Sssssss (1973) Horror Mad Scientist

Sssssss (1973) - Boy how things have changed in the 40 years since this film was made. In a day when practical effects are fading from film and animals are more likely to be animated than live on set I look back at Sssssss which is proud of the fact that it uses real highly venomous snakes and takes the time to thank the actors for putting their lives at risk. A mad scientist, Dr Carl Stoner (Strother Martin) thinks the world is going to shit and the only way that mankind is going to survive is to be more cold blooded. Of course Stoner has a strange plan for making sure we survive. He is a snake expert and through his experiments is trying to give snakes human intelligence. We know right from the beginning that Stoner is not on the up and up. The opening scenes show him and a carnival side show manager are loading a crate interestingly human size onto  the carny's truck. The sound coming from the darkened crate are human-ish but not quite. The opening definitely pulls you right in wondering what this guy is up too.
  Stoner is a snake researcher working out of his house with his daughter Kristina (Heather Menzies-Urich) as an assistant. He also employs a local student also David Blake (Dirk Benedict) who looks to get some school credit for his work. The research is very seldom discussed in the film more Kristina is around to show how the Stoner is down and out not being able to get research grants. He is a bit of a lush as well as a disagreeable fellow when it comes to kissing establishment ass. Its sort of strange really because the actor really makes him a likable character.  Blake is the new guy to replace the last assistant Tim (Noble Craig) who mysteriously disappeared to take care of a sick family member. He is young and naive and happily takes the injections from the doctor as immunization to the many dangerous snakes in the lab. The last main character is Harry the alcoholic pet boa constrictor who plays his role with honesty totally selling it.
  So what is really happening in this film?  I am not really giving anything away by talking about the plot because the film does not try to hide anything. We as the audience completely understand what the intentions of every character from the moment they are introduced. There is no subtlety, or nuance to any of the characters. Stoner is a scientist trying to turn his male assistant into a snake with human intelligence, the only question the film leaves is will he be successful? Will Blake figure out what is happening before it is too late? Will the excessively blinded by love daughter pay attention to things enough to realize her new love interest is changing and will she confront her father or remain loyal? Seeing how these questions get answered is the reason to watch this film. You can tell early on how it is going to go but there are some fun things along the way.

• We get to see Stoner hypnotize and then milk a king cobra for its venom.
• We get to watch the development of the relationship between Kristina and Blake including the most rediculous blocking of naked bodies when they go skinny dipping by putting something in front of the lense, so obvious and silly.
• We get to see the tough guy Steve Randall (Reb Brown, who later played Captain America) throw around Dirk Benedict before the tables are turned with Blake doing his patented snake strike fighting move.
• We see the transformation of man into snake, as well as the failed attempt on poor Tim.
• We get to hear some one say the line. "Freaks, that what you are a bunch of snake freaks."
• See a man have to put his hand into a cage with a viper to get a key only to miss the large snake in the rafters.
• We also get to see Blake fight for his life against a mongoose.

  Its an interesting thing, the police get involved but more because they hear things than actually having interest about a home snake lab in the county. When things get crazy they come in at the end to clean up the pieces but really are never an antagonistic factor. Stoner is the main player and in the end he may realize his dream of a snake with human intelligence.
  Is this movie worth a view? Well that is a hard call. On one hand it is a uniquely 70s film and I do so love much of the mumbo jumbo that came out in those years. On the other hand it is a very predictable movie with every turn telegraphed. Really only the ending scenes are a mystery in this one. Some of the acting is good particularly Strother Martin, but Benedict and Menzies-Urich are not so much. Cameos by the Carny Kogen (Tim O'Conner) and Prof. Daniels (Richard Shull) are excellent while most are cartoonish and not so good. So I think although I really didn't mind watching the film that it falls into the category of "Ed liked it but you probably won't." So I am not recommending this one.
Rating (4.2) 5.0 and up are recommended , some more recommended than others.

Zombie Women of Satan (2009) horror comedy

Zombie Women of Satan (2009) - A traveling freak show that main freak attraction is that they are very annoying heads to an isolated country farm to appear on a web cast. The farm is manned by a crazy scientist doing experiments that lead to the creation of female zombies in their underwear.
 That is the most basic of explanation for this really horrible piece of film making. Before this poor piece of screen writing is through we have to suffer through camp styled crap scenes that establish some of the character.
  The film starts with a woman in the woods who seems to be tracking something. The scene does nothing and only acts to let us know this person exists, but we learn nothing else before the credits. Later we see she is part of the freak group and so know we should circle round to this first scene again. After the credits we get introduction to the freak show group starting with the lovely Harmony Starr (Kate Soulsby) doing a feather dance, followed by the introduction of rock singer Skye Bannigan (Victoria Hopkins) by or painted face MC Johnny Dee Hellfire (Seymore Leon Mace) the poorly lip synced song is the first indicator that this movie might not be the best quality. The next act is even worse with a strange clown character named Pervo the Clown (Warren Speed) who basically does a joke instead of an act and runs off stage with assistant Harmony instead of the act he describes throwing knives. Then there is the midget Zeus (Peter Bonner) and chainsaw wielding Damage (Joe Nicholson)
  Inter cut are scenes of a older man Henry Zander (Bill Fellows) doing some kind of experiment on a woman in her underwear. He injects her with a serum and the cut backs show him writing notes while the body (dead maybe) becomes animated to the point that he has to stab her in the head with a knife. There is a secondary setting where a cult leader is welcoming into his family a young woman. Later we learn that this is the sister of Skye. Early on though the primary focus is showing the freak show that does nothing freaky in their act. At least on screen so it is really just establishing these characters as the main players.

 There is this horror comedy line that the film plays but early on it seems more committed to the comedy end of the spectrum. The music and setting we get to see Pervo and Hellfire in are meant to be humorous but really fall flat. The Pervo character is really unlikable including the stupid idea that he never takes off his face paint and clown nose. Who cares that he has several women in his room to play twister, or that after Hellfire returns to his own room there is a gagged woman and two other topless women wearing gas masks. Just being strange is not character development, its just strange and off putting so how does the writer Warren Speed expect any sympathy for his characters later in the film when the shit hits the fan?
  The strangeness does not stop with the freaks, at the farm the Zander family has their own quotient of loony. There is the experimenting Henry who has his dominatrix dressed daughter Red (Marysia Kay), as an assistant, apparently bringing drugged party goers down to be the next subject. The son Tycho (Christian Steel) is leader of a cult which is a fine way to get the women the father needs, and the mother (Kathy Paul) chained to the wall in the cellar is a rude crazy woman who may be cannibalistic. I would guess from the early scenes of this film that Henry is trying to cure his wife.  The last daughter is Blue (Gillian Settle) who assists Tycho with his cult. The cult is controlled by drugging the women with punch and after the freak show arrives at the farm we get to see a contamination of the punch when a subject bleeds into the bowl. The punch is dutifully distributed by Blue to the large room of underwear clad nubile young ladies. Who after drinking it fall to the floor in convulsions that surprisingly make them pull there bras off.
  When Blue runs to Tycho to tell him that the girls are going crazy, Skye sees her long lost sister through the barn door and is instantly determined to save her. So let me get this straight, just by chance the rock singers sister is a cult girl. It couldn't have been that is why she was in the woods in the very first scene, scouting the location of her sister? It couldn't be that she arranged the interview for Tycho's web cast to get in to save her? Instead it is happenstance? Really? Well anyway the fun is about to start with the now zombie girls starting to appear and craving flesh so it is a fight for survival.
  The comedy is poor with bits about the electric fence, masturbation, family dynamics that are challenging to get through. The freak group splits up, which really is the thing you want to do when confronted with flesh eating zombies. The ridiculous music does not let any kind of tension to develop just so we can get these bits before getting back together. Even with the crisis all they can do is bicker for minutes at a time instead of doing anything.

 The running joke of Pervo sneaking off to jerk off is absolutely the worst. They wander around the estate without a plan until they run into topless crazies they have to fight off. Damage takes a bite and goes down apparently dead but we can guess soon to rise. Again for no good reason the freak group breaks up into two groups, Zues Pervo and Skye heading out to find her sister, then of course Zeus needs to take a shit and thus needs to go off alone. Fart and squirt jokes associated with it are less than juvenile. The giant, and I mean giant pile he leaves certainly echoes how big a dud this movie is. Some strange editing has them all together again minus Zeus, to fight off Damage and a couple more zombie girls.
  While the freaks story lines struggle to be remotely funny or exciting the family at the farm apparently has been walking this whole time between the barn and the farmhouse where Dad is happily doing experiments on his latest zombie. Somehow the distance has grown from just a hundred yards or so to miles so in the time we were following the freaks, the family not only failed to reach dear old dad but failed to keep track of Skye's sister Rachel (Victoria Broom) and she has wandered off.Most of this movie is people wandering around the woods and every now and again running into zombie girls with bloody eyes. Almost all of it is played for laughs but it is a bit too stupid to laugh at.
  When the family gets to Daddy and start to load up with the few weapons they have, they develop a plan to kill not only the zombie girls but also the freaks. They want to keep Rachel in the cult so can't have word of their actions leaking out.
  In yet another bizarre turn the strapped down zombie's behavior changed when Tycho felt her breast, so Dad suggests her fuck her. Why? We have already established that the family is strange as strange can be. It makes no sense that this scene his here. There are so many things wrong with this film but also all the inevitable cliches, accidental deaths, bitten changing colleagues, and chainsaw kills. There seems to be an endless number of  semi nude not so attractive zombie. You think things can't get worse until you have Zombie Midgets, and wheelchair bound zombies. The final confrontation between the freaks and family with Rachel as the prize it stellar in a bad way. This movie is not one of my favorites, they even had difficulty focusing the camera at times. So there is no real recommendation coming in but watch it at your own risk.
Rating (2.7) 5.0 and up are recommended, some more recommended than others.

Splice (2009) - Horror Sci-Fi Monster

Splice (2009) - Putting off seeing films can be a good thing, with time their is also a certain perspective gained. Early reviews of Splice were decent with but not great, and unfortunately it was impossible not to hear the details before seeing this film. Still the movie is 74% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes. I was interested in seeing it in theaters but you know, sometimes you just can't get out to see everything you want to see. Recently picking it off of On Demand on comcast gave me a chance to see if the film was worth some of the very positives reviews it got or was it was the horrid piece of crap that audiences seemed to be saying. To qualify I read a bunch of early reviews where the author of the review talked about how darkly disturbing the film is, how he or she was enthralled while the audience they were seeing it with were hooting and hollering at the rediculousness of the film. I saw several reviews with this same theme, and then reading reviews written months after it was release, more talk about how audiences trashed the film. So is it a piece of genre art that only true fans can like, but general audience think is bad? Time to find out.

First the description of the film, two hot shot genetic scientist do the unthinkable, they create lifeforms from gene splicing. Giant maggots that produce a certain protein to be more precise. They want to more forward capitalizing on this new technology, but the corporate bosses want to go cautiously. Its not that the corporation has ethical reasons, its just they want to monetize what has already been created. In fact ethics never really enters the film although it is referenced by characters. This is the mad scientist as in, Frankenstien movie, so we sort of know what will happen at this point. Of course they need to have an "Its Alive!" moment. Also with mad scientists the ethics of "could we" versus "should we" is firmly planted in moving forward. So using her own DNA, Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) creates Dren (Delphine Chaeac), a creature not entirely human. It is important to note that at this point, anyone who has any kind of love or even like of science will be pulled out of the film. For us this film becomes just another gimmic and soret of B-movie science wanna be. The problem is that if you are a brilliant scientist as or team is with Kast and Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) then you just don't throw genes together and wait to see what you are going to get. It is not a mix and match and then see if you being is mostly or partly human. you will want to know, and not move forward until you know exactly what the expected outcome will be. Just throwing in frog dna sequences might be good enough for an action adventure film like Jurrasic Park but for a science fiction film, not so much. This may be the reason it was heavily advertized as a horror film, because they knew the science film premise would not hold together. So the deed is done and a creature starts growing, we get to see the development and be as amazed as our science team is on what develops, again they should already know what is going to come but seem amazed when it has funny legs and likes candy. Oh and what fucking scientist would just give the damn creature candies? What if it died from them?

When Dren grows into a semi female-ish being with funny legs the couple begin to see that working right under the noses of their company can only lead to trouble so they need a new place for Dren. Luckily the script writer/director (Vincenzo Natali) rescues them with a farm nobody ever mentioned and the Brody character never knew Kast had inherited even though they appear to be intimately involved in a long term relationship. The self concious reference makes it okay I guess? Really?

Off to the location where things can go horribly wrong, since the psuedoscience is done now the the script veers into personal motivation and we learn about Elsa's need for a child and how her damaging childhood fed into the creation of Dren. It is done as a reveal after we see her play Mom with the creature and loose all perspective as a scientist. She is the mother figure and it is her child, while all along the way Clive is like, "What the fuck we have to end this shit, this is crazy." and Elsa is like "Oh look at the little cutie, can't we keep her for just a bit longer, she's soooo cute." Okay I might be paraphrasing there but hey its close.

When Clive heads out to the barn to deal with Dren by himself things go horribly wrong. Maybe all father figures in movies are evil. Maybe because Dren is adult looking, with breasts but for some reason the Father figure, Clive thinks fucking the creature may be a way to deal with his troubles in his relationship with Elsa. Isn't this what all adopting Fathers do? So Brody goes full tilt on little Dren climaxing just prior to Elsa walking in the door. Yes it is what it looked like and things just spiral from there. Now I am no expert but I would say it is pretty messed up to screw the creature you brought into the world through genetic manipulation. I think Clive had that same feeling and probably felt really off the hook when they find Dren apparently dead in the water tub in the barn. He didn't get to say it to Elsa but I am sure he was thinking. "Okay, I know that was really fucked up but no one else needs to know about that right Elsa, baby." So they bury their problem but not their problems. Only one thing wrong with this, just like they introduced earlier in the film with the maggots, they both turned male and got aggressive. Dren sort of turns to Dan changing from a female to a male. Again let me state that there is no way this could have happened without scientist knowing the possibility was there. How can you combine genes without a basic understanding of chromosomes?

Male creature does what I guess all guys do and rapes Elsa and then comes to a very untimely death. Enough plot, what the fuck kind of fucked up head thought to make the males in this such fucking dickwads? Clive had sex with his non human child and then when that creature, probably out of shame changed into a male then raped its Mother? Hello what kind of freaking psychosis does this writer have? Elsa is no prize either, letting her personal life drive her experimentation but so afraid of intimacy that she can't have a baby, she has to create it. This bit of melodrama was metered out for us in such a soap opera way.

Now it is seeming like I hated this movie, which is not true. I hated alot about this film and wished it was better constructed. As a B-Movie it is decent entertainment, meant to be ridiculed as it is being viewed. As a serious attempt as a science fiction film it is not my cup of tea.

Rating (4.6) 5.0 and up are recommended In the Zombiegrrlz system, Rent it if you need to see it.

Orloff's Invisible Monster (1971) - Horror Mad Scientist

Orloff's Invisible Monster (1971) - The problem with buying films in the discount bin is a lot of the films really are just poor, this strange and pointless film falls perfectly into that category. This 70's french film that I think may be trying to copy the Hammer style movies is a ridiculous story with really no other point than to allow semi pretty untrimmed ladies to be naked on screen for short periods of time.

There is a story, it is so strange but it does exist. Dr. Garondet (Paco Valladares) is called to the castle of Professor Orloff (Howard Vernon) without much information besides that someone is ill. He has trouble getting a carriage, as the local folks are afraid to go near the place. Finally he finds a guy but part way there the carriage gets stuck in the mud and the driver refuses to go the rest of the way. He tells Garondet to continue down the road and you will get to the castle. Somehow though whether the wind confused him or his understanding of "the road" was different than the drivers, he ends up wandering through the woods. Finding a house he tries to get help but when he mentions Orloff the door is closed on his face. Flustered the incompetent Doctor finally finds the giant castle but the butler servant is not going to let him in. He has to force his way in.

Things do not get any easier for Garondet, the servants a man and woman maid (Evane Hanska who you will see naked later) don't know anything about there being a medical emergency. They insist neither of them sent for him. He is pissy being called out and wandering about in the rain and insists to see the Professor.

In a room he is taken to he meets Cecile Orloff (Brigette Carva who you will see naked later) the professor's daughter. She called him because the house is a strange place? I am not really sure why she sent for him. Anyway, she is a strange cookie and not all together in tune. I guess that is what happens when you come back from the dead. What? Oh not there yet, lets get there.

When the doctor finally gets to meet Orloff he very quickly learns there is an invisible man the Mad Scientist has created. The special effects are special as in short bus special. He says the being he created is smarter and stronger than a man. He tells a story of his daughter appearing to die. He has her put in a coffin and then puts all these beautiful jewels on her. The watching servants are obviously going to steal those jewels, particularly Marie (Isabel del Rio) we get to see her naked as she strips as a way to get a male servant to come with her to the tomb to get the jewels from Cecile.

All of this is just a way to get the servants to hurt Cecile while trying to get the ring off and thus the pain waking her from her apparent really deep sleep. It also gets Orloff pissed and he can lock up the servant in the dungeon. Why am I going on with this...

SO bad...

Pushing through, Orloff explains all about the invisible creature. The creature gets to rape the maid as punishment for calling for Dr. Gardonet, Orloff said he wanted to see how he would handle a women. What you really see is Evane Hanska moving about on a bed of straw hating and loving the invisible sex. The doctor is appalled by Orloff and want to now save his daughter from this place and the invisible monster.

Later somehow I actually for get how it happened Cecile walks around naked too. Using flour we get to see the monster, a guy in a gorilla suit and the castle burns to the ground. Writer/Director Pierre Chevalier does such a poor job I can't care enough to continue. Who lives? who Dies? What happens to Maria, adn the Monster? Well you can choose to watch this because I am done here.

Rating (2.7) 5.0 and up are recommended, Zombiegrrlz rating system, SKIP IT!

The Human Centipede: First Sequence (2009) - Horror mad doctor

The Human Centipede: First Sequence (2009) - Part of the Terrorthon 10 horror festival at the Somerville Theater. REVISITED -Originally reviewed here on this blog in May 2010 it received a recommended but just barely. Viewing it for a second time I think I enjoyed it much more. My initial review focused on the idea of the human centipede, it is a shocking idea that I was mildly disgusted with. This second time with the idea not such a big new idea, watching the film was easier. The performance of Deiter Laser as Dr. Heiter was much more impressive. He was the mad scientist an egomaniac who wants to create something never done before. The idea of humans only comes to him after the three dog centipede he created died. I had not noticed in the first scene that he was looking at the dog version in snapshots before he shoots the truck driver. He is a man in grief trying to fill the hole left with their passing. What drives the movie is his performance and it is really well done. He has the look and the intense eyes and works the part to the max.
Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) are really underdeveloped but they do not need to be more complete than what we are given. They are victims and because of the downer ending their story arcs don't have to travel that far. Katsuro actually get to be more of a character and his outcome is a noble one, of course being the head is considerable more promising than being the tail, and poor Lindsay in the middle is really unfortunate.
The women are indeed foolish in their decision making to get into this position. They leave the road when they got a flat and although they can't have known the evil in Heiter's heart they did sense his strangeness but acted too slowly. There is also a bit of a logical flaw when they allow him to call the rental place for them since how would he know which rental place that was. Wouldn't they want to make that call? So they are captured and we get to see the cruelty of the doctor when the truck driver's tissue doesn't match that of the girls.
There are really a great scene after Heiter comes back with the trucker's replacement, the Japanese man Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura) who yells some very funny things in Japanese even though no one can understand him. The reaction of the three victims when the doctor explains with hand drawn slide what is in store for them is great. The mixture of WTF and then more WTF! and a sense that they are helpless, all actors pull this off but Katsuro in particular because he gets the idea of the operation just from the simple drawings. None of the three yet know where they are going to end up in this creation but it does not take long before that information comes out.
Lindsay gets free of her bonds and makes an escape. In a tense and well executed scene she looks like she is going to get away. Of course she doesn't get away and the punishment Lindsay suffers is because she failed in the number one rule when you escape an abductor. Never go back for your friend! You can get to help and than save your friend but going back always leads to bad things for you. In this case she earned the middle slot in the sequence.
After the operation we have less enjoyable scenes of the reaction of the victims as each wakes to realize the situation. Then of Heiter trying to train the human centipede as you would a dog. You see he is driven to replace his beloved dogapede and damn it if these humans are even more difficult to train. The rantings of our lead segment Katsuro, and the constant whimpering of the other two makes the doctor wish aloud that he had severed their vocal chords.
The squeamish should be wary of the effects of food on the human centipede. The first bowel movement is well acted but hard to watch. Then there is poor Jenny who does not do too well after the operation and seems to have an infection in her stapled face. As we move towards the climax of the film she is having a harder time staying upright.
When the cops come to the doctor about the missing girls he can not break his psychologically depraved desire to had to his creation and attempt the same drugging of the officers as he did the girls. It does not work out so well and in the end things get a bit crazy for the good doctor. Still trying to hold back the spoilers for this film no further information will be relayed here, other than the ending is not one of triumph of the human spirit over adversity. This film was much better on a second viewing.
Rating (6.6) 5.0 and up are recommended, on the Zombiegrrlz rating system I would say Rent it!

Dr. Blood's Coffin (1961) - Horror

Dr. Blood's Coffin (1961) - Peter Blood ( Kieron Moore) was a stellar student at medical school, so much so that he got a five year reseach internship in Vienna. When he pushes the boundaries of medicine too far he is kicked off his research grant and is forced to return home. Early in the movie we are not allowed to see the good doctor, the surprise is being saved for later, Instead we see a small English village where medical supplies and residents are disappearing. Again we see a mysterious lower body and a pair of hands but not the good doctor. So at this point we don't know he lives here and is the son of the local doctor. What I thought was going to be a big surprise was discarded when Peter drives into town like he has not been there for a month. We get to see him flirt with nurse Linda Parker (Hazel Court) and see his father.

It is transparent to the viewer that Peters hands are the same hands as the guy kidnapping people and taking them into the tin mines. So as the town constable talks about searching the mines Peter starts stepping in to protect his illegal experiments. We do not know what those experiments are but we know he is killing people from the village to try to complete them. He first kidnaps the guide for the minds the night before the search, then he takes his place and leads the cop away from his secret rooms in the mind. Unfortunately for Peter things keep going wrong and he has to compound his lies and stack up bodies to stay ahead of the trouble he is on. He is a driven man and as the plot tightens the noose around him we learn the big secret experiments.

With this is also a love story between Peter and beautiful Linda, a widow whose husband died a few months earlier. Peter has to agree to do autopsies on the people he has killed with his poison or at least paralysing them. Then when he is discovered by old friend and undertaker Tregaye (Fred Johnson) mostly because he never locks any doors. In fact the body count would have been significantly lower if he could just stop people from walking in. He was so driven to complete the big secret experiments though and that would be such a hassle. His father after returning from having a syrindge with the poison analyzed at a lab in a different city finds Peter's autopsy reports a bit odd. What else was odd was a comment in the pub where Peter and his father are having a beer and talking. Linda comes over and they ask her if she will join them, in a beer. She says no thank you and then mentions the calories. Peter says something about women worrying too much about their weight. It was out of the blue and had nothing to do with the movie.

Peter is caught again in his experiments this time when Linda walks in. they have an argument about the big secret and it is revealed that we want to create life in a corpse, by transplanting a heart from a living person. REALLY? That is the big secret, you want to reanimate a body while killing a living person. Naturally Linda thinks this is wrong and gets into a religion vs science argument. She takes a desidedly anti science stance and he being the crazy doctor makes science lose for sure. He is a driven man though and takes his latest victim to the mines and completes his experiment by reanimating Linda's dead husband. then he drags her down there and shows her the reanimated rotting corpse of her husband. The zombie creature attacks and Peter and it fight while Linda escapes. They knock over some chemicals and both choke to death. In all Peter killed like 6 people to complete this experiment, but he rationalized it saying they were no bodies and not worth a second thought. WOW! Director Sidney J. Furie early in a career that continues to this day made some odd choices with angle and close up. This one made no sense, written by Nathan Juran and really besides the scenic views of the English coast was a real waste of time. The picture was old and grainy and the music by Buxton Orr was overly dramatic
Rating (2.1) 5.0 and up are recommended Zombiegrrlz rating Skip It!

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) - Spoilers!!! This review will discuss in detail this bizarre film and will most certainly give away major plot points.

The opening of this film we are introduced to Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) who we think is a killer as we get to see him aim a gun at a trucker before breaking and starting a scene to introduce our two female leads Lindsey (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie). They are two American girls on a walk about in Europe and preparing to head to a party in the German countryside. This leads to the inevitable flat tire and then leaving the vehicle because there is no cell phone service to look for a house to call for help. They stumble upon Dr. Heiters home and he invites them in in his strange and off putting way. He says he will call for the rent a car service people but fakes the call from the other room while drugging the water he gets for the girls. When they are captured and drugged and then wake up they are in restraints, and laying with the big old trucker in what looks like an operating room. Scared and crying they watch in horror as the trucker is killed because as the Doctor says "One of these thing does not match. So next we have the doctor arriving with a new body of a young Japanese man Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), who has been tranquilizer darted. Now that all three parts have been procured Heiter explains to them that he is formerly the leading doctor for separating Siamese twins but now he wants to do the reverse. He wants to create a human centipede. He will attach the lips of one to the ass of the other and so forth creating a living human centipede with a singular digestive tract.

Naturally the captives are horrified and Lindsey successfully frees herself but not being able to bring herself to leave her friend she is recaptured and is promised the middle spot for the trouble she caused. The operation proceeds and it is a nasty thing this guy does, cutting knee tendons so the victims can't stand and attaching Lindsey's face to the ass of Katsuro while attaching Jenny's Face to Lindsey's behind. Absolute gross to look at we are subjected to the doctor then trying to train them like a dog. We get the requisite shitting in Lindsey's mouth scene and then the climax, when a couple of cops investigating the disappearance of the girls in the area find the doctor strange. I won't discuss the actual ending but I was left feeling like redemption of any kind was never in the plans for any character in this film. So strange and disturbing just talking to my wife about it left her with nightmares. A passing grade for the shocking grossness of the idea but really the film does not have any character paths that grow, only suffering so in the end not a great movie.
Rating (5.2)

Swamp Thing (1982) Horror (ish)

Swamp Thing (1982) - It is 1982 I am sure I am in my Chinos and Members Only jacket, getting stoned and heading off with friends to the Neponset Drive-In for a fun double feature and one of the movies is Swamp Thing. As is often the case the blurred memories of the past and the present do not always smoothly fit together. This was my experience watching this movie. I am sure, in its time I thought this movie was fun. I have always had fond feeling for it. Now it could be as a senior in high school the small (and I mean small) glimpse of Adrienne Barbeau' s assets was enough to create such memories. It could be the combination of friends, the Drive In, Pot and alcohol created the right conditions for positive reflection. Whatever it was it is no longer present for me. This movie was soooooo.... hard to watch. Miss Barbeau plays Alice Cable a government scientist/agent checking up on Dr Alec Holland (Ray Wise) who is attempting to grow plants that will survive in the harshest of climates. Hidden in the swamps for some reason, in an underground bunker that looks like a shack from the outside, but has a bunker below it he works and quickly in the movie has a breakthrough. The tone is strange early in the movie with the introduction of villains, Dr. Arcane (Louis Jourdan) and his henchmen. They are very cartoon evil while Adrienne Barbeau and Ray Wise side seem to be playing things very straight. The bad guys evil for the sake of evil are looking a for Holland's breakthrough to exploit it. They take the notebooks detailing the experiments and Holland is covered in his formula and runs out on fire into the swamp to become the creature. Alice escapes with the final vital notebook and most of the rest of the movie is the absolutely silly soldier guys hunting for her in the swamps of South Carolina, while the swamp thing protects her. Eventually the monster is captured and his formula used by both Dr. Arcane and a henchman. Arcane becomes a hairy beast who has the final fight with Swamp Thing. In this there is a lot of explosions, capturing and loosing of Alice, a romance sort of between Swamp Thing and Alice, ridiculous looking stunts where you see the landing pads are pads, Swamp Thing healing ability, silly rubber suits for the monsters, and when it is all over a feeling of regret that I had such fond memories of this film. Director Wes Craven was in a very creative time for him, between the the late seventies, The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and just before the great A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), but he seems to have lost his way on this one. It is not a very good movie.

Rating (4.2)

Subject Two (2006) Horror

Subject Two (2006) was a compelling film that takes the Frankenstein story and builds on it, giving it a wicked twist in the end. I was engaged and interested from the beginning all the way to the end. A failing grad student takes an assistant position with a doctor experimenting with reanimating corpses. Soon after arriving he finds out he is to be subject number 2 and the Doctor kills him repeatedly in order through trial and error to perfect the formula. The scenery of the film location near Aspen Colorado is stunning and without giving anything away. Things are not quite what they seem with the good doctor and his experiments. I really enjoyed this one and with a cast of just six it does a fine job telling the story.
Rating (8.0)