CHICAGO MASSACRE: RICHARD SPECK

There are days when I'm convinced I'm one of the last dozen people on earth who remembers when Corin Nemec was Corky.  And worse, who remembers when he was Parker Lewis.  Because watching Nemec in the latest attempts to outrun his past--and this time in horrific scar makeup--is actually wavering wildly between comical and terrifying.  And this time, Nemec is bringing us Michael Feifer's take on Richard Speck's rampage of killings back in the mid sixties.  Just in case you're not conversant with the details, Speck took nine student nurses in Chicago hostage and beat, raped, and killed eight of them. The last survivor, who hid under the bed, manages to give details to the police.

ACTS OF DEATH

Back to school time means back to school movies, and this one is just in line.  Baxter University's theatre department goes a little too far in the comraderie department, and during an initiation, ends up badly wounding one of its initiates.  In true Baxter University Theatre Department style, they run like crazed weasels into the night and leave said initiate to die.  Thus, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone that, the next night, the theatre department undergoes radical downsizing with lots of extra blood.  I know...you, much like me, are heaving sighs of exasperation and mild disgust because you've heard this sort of thing before.  POPCORN. URBAN LEGEND. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.  Lots and lots of movies about kids getting killed, sometimes accidentally, and their alleged friends running like thieves in the night and then getting killed for it mere hours or even days later.  Oh, and one or two at a time, too, and in bloody and / or dramatic fashion.

BRUTAL

There's a lot of things you can say about BRUTAL.  One look at the box practically screams "Torture porn ahead!" The plot synopsis on the back is no help at all.  But once you get past the heavily flawed box, what you find inside is a strange little package of ups and downs, of what might have been and what might be great.  What Wiley has brought forth is the story of several attractive young women, kidnapped and messily killed with various tools and implements and suchlike -- including hedge clippers.  Which I have to give Wiley some kudos for -- I can't recall the last time I saw murder by hedge clippers.  And of course, the murders are drawing attention from local law enforcement, one member of which august body happens to be, surprise surprise, an attractive young woman herself.  Which means not only will said attractive young woman be chasing our garden implement killer, but also will likely be his target.

BAXTER

Let this be a lesson to everyone who's ever looked down their noses at Paris and sneered as they turned back to their "freedom fries": never turn your back on the French, especially their filmmakers...because when they want to be, they can be just as truly balls-out fucked up as the Japanese ever thought to be.  BAXTER will be the proof of that.  Don't believe me?  Well, try out the first five minutes as a kid voluntarily slams a thumb tack into his palm.  And if that doesn't freak you out, well...try the plot synopsis.  Baxter, as it turns out, is an insane bull terrier who finds himself discontented living with his new mistress, an elderly woman who's quite afraid of him.  Due to his dissatisfaction, he plans to murder her.

THE OTHER SIDE

The dark side of the afterlife has a revolving door policy in the Slamdance On the Road presentation of "The Other Side".  While waiting for the woman he loves, Sam North is unexpectedly murdered and sent, surprisingly, to hell.  Hell, meanwhile, is an insane combination of childhood flashbacks and plastic wrap and not a whole lot of fire.  Anyway...now Sam's in hell, or is until a few other denizens help him, bafflingly, escape via a corrugated plastic tunnel conveniently located not too far from where he landed in the first place. Naturally, the management disapproves of such things--though if they actually DID have a distaste for this kind of thing you'd think they'd just seal up the damn corrugated plastic tunnel.  I mean, come ON.  Why don't they just put up a big sign saying "This Way Out Of Hell" and start advertising?

DEMONS 2

All right, classic splatter fans--sit down, shut up, and brace yourself as Bava and Argento bring us more eighties survival splatter in DEMONS 2.  If you're already looking askance at this piece and muttering at your monitor: "Hey...wait a second.  Wasn't the end of DEMONS basically an 'end of the world' scenario with people bugging out to the countryside because the cities were jam-packed with cannibalistic, fanged, demonic subhumans hell-bent on murder, mayhem and lunching up the populace?", you're not alone.  Seriously, I thought much the same thing.  And don't worry--there's a rational explanation.

SHADOW PUPPETS

Ever since you were a little kid, you were probably freaked out by what was moving--or what looked like it was moving--in your bedroom at night.  That's the joy of SHADOW PUPPETS, taking the worst of the fear of the unknown and packaging it into movie form.  Not to give too much away, but several people find themselves trapped in an abandoned insane asylum.  They have no idea who they are, where they came from, or what they're doing whereever it is they are. So, when they start gathering together in an attempt to find their way out and recover their lost memories, it's not going to be too much of a surprise that a lot of them will start dying.  And now, they have to not only get out, but also get out alive.

MUMMY MANIAC

When I first slipped this into my DVD player, I thought I'd finally gone completely over the edge.  It looked like yet another Ulli Lommel shitheap, with its poor video quality and its heavy dependence on gratuitious violence and gore.  Not to mention the necessity of text crawls to advance the plot--it's standard Lommel to not even bother giving up the plot with things like exposition and character development.  No, you see, these things just get in the way of reasonably attractive young actresses getting strangled and rendered, so why bother?  But no...unless "Max Nikoff" is a psuedonym for "Ulli Lommel"--and frankly I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it were--this is just another godawful shitheap of a movie that has absolutely nothing to do with Ulli Lommel and instead with Nola Roeper and the Hollywood House of Horror.

DEMONS (1985)

Once again, Anchor Bay salvages the darkest depths of 1980s video store fare to recover a classic.  Funny, but they very seldom seem to dredge the turkeys out of the lake, rather sticking to fantastic treasure ships.  And this one will be no different--welcome to Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento's great Italian nightmare, DEMONS.  In a move that displays why the video store is your greatest and safest entertainment value, DEMONS offers a special treat--a free screening of a horror film at the local theatre, the Metropol, courtesy of a guy in a truly freaky metal half-mask.  Those expecting a simple night at the movies couldn't be more wrong, as in short order, people abruptly start turning into insane monstrousities bent on murder and destruction.  Okay, the premise is pretty flimsy, but we're not here for a deep and involved storyline--we're here to watch people try and survive the theatre of horrors! 

SHOCKWAVE

Another Sci-Fi Channel Original Picture comes at our video store shelves via SHOCKWAVE, the story of automated defensive droids gone horribly wrong on a deserted island.  A pack of Navy SEALS is dispatched to shut off the robots, and you almost certainly saw it coming long before you put the DVD in the case that it wasn't going to be easy to do just that.  Never mind that SHOCKWAVE is heavier on the Star Trek alumni than James Doohan's funeral procession, containing Worf, Sulu, and the Emergency Medical Hologram from "Voyager".  Never mind that these super-destructive robots both look and behave, almost verbatim, like the tripods from WAR OF THE WORLDS right down to the heat rays they mount on their fronts. Never mind that the concept of Original Picture in the title Sci-Fi Channel Original Picture means less and less by the movie.  Never mind that the effects in SHOCKWAVE are so monstrously cheesy that they have to resort to lousy CG to take off a human's head, and that somehow, all firearms seem to contain limitless supplies of ammo because I never so much as saw anybody changing a clip on camera.  You know what?  I changed my mind.  Mind it.  Mind ALL of it.  This kind of godawful filmmaking is ruining the video stores.