racketboy.com

Yes, despite that they called it a "prank war" the entire time, and the dean referred to them as pranks consistently.

That movie is such a mess.

Troll 2 is a way better movie. Seriously. You'll be far more entertained by Troll 2.

27. Uninvited

A corrupt rich man spots a couple of bikini-clad beauties and invites him to come visit the Caribbean on his yacht. Along the way they bring a trio of guys and a cat they find. Unfortunately once they get on board, the SEC arrives to investigate the corrupt rich guy, and he's forced to shove off immediately without letting anyone off. But that's nothing compared to the cat, which is actually an escaped lab animal harboring a hideous mutant cat inside of it which can dispense a lethal dose of poison with a single bite. Soon the engine breaks down, the monster cat contaminates the yacht's food supply, and the steadily dwindling group start going mad from desperation. Will anyone survive?

As ridiculous as that sounds, Uninvited actually does offer a few moments of nasty horror, particularly with its poison. Apparently the way the cat's poison works is to cause the human body to overproduce blood cells until our veins pop from the excess pressure. While nobody ever goes in a cartoonish balloon(you have no idea how badly I wanted to see that happen), there are some pretty nasty effects. There is also an awesome scene where a character who has previously been shot in the arm looks down and discovers the mutant cat has just chewed off three of his fingers. It's ghoulish the way he spots it in time to see his middle finger pop off and flop to the floor. It's just a shame that the rest of the movie never quite lives up to its best parts.

Why not? Well for one, the mutant cat is a painfully bad puppet. Sometimes it's used sparingly, and during those moments it can be effective. Towards the end however it gets some overuse that reveals just how awful, raggedy, and fake it really looks; there is a particularly terrible image of it sitting on top of a floating briefcase in a storm that just screams "puppet." It causes the creature to wear and makes me roll my eyes. Another problem with the film is that it's front loaded. By the time you reach the last half hour, the director is rushing between scenes with little to no transition. Suddenly this happens. Suddenly that happens. Suddenly everything. Too much of the limited budget was spent on the lead up to everything and not enough time was spent on the back half of the movie, particularly the hilariously bad final battle in a lifeboat under what's supposed to be driving rain.

As for the cast, well, they're nothing special. George Kennedy is the highlight as the rich man's muscle, but his lines mostly consist of how much he hates everything. Other actors vary in their abilities, but the script certainly doesn't help any of them. I'm sure it could have been worse, but when combined with the steadily worsening pacing problems and the overuse of the cat puppet, it certainly doesn't feel like it's trying too hard. Still, it's got some decent nasty kills.

Uninvited. Don't ask for it by name. Ask for "that mutant cat on a boat movie."

Ack wrote:Uninvited. Don't ask for it by name. Ask for "that mutant cat on a boat movie."

There are at least 1/2 dozen horror films with that name - and one NES game! - and some of them are pretty awesome.

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My wife and I very much enjoyed:



The Blob (1958). It is a fun mid-century creature feature with decent special effects, and a very effective leading man. (It features Steve McQueen in his first starring role...as a character named Steve. ) It is not terribly scary, but it is quite suspenseful at times. Most importantly, it still looks great, and it is tremendous fun. I recommend it. (I also recommend the 1988 remake, a serious horror film that is drastically less fun.)

I attempted to watch Lumberjack Man. A modern slasher that basks in the campy cheese, something about pancakes. And Adam Sessler is in it.

But man, 20 minutes was enough. DROPPED

28. Troll 2

This is the first time I have ever actually sat down and watched Troll 2 from beginning to end. I'm familiar with much of it through Internet memes and being a fan of the kinds of movies that I so often watch, but it's not something I had ever really sought out. When he found out, Noise decided that this needed to change, so he bought and mailed me the Blu-ray release. I promised him at the start of the month that I would watch the movie, so here goes...

Troll 2 is the story of a family doing a house swap with a rural family, only to arrive in the small town of Nilbog and find it full of weirdos and creeps. But the ghost of the family's grandfather keeps showing up and telling their youngest member that the town is really full of goblins trying to eat them. Sure enough, the goblins soon appear, and the family must fight to destroy them all.

You know what? That was too good of a description of the plot. Let's try that again.

A family made up of a dentist, a mother who must be mentally ill, a daughter who can't act, can't dance, and has a weird love/hate/hate relationship with her boyfriend, and a little boy who is most definitely the most talented member on the crew make the dumb ass decision to house swap with a bunch of hicks from a little town in the middle of bumfuck nowhere entirely populated by mental patients(seriously, those "actors" were stoned mental patients). Once there they discover all the food is covered in nasty green icing, and they face off against a drama teacher whose best days are long gone by as she and her swarm of sackcloth goblins try to turn them into plants or green goop to eat them. Only the crazy, molotov-wielding ghost of the boy's grandfather is capable of saving everyone in this parable about the dangers of vegetarianism.

No, that's still too good for this movie. How about I try again?

A guy who speaks no English made a monster movie with a bunch of non-actors and crazy locals in Utah, with Emanuelle of '70s porn fame making the monster costumes out of sacks for potatoes.

Yeah, that's probably the best we're gonna get. Anyway, yes, this is a movie made specifically because the director's wife didn't like her friends becoming obnoxious vegetarians. So he wrote a script and then for some reason shot it in the US with the help of his Italian Eurotrash buddies. The budget for the picture was $200,000 apparently, which seems to mostly have been used for airfare to bring over an entire Italian film crew, just to make sure that nobody spoke English. Then he acted like a jerk to his actors, and he still acts like a jerk to his actors apparently.

That director, who goes by the false name of Drake Floyd for this film, is in fact Claudio Fragasso. You may have seen that name in the last couple of years on this forum. In fact, you may have seen it a year ago, because I watched a couple others of his films for last year's Halloween horror movie marathon. Zombi 3, Hell of the Living Dead, and Robowar are all movies of his that I watched in 2015, and while I haven't rambled about it much here, I promise you that Fastbilly has had to put up with hearing me rant about his movie Strike Commando.

And this one? Troll 2 may well be the worst of the bunch just because of the language barrier, but it is pretty hard to say whether it is worse than Hell of the Living Dead. Fragasso just so happens to make shit movies, and Troll 2 is a perfect example of the kinds of "quality" you should expect. That's why we love him. If that's not enough to make you love to hate it, it was also produced by Italian porn/horror/mockbuster director Joe D'Amato, who once declared it's more important to make movies for profit than entertainment. I've also ranted about some of his movies here too, such as Zombie 5: Killing Birds.

Troll 2 is shit. It's beyond shit. But it's so far beyond shit that it becomes almost watchable again. It's a paradox of entertainment, like beautiful trash. I had to fight to keep watching it and fight to look away from it.

I'm not kidding: The first time we watched it, it ended and my wife turned to me and said "do you want to watch it again?" And I said, "Yes."

Also, this is better than Fraggasso's "sequel" Troll 3 (AKA Contamination 7). That one's way worse. Troll (1) is pretty good. And the main character is named Harry Potter.

I'm going away for the weekend, so this my be my last movie write-up this month. I will be sure to post my thoughts about Ash vs. Evil Dead when I get back though.



Terror Train


A group of pre-med students organize a fraternity prank for their nerdy and awkward frat pledge, Kenny. They convince members of a local sorority to help them out by pretending one of them is waiting upstairs for Kenny and ready for some sexy times. But the prank goes horribly wrong and poor Kenny gets hauled off to the hospital.

Three years later those same students are getting ready to celebrate New Year’s. The co-eds have organized a rather extravagant costume party aboard a charter locomotive. They’ve ponied up the money so that they have everything they could possibly need. The train’s got a VIP lounge, a funky band, a ballroom, a fully stocked bar and for entertainment they’ve hired a baby-faced David f*&%$#* Copperfield.


They spared no expense.

Questionable entertainment choices aside, the kids have planned for the best New Year’s eve party they’ve ever had. But things don’t go as planned when an unwanted guest boards the train and starts killing off party members one by one, much to the consternation of the kindly conductor who just wants to retire and buy a nice RV.


I don’t care about the sex and booze, but if you young’uns start knocking each other off I won’t hesitate to throw you out the
nearest window.

Terror Train is billed as a slasher, but it may be more aptly described as a revenge tale with a murder mystery thrown in for good measure. Except that you’re made fully aware who the killer is from the beginning. The mystery comes in not knowing where the killer is at any given time. Being on a train filled with people in costumes affords him a huge sense of anonymity. The suspense doesn’t come from not knowing the identity, but from watching the killer’s plan unfold in such an isolated, small space. After each victim is killed, the killer dons their costume and thus, their guise. There are countless times when the students are standing right next to the killer, fully unaware of how close they are to possible death. There’s something sinister watching the killer track down his next victim while wearing a Groucho Marx mask with a permanent smile affixed to it.



Other than that, the structure of the movie is pretty formulaic. The killer is out to right a great wrong done upon him in the past. The Final Girl, unaware of the extent of the prank she was participating in, is appropriately guilt ridden and the only one who shows any real remorse for their actions that night. The other boozy, sexed up kids are the annoying, typical fodder that you just know deserve their comeuppance. I mean, it’s hard to feel bad for an a$$hold leader with a name like Doc Manley (Seriously?). Yes, this is the type of movie where you’re looking forward to certain people dying.


To be fair, all Lizard People have it coming.

Where the film stands out a bit is the cinematography. John Alcott worked on both The Shining and Clockwork Orange, and here he puts together a beautiful setting and atmosphere filled with blues, greens and yellows. It makes a very pretty slasher-mystery.



Back when it released, the slasher sub-genre was just beginning to pick up steam and Terror Train was new and fresh. Today everything it does is very familiar and been copied by other movies: the structure of the film; many of the Final Girl personality traits (Laurie Strode may come to mind first, but it’s Alana's traits that have persevered). But that doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable. It might not be very scary, but it’s a fun mystery ride with a bunch of creepy-ass masks.

Oh, and live magic. Everyone loves magic, right?


Shut up, Jamie.

That looks awesome. And I have a weird love of train settings in movies.

Last night, my wife and I watched:



Sisters (1973). Like most of Brian De Palma's best work, it is an elegantly directed, exceptionally fun film that borders on trash. (The story is basically a murder mystery involving a formerly conjoined twin and her depraved doctor/lover.) It is also very heavily inspired by some of Alfred Hitchcock's best work, and it borrows heavily from The Lady Vanishes, Psycho, and Rear Window. It doesn't end up as good as any of those films, but I still enjoyed it. (Like many of the movies on my list this year, however, it only barely qualifies as horror, and I am going to have to really step up my game this weekend!)

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prfsnl_gmr's 2016 List of Unspeakable Horrors!