Aloha yall,
Tex Hula
Every Monday I find a random movie I've never heard of to watch and review. This time, in celebration of my favorite holiday, I'm doing all monster movies.
THE CHILL FACTOR (1993)
aka DEMON POSSESED
Thoughts before watching: This video obscurity was just given the blu-ray treatment a few months ago by Arrow Video.
Not to be confused with the Skeet Ulrich, Cuba Gooding Jr. CHILL FACTOR. Although I doubt anyone's even thought about that movie in twenty years.
Three couples go to an undisclosed location up North to celebrate an engagement by riding around and racing on snowmobiles. During a race our lead girl Jeannie's boyfriend Tom is thrown head first into a tree. Since the nearest town is too far away, they find a nearby abandoned cabin to take him while one of the guys rushes to town to get help.
Meanwhile the group left behind tend to their fallen friend, explore the cabin, bicker and have conversations with the lamest dialog. Like:
"I'm so hungry I could eat a skunk right now."
"Oh no you couldn't. Not even you could face that."
Goddamnit movie, please hurry up and kill these people.
Finally, they find an old spinning wheel type Ouija board and accidentally summon a demon that posseses Tom. They get stalked by a shadow on the wall and begin getting killed one by one. Eventually one final girl remains and she flees from the cabin on a snowmobile with one of her demon possesed friends giving chase, also on a snowmobile.
The movie is narrarated by a raspy, elderly version of Jeannie from thirty years in the future. In the opening narraration she lets us know that one of the guys is "dating a black girl." I guess she wanted to soften the blow so we wouldn't go into shock over seeing an interracial couple.
In the year 2023, someone's chain-smoking, racist grandmother is going to be telling the story of THE CHILL FACTOR.
The kills in the movie probably sounded good on paper, but come off lame in execution. Some of the instruments of death are: barbed wire, ceiling fans, a falling icicle, and in one case a girl is strangled to death by a sentient volleyball net in a storage closet. That last one sounds like it should be ridiculous fun, but it's just lifeless and dull.
CHILL FACTOR wants to be a snowbound version of THE EVIL DEAD. It really doesn't have the creative talent to pull it off. EVIL DEAD didn't have much in the way of story or characters (Bruce Campbell's Ash didn't become the boomstick wielding, cheesy one-liner badass until EVIL DEAD II), but it made up for it with atmosphere, scares, brutality, unique special effects, inventive camera tricks, and a team of creative, go for broke filmmakers. CHILL FACTOR has none of those positives, just predictable, boring, bullshit. THE EVIL DEAD isn't as easy to copy as some people think.
BITE ME IF YOU LOVE ME (2012)
Thoughts before watching: Originally there was a different movie movie chosen for this spot (ZOMBIE HIGH), but after I saw the VHS case for it I realized I'd seen it before. I wanted a zombie movie. After last week's movie, I also wanted something that wasn't boring and forgettable. Total batshit insanity is the exact opposite of that. The best place to go for batshit insanity is Japan.
Yep. Japan does not disappoint.
Hitomi isn't your typical Japanese schoolgirl. While her classmates are obssesed with J-pop bands and boys, she's into zombies, George Romero, Lucio Fulci, and Dr. Herbert West. In other words she's awesome. She also has no interest in boys with a pulse. She's saving herself for a zombie boyfriend.
In order to make a powder to resurrect the dead she needs help translating an ancient text. For that she enlists the help of the school nerd nicknamed Mr. Zombie. He helps her create her magic zombie powder, and for his troubles she pushes him off a building just to bring him back to life to be her zombie boyfriend.
At first having a zombie boyfriend is everything she's dreamed of. They go for long shambling walks. She shows him off to all her girlfriends. The sex is great, and when rigor mortis kicks in, she gets on top and it's even better.
When he starts to get hungry she gladly chops up one of her classmates for him.
But soon the novelty of having a zombie boyfriend begins to wear thin as he begins to decompose. The smell becomes unbearable. She constantly has to pick maggots out of his face with a pair of chopsticks.
Soon a mystery man slowly walks into her life one morning, and the two start dating. That man is Jason Voorhees, or as she calls him: Jay-uh-soon-ah.
Jason's doing well for himself in Japan. He's packed on some pounds. He wears casual suits. He's grown a full head of jet black hair. He even drives a car.
Mr. Zombie starts to get suspicious when Hitomi replaces all her zombie posters and things with FRIDAY THE 13TH memorabilia, so he follows her out one morning and spots her with Jason. Broken hearted he decides to leave her.
Meanwhile, after Hitomi and Jason have sex, (in a scene that's really close to hardcore), she learns that dating Jason Voorhees has a downside as well when he gets the urge to ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma.
If you couldn't tell, this movie is incredibly dumb. If you like goofy horror you'll have fun with this. Also if you're a diehard FRIDAY THE 13TH fan you might want to check it out. Chubby Japanese Jay-uh-soon-ah is definitely the highlight of the flick. He's like a Mexican wrestler in a Luchador movie. He walks down the street in his hockey mask without anyone giving him a second glance.
It might be dumb, but it's certainly not boring, and unfortunatly it's not forgettable either. I really wish the image of Jason's fat ass bumping and grinding on top of a Japanese schoolgirl could be ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND out of my brain.
FULL ECLIPSE (1993)
Thoughts before watching: This will be the second Anthony Hickox movie I've watched on Monday reviews. The first being JILL RIPS, and it wasn't that good. Which is too bad because I really liked his late eighties straight to video movies like WAXWORK 1 & 2, and SUNDOWN. One of my favorite parts of WAXWORK was the werewolf sequence. So a werewolf film by Hickox starring Mario Van Peebles is something I'm looking forward to.
Max Dire (Peebles) is a cop on the mean streets of Los Angeles. His partner Jim, is one day away from being married. In cop movies that means get a bodybag ready for this guy. During a hostage situation at a nightclub, Jim unsurprisingly is gunned down and winds up in a coma. That night as he's laid up in a hospital, a mystery person injects him with a serum.
The next day, to Max's surprise, Jim shows up for work like nothing's happened. Not only that, but when some gangbangers pull a drive-by in front of their favorite donut shop, Jim becomes a super cop. He leaps from car to car chasing the gang, firing his pistol at the same time. He also doesn't appear fazed by the bullets they pump into him, and he heals up quickly. Max can't quite put his finger on it, but something seems odd about Jim. His feelings are confirmed when Jim walks into Max's favorite bar and shoots himself in the head with a silver bullet.
He took a few detours along the way, but eventually he made it to the bodybag.
Grief striken Max is advised by his Chief to go to a group session for trauma striken officers. He reluctantly goes and finds they're actually a group of damaged officers that have turned vigilantes, led by the mysterious Adam Garou. (Bruce Payne, Julian Sand's replacement in WARLOCK: THE ARMAGEDDON.) Max decides to tag along on one of the groups night hunts. They gear up and inject themselves with the super mystery serum. Max watches from a distance with night vision goggles as the team wrecks shop on the local drug kingpin's gun party.
Later that night blonde hottie team member Casey, (Patsy Kensit, LETHAL WEAPON 2), seduces Max to get him to join the team. She tries to get him to inject the mystery serum, but Max just says no a few times too many. Not having it, Casey pulls out a gun and shoots him. Before he dies she injects him with the juice, Max heals and is up on his feet stronger than ever. Surprisingly, he's not that bitter about the attempted murder and then being pumped full of drugs that he didn't want. So for shits and giggles Casey takes Max to a local crackhouse to murder everyone inside.
Before they go into the crackhouse they shoot up serum again. The mystery juice not only gives them super strength and a healing factor, but it also causes claws to sprout from their knuckles.
Also, at one point in the movie a familiar headgear is worn:
It's not just coincidence, at one point in the movie the X-MEN name is actually dropped. For 90's kids who loved X-MEN this was probably really cool to see. This was back in the day when an X-MEN movie seemed unrealistic.
Anyways, Max talks to a prisoner in the holding cells that used to be part of Garou's gang in Miami. A former detective (Joseph Culp, The Thing from Roger Corman's FANTASTIC FOUR), tells him that Garou isn't what he seems. After some investigating Max finds out...OBVIOUS SPOILER...Garou is a werewolf. That's supposed to be a twist. The fact there's a werewolf in a werewolf movie is revealed like a twist. I found this movie googling werewolf movies. You can look at the cover art, and read the title, and know this is a werewolf movie. If they wanted to make that a big twist ending, they should have sold this as a superhero cop movie.
I really wanted to like this movie. Fifteen minutes in when Max's partner Jim goes supercop on the drive-by guys, I thought for sure this was going to be a gem. Mario Van Peebles does a slo-mo dive forward with both guns blazing, Chow Yun Fat style. Jim the supercop hijacks a motorcycle with an innocent person in the sidecar. It's a great, fun action sequence. Unfortunately that's the movie's peak.
There are quite a few positives here: The X-MEN influence.
Mario Van Peebles. Why didn't he become a huge star? He was talented behind the camera and in front of it. He was like the Fred Williamson of the 90's.
The FX work. Practical effects by Tony Gardner's Alterian Effects Studio. Their first movie was RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and their latest movie is ZOMIELAND: DOUBLE TAP. They're working on a shoestring budget here and still manage to pull off impressive effects. The full werewolf only gets shown briefly, and it's pretty cool.
The werewolf transformation is terrible early 90's "we're still learning," CGI.
This movie had a really great premise. I was really into it for awhile, then I started to get really frustrated with it. It forgot how to have fun, and slipped into mediocre. I could've ignored the plotholes and loose threads in the story if it would've stayed a fun, reckless action movie. This is the type of movie Hollywood should remake, movies with a strong premise that miss. Don't remake ROBOCOP or TOTAL RECALL. Remake movies like LAST ACTION HERO, or FULL ECLIPSE.
Afterthoughts: I just assumed this was a straight to video movie. Actually FULL ECLIPSE was a made for HBO movie.
OLD DRACULA (1974)
aka VAMPIRA
In the mid-seventies Dracula, (David Niven) is alive and well. He's living in his castle in Transylvania with his servant Maltravers. The love of his life Vampira is in a catatonic sleep due to drinking from a poisoned peasent girl hundreds of years ago. The only way for Drac to revive her is to find and inject her with an extremely rare blood type.
Luckily for Dracula, he's now a celebrity and people come from miles around to spend the night in his castle. Dracula pretends to be an actor dressed as Dracula, and when they sleep he feeds on them and takes blood samples to match his beloved. A group of Playboy Playmates and their photographers show up at Drac's castle to spend the night, and do research for an upcoming photoshoot. (Really? Playboy goes to these lengths to keep their pictorials historically accurate?) Dracula takes samples from each of the girls and finds the rare blood type he's been searching for. Thanks to Maltravers being a complete fuck up, the samples get mixed, so Dracula injects Vampira with all of them. One of the Playmates was black an so Vampira rises again as an ebony Princess.
So Dracula is upset and wants to know how this could happen and how to fix it. So Maltravers suggests, "it's like washing blue socks with white shirts, the color runs, and the only way to get the whiteness back is to wash the shirts again on their own." (I'm just repeating what the movie said here.) Dracula decides to go to London to get more blood from the Playmates to wash out the color.
Vampira however, loves being black. In London she goes to see a blacksplotation film, (BLACK GUNN) and get's caught up on current slang, like "right on," and even calls Dracula a "jive turkey."
Everything leads to a London swinging sixties party in the mid-seventies, with Dracula trying to extract blood from Playmates with a hypnotized stooge. All because Dracula doesn't want his beloved to be black.
Goddamnit.
The biggest problem here is this movie isn't funny. If it had BLAZING SADDLES level of humor, this might've worked.
Speaking of superior Mel Brooks humor, this movie was called VAMPIRA in the UK. For its American release they named it OLD DRACULA in the U.S. to cash in on the success of YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.
There is a huge positive here though, David Niven's Dracula. I kept forgetting he was a sadistic bastard. At one point he throws a girl down a well full of rats. It surprised me. He has a proper gentlemanly way and charm that makes you forget he's a bloodthirsty killer only out for himself. That's Dracula. If only we could've had David Niven in a Hammer Dracula film.
And he's totally convincing as a black man:
Yeah, they really did this.
Happy Halloween!
Tex Hula
