: Andreas Schnaas
Country & year: Germany, 1992
Actors: Andreas Schnaas, Anke Prothmann, Claudia von Bihl, and a bunch of friends of Andreas Schnaas
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0105759/
Sequels:
– Violent Shit III: Infantry of Doom (1999)
– Violent Shit 4: Karl the Butcher vs Axe (2010)
Prequel:
– Violent Shit (1989)
A mother is preparing dinner while her young daughter is playing. At the same time, something sinister is lurking outside the house…
Beneath the Skin is a creepy horror short by Tracy Kleeman (who also created the horror short Fear Filter).
Director: Tracy Kleeman
Country & year: USA, 2020
Actors: Luisina Quarleri, Mia Mamurov, Jolie Mamurov, Joel Ezra Hebner
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt11656770/
Corey Thornton has just inherited a mansion from his recently deceased father, and travels to Louisiana to check it out. Upon his arrival at the grand estate, he meets with a beautiful young girl which is described as “jailbait” (but who is clearly in her mid-20s…) and his father’s live-in housekeeper, who is the mother of said girl. And of course, a black-gloved and somewhat fishy-looking lawyer. Corey discovers that his father has written a will which includes a description of how the old man has, supposedly, found a way to return back from the dead, and in doing so he needs the help of his son. Corey soon ends up at the local pub/brothel called Tonk’s, where he meets a witchy prostitute who harbors the secrets of black magic. And she turns people into birds if she feels like it. Corey is now obsessed with the task of fulfilling his dead father’s wish of bringing him back to life, and seeks help from the strange people in the weird voodoo-brothel in the bayou.
Netherworld is a Full Moon Entertainment movie directed by David Schmoeller and produced by Charles Band. Right off the bat the movie sets a certain tone with the illusory opening scene in Tonk’s bar, which features both chicks and chickens in surroundings that resemble a sexy yet uncomfortable fever dream. Downstairs is what you could probably call a funhouse-like brothel with weird hallways and just as weird characters. To top it all we also get to see a flying disembodied hand and a guy that is turned into a bird (although the latter isn’t displayed to the full extent, but more implied). In other words, it gives a certain promise of being a really cheesy popcorn entertainment flick.
Then the movie takes a u-turn when we meet Corey and he enters his newly inherited mansion, and a more serious tone is set. While we get to gradually know more about Corey’s dead father and what he tries to accomplish, the pacing becomes a bit of a problem where it’s all moving a tad bit too slow. The scenes at Tonk’s are definitely the movie’s highlights, with creative usage of color and lighting and some pretty cool old-school effects and jazzy sex scenes. The brothel appears to have lots of girls with names of deceased celebrities, including a woman calling herself Marilyn Monroe, who looks…well..exactly like Marilyn Monroe. This is a pretty cool idea, actually…a brothel where deceased celebrities have been brought back to life.
While it does move a little slowly and never really gets very exciting, it makes up for it with the visuals and a fun premise. Netherworld is entertaining enough with its slightly goofy concept, perfect for a relaxed saturday evening with some popcorn.
Netherworld can be seen on Full Moon Features.
Director: David Schmoeller
Country & year: USA, 1992
Actors: Michael Bendetti, Denise Gentile, Anjanette Comer, Holly Floria, Robert Sampson, Holly Butler, Alex Datcher, Robert Burr, George Kelly, Mark Kemble, Barret O’Brien, Michael Lowry, David Schmoeller
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0104987/
Things start to change in the life of a depressed middle-aged woman when a mysterious mask appears at her doorstep.
Facelift is a creepy horror short by Virat Pal (who also created the horror short Bells).
Director: Virat Pal
Country & year: USA, 2020
Actors: Carly Jones, Cara Loften, Penny Orloff, Rashmi Rustagi, Nell Rutledge-Leverenz
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt13212248/
