Clawed (2017) Horror Sludge Monster

Clawed (2017) This film was originally called Sludge and it is the more appropriate title because the monster comes from a combination of some slime leaking from the ground coming in contact with toxic waste. I don't know if this writing will become anything but I am going to throw some words together on a little movie. I often skip the writing for films that don't connect with me and this one did not. I try to remember that making a film is hard and just because I get to sit in my TV room and pass judgement it is still an accomplishment to create and even if it is not art to me it still has value. Some films just don't grab me and some are just not good enough for writing paragraphs about. I know that seems a bit harsh but this film makes a case for actually using script writing structures. It is very difficult to connect to a film when the acting is unbelievable or the script is structured in a way that makes it confusing or the shots take you out of the moment.
  The framing story of the film is done through a pod caster interviewing the sheriff about the massacre at Bear Claw Mountain ten years earlier. The actress playing the podcaster chooses the most callus, gotcha politics style to ask questions. An airy voice asking questions like this is some kind of expose show and not really getting the gravitas her co actor is going for. It makes no sense as a choice when contrasted with the dower survivor who is the cop. In the end though her choice makes sense after you see the twist ending.  As he describes the incident giant claw scars covering one side of his face, we fade to that time and spend the better part of the film reliving the killings. Problem is there are no developed characters people come and go and die but you literally don't get to know any of them. We get a couple scenes sort of introducing the players like Jim the cancer ridden angry young man who heads off the Bear Claw Mountain to die only to be saved by the toxic goo that spews from the ground. He falls in it and looks to be dying but seems instead to ingest the stuff and it has some interesting effects on him. He is the closest to a lead character in this part of the film but we barely stay with him.

Instead we cut to a group from the local college out exploring the geothermal activity of the mountain.The problem with this script are numerous but the main thing is there are too many characters there for the sole purpose of dying. Cliche and poorly acted most of the ideas seem dredged from every other poorly written monster film over fifty years. You care about none of these characters so their brutal deaths at the claws of a maybe toxic chemically altered animal are not at all compelling. I am just saying that if you write good characters that can connect to the audience then their deaths mean something. this film really does not do that. Sure there is plot, seismic activity, goo leaking from the ground, illegal dumping of toxic waste, a rampaging monster but the story does not come from character development instead it is exposition by characters we don't really know, passed to the audience just so we can get to the killing.
 The people involved with this film do a great job of showing off their practical effects chops with lots of early gore scenes of people getting killed in various ways. The gore gags are pretty cool but since it is mostly daylight and the practical end of the effect sort of needs to be hidden the film maker uses really quick cuts when the effect is shown. This film is also plastered with these shots, instead of developing characters we seem to have a formula where every x minutes we get another gore shot. So really the characters are there to further the effects department instead of the story. When they do computer effects they are really shoddy and not very convincing.

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005) Horror Ghost

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005) - It's important to note that these thoughts are as I watch the film. They are not designed to be a review necessarily but more as thoughts while watching. There is so much spoiler information and guesses of what will come that you should be wary of reading this prior to seeing the film. You have been warned.
It's 1969 in small town America and Mary and her friends have not been the most popular of girls in the local high school. Some sudden attention from the jocks has her on a high because the guy she likes Willy has broken up with the prom queen to take her to the dance. It seems like it is going to be a magical night when Willie and the boys spike the punch of the three girls and a cruel alternative plan is revealed. Mary walking outside with Willy notices her friends all but passed out in the alley behind the dance and the Queen of the prom there beckoning to get the girls into the car. Mary runs and tries to hide in the school. Willie catches up to her and in the physical altercation that follows he accidentally kills her. Instead of doing the right thing he hides the body. Cut to teen girls in the bedroom during a sleepover telling the story. It is a legend.
  Samantha  (Kate Mara a young 22) is one of the young women telling and talking about Urban Legends. They makes some mentions to set the mood and also reference movies like Candyman (1992), before talking about how you do the Bloody Mary legend where you stand in front of the mirror with the lights out and say her name three times. She will appear and have a corpse face, and if you look at her she will drag you into her darkness unless you turn the light back on. Now the film immediately after setting up the rules breaks them because sure Samantha says "Bloody Mary" three times but she is lounging around with her friends not standing in the dark in front of a mirror. There is a desire by writers Mike Daugherty and Dan Harris to connect what is made up urban legend with well known stories in urban legend. This so he can blend the old with this new story they are trying to tell.
  Dougherty is so much the thing these days having written the already Halloween classic Trick r' Treat (2007), the wildly entertaining and I may say turning classic very quickly Krampus (2015) before graduating to blockbuster size films with Godzilla: King of Monsters this year. So when we cut to a creepy Bloody Mary appearing outside the house it is a head scratcher. Then when Mom comes in to wake the girls up they are all gone. A montage of scenes shows that the girls went missing maybe not to be found again. The girls suddenly came back and say they woke up in the cellar of the old mill, mind you with date rape drug in there system. Its weird because what we have here is the current story mirroring the events of 1969. This I am sure is on purpose as the Director Mary Lambert is going to integrate it all. Although I am wondering why include the urban legends stuff at all. It does not necessarily fit with the ghost story they are telling here and thus gives sort of a false read of the film.
  So my mind is going at this point, this seems like a classic misdirection as I pause the film to write this. The step father in the is family is Bill Owens (Ed Marinaro), running for mayor and I have a theory. Bill is Willie from the opening, we know his wife Pam was a prom queen so that matches. Then the fact the girls were drugged, maybe Bill never got over his need to drug girls like in 1969? What if the POV that seemed a bit creeper in its gaze when he checked on the girls the night they disappeared was a red flag purposely put in the film by director Mary Lambert?  It could be the current jocks who were established as being pissed at Samantha for a school article she wrote are the culprits. I think that was a misdirection though, creepy guilty of murder step dad is the suspect I am leading towards at this point. It is possible though. A parallel works here and I think there is a couple stories really taking hold at the same time.
  Talk in school is that the girls may have done the whole thing themselves but we quickly learn it was the jocks getting back at Samantha for her article. Twin brother David (Robert Vito) is trying to defend his sister but is ill equipped to do anything. The jocks are not pleased with the outcome worried that the girls will tell on them and get them into trouble. By the way this is exactly what should happen. All should be disciplined and kicked off the team but this is not the route the film takes. Instead the secret is kept so we can talk about this all happening before. Then we start to have incidents that are all very urban legend. One jock is fried in a tanning booth. Heather  (Audra Lea Keener) the lead jocks girlfriend although her relationship with Samantha has faded from when they were kids suddenly has the real life problem of a spider laying its eggs in her face. The absolute go for it attitude of the film makers having Heather pull off her face is pretty cool.
  There is a bit here on the effects of trauma but it is a bit over shadowed the linear story of the jocks wanting to blame people for the deaths of their friends. Instead we get even more urban legend deaths, like the guy getting electrocuted by pissing on a high voltage fence. The mystery seems to get bigger and bigger with Samantha and David thinking there is some conspiracy going on. There research leads them to the original disappearance in 1969 but it seems like all of the adults are suspects, like the step father and then the coach of the football team starts showing up being creepy himself. The children will always suffer the sins of their parents. The inexplicably builds this connection between the past and present even introducing premonitions that Samantha receives. So maybe this is really a ghost story where 35 years later the first crime is found out by the ghosts coming looking for justice? It is but is is wrapped up unnecessarily in urban legend talking points that sort of take away from a very reasonable revenge ghost story. Of course without all these extra shiny objects one might be reminded of the movie Stir of Echoes (1999) where a ghost gets her story told by using a neighborhood guy who was put under hypnosis to get revenge. The vengeful ghost is a motif after all so there will be many examples of this.
  The film takes the interconnectedness of all things and stands it on its head with what seems like a story that is not sure what it wants to be. Is this urban legends? No not really all those parts seemed disconnected from the real plot. A revenge ghost story? Yes it is a ghost that for some reason has to be reconciled at this time for no real reason other than that the children of the perpetrators are the same age as the victim when the original crime was committed. I am not really going to recommend this film but it isn't horrible just a bit too much.

Black Cobra Woman (1976) Exploitation Voodoo

Black Cobra Woman (1976) - It is not often that I get a DVD from Netflix and the quality is really poor but this is the case with this Jack Palance, Laura Gemser movie. Presented in full screen ratio from an old print including scratches and flaws the look and sound are not great. I don't know if writer / director Joe D'Amato was trying to push his sleazy films as travel movies but he often starts his films establishing the location, in this case Hong Kong by showing planes landing at the airport and ferries crossing the harbor in front of the city.  Eva (Gemser) has arrived in town to do a show and when she arrives she is talking to Jules (Gabriele Tinti) who is interested in seeing her show. I am going to guess that the show contains cobras hence the name of the film.  This film is early in the lovely Gemser's career this being her fifth film. Already a budding exploitation star with three featured characters in the Emmanuelle series of soft core exploitation movies she would go on to do more than a dozen of the films. Fresh faced and young in this one Gemser is just starting that twenty year film career. Her IMDB bio explains her early life as:"The exotic dark-haired beauty moved to Italy in the mid-1970's and made her film debut as Janine in the obscure Amore libero - Free Love (1974). However, it was Laura's small, but memorable role as a masseuse in Emmanuelle II (1975) that really launched her career in racy soft-core exploitation fare. Gemser achieved her greatest enduring international cult popularity with her incredibly erotic and uninhibited portrayals of the titular hedonistic and sexually adventurous globe-trotting photojournalist in the steamy "Black Emanuelle" series that were often directed by the notorious Joe D'Amato and frequently co-starred Gemser's real-life actor husband Gabriele Tinti." Tinti eighteen years her senior in real life and Gemser's husband plays Jules Carmichael a playboy who since he hit it off with her on the plain invites his brother Judas to go see her show. I wonder if that name will fit the character of the man. The DVD sleeve says that Judas falls for Eva and that is just weird in that he is a good thirty years older than she, but I guess the wealthy have the luxury of not paying attention to age norms in dating.
  Judas is smitten by watching the topless Eva dancing with a boa constrictor in a room full of men. She is slender and beautiful and it is all to establish desires, Eva touching a female friend under the table in the club establishes her willingness to be open sexually. Judas staring at this with an intense desire wants her. Later Eva is touching herself on a bed while thinking about her snake dancing and female lover. Judas a snake keeper himself takes her to lunch and then hires Eva to care for his reptiles. She having just met the creepy old man is not looking to immediately move into his house to be cared for by him. Such a strange approach the older rich guy offing to keep her and take care of her. This makes her Asian boyfriend jealous, he does not mind her taking woman lovers but the idea of another man in her life makes him angry. His anger is enough for her to allow him one more fuck before she takes the job with Judas.
  Things seem to go well when she joins the Carmichael residence but this film churns slowly while Eva is finding and wooing a bleached blonde Gerri (Michele Starck) and Julkes is seducing and then torturing Candy (Ziggy Zanger) with his brother's snakes. It slogs through the two women travelling around Hong Kong talking. There is some animal violence when they watch a snake being killed skinned and cooked at a local merchant stall. There is also a feeding of Judas' snakes that includes a python killing a mouse. Mostly there is a real openness to the films approach to bisexuality and lesbianism but unfortunately it does not empower those ways of life. More it is a male POV where we can see women caressing each other and getting naked, bathing together and often times in these scenes we see Jules peeping in from the other room always reminding us that this is material for the men to enjoy. Jules is a bit of a creeper, more so than his eccentric but seemingly harmless brother. His jealousy of the two women sharing a bed prompts him to put a deadly snake in the room with the two women. Gerri panics and incites the snake to bite her and she dies quickly. Devastated Eva leaves Hong Kong with Jules not knowing that he killed her lover. Or does she?
  There is a revenge aspect to this film and we eventually get there after a lot of slow plotting. Jules taking a Black Cobra up the ass because this special breed will eat its way free is an idea to be marveled at. She also has the gall to confess her crimes to Judas looking for him to back to the happier times when they lived together. She wants t show him she is the snake charmer and brings the green mamba out to dance with it. Unfortunately for her she is bitten by it and dies. This is a quick and remarkable dark ending to the film. I am not sure how worth the time this particular film is as it slogs most of the time and there really is not any redeeming qualities. I suppose the moral is don't kill with snakes or you will die by one? On a Gemser scale for nudity this film is like 2 of 5 nudes so if that was why you want to see it you may be disappointed in that also.

Mercy Black (2019) Horror Children

Mercy Black (2019) - This film is next up on the Zombiegrrlz podcast : Stream Queens and can be seen on Netflix. So go watch it, then listen to the pod when it comes out. Those two amazing women doing the pod will give you a very entertaining, insightful hour and a half. And when you have done your homework you can argue with them even though they can't hear you. What better way to spend your time sitting in traffic on the way to work. You got that Rachel? "Stream Queens saving your morning drive!"
Three girls head out into the fields and streams on a beautiful sunny day but only two come home. The mystery of the opening scenes which seems to show two of the girls killing their friend is seen only in short snippets. Those snippets are enveloped by a scene of Dr Ward (Janeane Garofalo) talking to young Marina (Jamy Lentz) trying to find out what happened that day. That is just the setup and we very quickly move to 15 years later when now grown Marina has been convinced that she was imagining the entire thing and was close to becoming schizophrenic thanks to 15 years with good doctor Ward. Let talk for just a minute about every time we have a mental health professional in a horror movie. They are either evil, crusaders or incompetent. Many times they are two of these things at once. Like the evil orderlies and non caring doctor Silverman in Teminator 2 : Judgement Day. Or a crusader like Dr Loomis trying to get people to understand just how dangerous Michael Myers is in Halloween. Or just incompetent like here in this film where because the therapist can't believe in the supernatural, then the patient must be ill. All of these instance make mental health workers look bad. I have something against that having worked as a counselor for eight years in my glorious past I know the majority of people in the field are in it for benevolent reasons. Because of the history of psychology and its really ill formed start as more punishment than a helping profession, mental health professionals get short shrift when it comes to morals. Often just mean people throwing straight jackets on patients and medicating them against their wills it has not been portrayed in a positive light. Ever. My pet peeve and soapbox. In this film Ward is seen as a logical smart professional but since she has no ability to connect to the supernatural aspects of the girls story, she just creates a diagnosis that covers what happened to Marina (Daniella Pineda). She sends her home after 15 years.
  Picked up by her sister we learn the parents are dead and the house a bit run down. Sister Alice (Elle LaMont) lives there with her son Bryce and the setup is what? Marina kills another child maybe Bryce? The creepy starts right away but in a very safe way. What could go wrong? Back in the house you lived in when you were traumatized. A kid creeping around while you are sleeping and having nightmares. A true crime friend Will Nylund (Austin Amelio) who comes over and want to talk about the murder of their friends in the name of Mercy Black. There really for some exposition we learn that the two friends didn't just kill a little girl with a rock but also stabbed her seven times. It widens the story letting us know that the story of two girls killing a friend has gone viral on this new invention called the internet. It also leads to a townie coming and scaring Marina with an effigy on the front porch. It also leads to the boy, Bryce finding out about Mercy Black, a guardian angel who seeks out sad kids and will take the hurt away if she receives a pure offering. "A perfect offering that will make her flesh and blood."
  The teacher, Lily Bellows (Lee Eddy) is suspicious letting Bryce get all kinds of information and trying to make it a bit of a mystery. This is not going to end well especially when she leaves the kid on the internet by himself. Just beside I get the we will see this woman again vibe so maybe the actress if foreshadowing her character a bit too strongly. At this point it is all innocent enough but I have a feeling about this one.
  A black feather to remind Marina about the crow they killed for their sacrifice. Will shows up to get Marina to consider getting on TV with her story. We also get more exposition where we learn Rebecca Kline the other little girl, was let out before Marina. Rebecca is the one who thought up Mercy Black and Marina portrays it as her idea to do those dastardly deeds. Will is a bit of an ass and can't keep his Mercy Black fandom contained when he talks to Marina making her really uncomfortable. She kicks him out of the house and he threatens the dog. So when they find the dog in the trash dead that night Alice is all in on blaming Will. When she confronts him she learns he has been researching stories of Mercy Black killings from around the world. The character does not make great sense as a friend but as a nutjob looking to profit off of Marina's history.
  Will is an antagonist who gets a bit of creepy himself. As it happens we see a frames image of the five of spades on his wall. Which a quick internet search reveals "The five of spades refers to your qualities and invites you to be careful. ... As a bad omen, the five of spades announces betrayal and the end of a romantic relationship or friendship, despite your implication and attachment. Playing on emotions and memories, this card refers to a sad time you will find hard to cope with." This plays right along with the myth they are building and it is time for the "monster" to start getting peopl so he is not a bad victim.
  Marina starts questioning her years of therapy and now in a quick reverting to crazy has to find out if  Mercy is real. Not calling back to the hospital for support but instead looking for Rebecca. We learn that after a suicide attempt that Rebecca is just a spaced out shell of a person. Well mostly. I like how everything even if a bit on the nose pushes the story forward. Mixed with the flashbacks of the children we get to see that the desire for Mercy to exist, even if made up by delusional kids may be enough to create the fiend out of imagination. We are really well set up in this movie. The mercy story has spread to Bryce and his imagination takes over while at the same time Marina is seeking to find out if her childhood trauma was just in her head. Both things are hopefully going to culminate with either a realization that it is a mental health problem or a real Mercy Black doing some serious damage. I would guess that since Marina is still the main character that she will be the one saving the boy from himself.
   Well constructed to this point we have all the pieces we need for a very creepy climax. We end up with Bryce and Marina in the house alone together and Mercy on her way. There is a great little twisty twist concerning the librarian who has been noticing Bryce's behavior. They do this thing though where they show a bit too much too soon and it cuts a lot of the tension out of the last quarter of the film. Still I think it works in a way. I am not sure it is the route I would have taken with the story but in the end it all plays out as a story about faith in what you believe in. Will there be time though for Marina to face her demons and still save the day? Again the ending was a bit stunted and not totally unforeseen. So overall I am saying this film is not so bad, a very passable little film which makes the recent choices on the Stream Queens like 3 for 3.

Necropolis (1986) - Horror Witch

Necropolis (1986) -  LeeAnne Baker stars as Eva a reincarnated witch in NYC as she travels around using her demonic influence to take the lives of others. Sucking their life force, a slime like goo from them. This goo she then feeds to her undead followers via breast feeding with her six breasted chest. Baker who had a super short but spirited career for a couple years where she was in seven films including Breeders (1986) also a very gooey film and Galactic Gigolo (1987) the platinum blonde slim, fit girl strikes all the right poses as she uses her sexuality to get what she wants. Her magic which comes from worshiping Satan she has the ability to talk people into doing thing as extreme as suicide in order to get what she wants. Part of the Full Moon Grindhouse collection this film certainly has the grimy NYC so often seen in grindhouse films. The version I watched was a full screen lacking a good print to give it a theatrical look. Looking like it was transferred from video a lot of the film is a bit too dark.
 Working two sides of the story. We follow the lovely Baker as she initiates her plan to bring back her followers, making victims of the sleazy characters she runs into.  Not nice and with an incredible number of costume changes Baker exudes the evil she contains. Opposed to her is a trio of a cop a virgin and a minister. The cop Billy (Michael Conte) spend less time chasing the witch as he does chasing the tail of Dawn (Jacquie Fitz). Still through his interactions with a preacher (George Anthony-Rayza) seemed to bring him up to speed about the strange deaths in this run down bit of the city.
Listen there is not a lot going on with this film and as a completed product its appeal is limited. In the end good and evil meet and who knows who is going to win that battle. Will the witch be successful in bringing her followers into modern times? If she does isn't the magic she is introducing the movie that should have been made? Writer - Director Bruce Hickey lets the film slip in pacing and the acting by mostly inexperienced group when it comes to film struggle to make their characters compelling. The weird six breasted witch is something to see thanks to special effects by Matt Vogel. Still this film although it takes itself very seriously wasn't really my cup of tea.