Category: Horror films

Really Awful Movies: Ep 65b – Dead Alive

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Dead Alive is bloody. Very, very bloody, and the brainchild of the one and only, Peter Jackson. This Kiwi production is a bloody good time.

A soothsayer foretells the pairing of a cute bodega worker Paquita and a middle-aged nebbish Lionel.

The latter’s overprotective mother Vera Cosgrove (Elizabeth Moody), spies on their date as they visit the Wellington Zoo, which features a very special exhibit: a Sumatran Rat Monkey.

The monkey is a hybrid creature, the offspring of invasive rat species getting it on with monkeys. Anyway, one of the creatures bites the overbearing mom, turning her into a crazy zombie.

Lionel tranquilizes her and keeps her in the basement, but not before she’s bitten and transformed others into mindless zombies. Soon after that, ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE.

A critic in Entertainment Weekly said, “Horror films used to be primordial spook shows, tapping midnight-dark fears. Now they tap bodily goo: rivers of blood, dripping limbs, eyeballs that go pop in the night..”

The climax is one of the bloodiest things we’ve ever seen. Check out Dead Alive. It’s one for the ages.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 63 – Phantasm

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An otherworldly mortician, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), re-animates the dead as little people zombies in Phantasm, a weird and wonderful Don Coscarelli film.

But have no fear, for on the case is a young boy named Mike. He has the task of trying to convince townsfolk that the absurd plot above is legit.

His older brother and family friend (Jody and Reggie) are finally convinced and they do battle with The Tall Man, who can telekinetically fire deadly metallic baubles.

Phantasm is a decidedly unique experience. It’s an hallucinatory horror film that explores lots of different themes, and the soundtrack is one of the all-time greats.

For a budget that’s only a third of a million bucks, the movie looks incredible and has had a lasting cultural impact, namely making The Tall Man one of the most memorable antagonists in horror history.

Several sequels of varying quality followed, but here we focused on the one, the only…Phantasm.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 61 – Blood Feast

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Blood Feast!

This 1963 low-budget gore-fest is a first of its kind. Widely acknowledged as the first splatter, Blood Feast is by no means a great work of art. However, there is no denying how ahead of its time this was. Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, a Pittsburgh-born maker of “nudie cuties,” who moved into the horror culture when the latter died out, anyone who calls themselves a horror fan has to check this out.

Blood Feast features a psychopathic food caterer who kills women so that he can include their body parts in his titular feasts and perform sacrifices to his “Egyptian goddess” Ishtar. Some ineffectual cops, unfamiliar with cause and effect, have a problem figuring out the denouement.

The nastiness still holds up. Check out the DJ Kool Herc of horror, the first of its kind.