Day of the Dead (1985)

 

I always loved the clown zombie.

The Best Werewolf Movies You've Never Seen

Say you love The Howling. SAY IT, goddamn you! Okay look, I had a bad day at the job - you know, the one that pays the bills? I came home and promptly got shitfaced and am watching The Howling on repeat, torn between two werewolves. Should I marry Rob Bottin or Eddie Quist? And which one is hairier? In my unasked for opinion, The Howling is the best werewolf movie ever made. Better than American Werewolf (because it actually had a plot), better than Wolf, which I hated. Actually I hate Jack Nicholson. Fucking sue me, the guy plays Jack Nicholson in every single goddamned movie he's ever made. If you don't love The Howling, you are wrong. If it is not one of your top 2 werewolf movies of all time, you are Wronger than the Wrongest Wrongface ever to Wrong their way through Wrong Way Ville.

Anyway, there's really not a lot of super great werewolf movies. There's The Howling. We'll pretend its sequels never happened. There's An American Werewolf in London, and no, you cannot have Paris. There's um...uh, Dog Soldiers was okay I guess. And...uh...oh fuck it, I'm too drunk to segue. Please continue reading this badly written article about which obscure, low budget werewolf movies I would recommend even if I was stone cold sober. Which I am not. I already have a fucking headache. Oh god, I will regret this in the morning...

Big Bad Wolf (2006)

Directed by: Lance Dreesen

Starring: That guy with the big face who was in Black Hawk Down, Chloe Grace Moretz's big bruddah, I think Clint Howard is in there somewhere too.

Synopsis: Grody pig stepdad is a werewolf. Even when fully transformed into his lycanthrope alter ego, he can still talk and favors dirty jokes. He also rapes a girl who was half a virgin and then gets a blow job from his step son's girlfriend. Some other shit happens. The end. Intended as a comedy, BBW is a very dirty joke with a sadistic sense of humor.

Romasanta (2004)
Directed by: Paco Plaza, the guy who co-directed the [REC] films.
Starring: Julian mutherfucking Sands, who would have been Christopher Walken if we hadn't already had one. Also, several Stuart Gordon hotties.
Synopsis: Technically, this is a drama/thriller, based on the true story of Spain's first documented serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, who looked nothing like Julian Sands. Romasanta claimed to be a werewolf. The courts said he was insane. However, the film looks at the story from both points of view, ultimately allowing you to decide for yourself. My friend Ray Garton just pointed out to me that there can't possibly be two sides because werewolves don't exist, but I do not care because I choose to believe. Also, I am drunk.

The Company of Wolves (1984)
Directed by: Neil Jordan, the king of the vampire movies, responsible for both Interview With the Vampire and the vastly superior Byzantium.
Starring: Sarah Patterson, an incredibly beautiful girl who has all but disappeared from the silver screen. Also, David Warner, Angela Lansbury, Jordan staple Stephen Rea and Goth Queen Danielle Dax as a wounded wolfgirl. Also, Terence Stamp as Satan. Woo!
Synopsis: Long before Ginger Snaps, this film boldly addressed the similarities between menstruating teens and lycanthropy, presenting the tale Little Red Riding Hood as a tale of sexual awakening rather than a cautionary tale about avoiding strangers. Patterson as Little Red is flawless, sweet and innocent but also shrewd and fearless.

Werewolf Of Washington (1973)
Directed by: Milton Moses Ginsberg
Starring: Dean Stockwell, who is fucking brilliant, and a bunch of other people I've never heard of.
Synopsis: Guy goes to Hungary. Guy gets bitten by werewolf. Guy returns to US and becomes press assistant to the President of the United States of America. Hilarity ensues. This is a viciously satirical post Watergate political comedy which nevertheless knows its lore and manages to remain, at its core, a movie about a guy who turns into a wolf every now and again and goes on killing sprees. Fortunately for Stockwell, his lycanthropic tantrums are blamed on hippies.

Werewolves On Wheels (1971)
Directed by: Michel Levesque, who also did Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens and The Incredible Melting Man.
Starring: some people
Synopsis: A rough biker gang makes the grave mistake of stopping at a Satanic Temple one night. Lead bikers girlfriend is hypnotized and forced to do a sexy bump and grind with a skull and a snake. This somehow turns her into a werewolf. Pretty soon, the other bikers are getting killed off by the girl and her bitten boyfriend, who are only slightly hairier and dirtier than the rest of the gang. Is this a great film? No. Is it fun? Hell yes. A nice, gritty grindhouse flick reminiscent of Hells Angels '69, which actually starred the Hell Angels and is THE penultimate biker film ever, your argument to the contrary is invalid because Hells Angels.

Mexican Werewolf In Texas (2005)
Directed by: Scott Maginnis
Starring: nobody famous
Synopsis: A werewolf/chupacabra is running amok in Texas, doing things and killing stuff. Four teenagers band together to destroy it and thus save their town from misunderstandings and racial tension. Silly but goodhearted little flick with a great sense of humor. Honestly, it's been a long time since I've seen this flick so I don't remember the particulars, but I remember thinking it was a hell of a lot better than I thought it would be. Also, Serial Killer Magazine was nice enough to post my review of it at some point. I don't remember giving permission, but whatever - it's not like I get paid for this shit.


Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)
Directed by: Christophe Gans, who would go on to direct Silent Hill.
Starring: Monica Belluci in a pushup bra and tons of gorgeous silken finery, the guy who was in Frontier(s), a hot Iroquois and a really bigass African lion in a suit of armor.
Synopsis: Yeah so I kind of blew it. The "wolf" in the movie is actually a gigantic lion clad in armor plate and spikes who has been trained to kill on command. But that's not the point. The French aristocracy is trying to pass the pussy off as a werewolf to overthrow the king and gain power somehow. It's been a really long time since I've seen this film, but I remember it as beautiful and sorrowful and very, very fucking weird.

Portal

Okay. I just want to know how I - having been a metal fan since 1983 when I realized that Duran Duran and/or The Thompson Twins simply weren't capable of touching my dark, troubled soul with their neon pink bubble gum lyrics - have never heard of Australian death/black metal hybrid band Portal before today.

Why haven't any of you inconsiderate pricks informed me of the nightmarish genius of this incredibly horrifying, fucking twisted, cosmically warped, in-your-face funereal, sickeningly morbid bunch of bastards, bearing names like Aphotic Mote and Omenous Fugue? What the fuck, people? This shit is right up my alley! It's bleak, demonic, completely insane, totally devoid of any sense of goodness, slimier than an Equatorial snail farm during a salt flood and blacker than a woodchuck's asshole stuffed into the thumb hole of a bowling ball and then tucked inside of a burlap sack and thrown into a sinkhole. Inside of an outhouse. In Dehnzev, Russia. In the middle of a long, hard winter.


Look at this mutherfucker! I have no idea who the hell he is. He calls himself The Curator and he's the fucking lead werewolf possessed by a chainsmoking demon singer of Portal. He's got goddamned tentacles on his fingers! He never reveals his face on stage. He wears giant wizard hats, towering black pope hats and/or a fucking grandfather clock over his face, depending on his mood. For all I know, it could be Nicholas Cage under there. Oh god, please don't be Nicholas Cage under there.


This band's music is fucking horrifying! I believe it entirely possible that overlong exposure to this music will turn one into a goddamned White Walker. Lab rats exposed to 24 straight hours of Portal's music has produced bizarre anomalies and mutations, including the retraction of the tympanic membranes of the ear into the lower intestines, the spinal cord being replaced with a length of rusted rebar coated in permafrost and the soul being entirely emptied of its positive contents into the nearest possible garbage disposal. Interestingly, if you play Portal in your kitchen, your garbage disposal will uproot itself from its foundations and exit the house, having realized its pointlessness in attempting to compete with The Curator's vocal chords. Said garbage disposals have been overheard to exclaim: "Well fuck me, why bother?" Further, it is entirely possible that no one in Portal actually plays guitar, but merely amplifies the screams of newborn infants being rubbed over ancient cheese graters. Neither are bass and drums incorporated - what you mistook for a rhythm section is actually the sound of Odin beating the shit out of a Balrog with an aircraft carrier.

Holy shit, look at this fucking album cover!! They managed to squeeze both Reggie Nalder as master vampire Kurt fucking Barlow and Cthulhu into one big goddamned freakyass collage! I just came so hard I became airborne for a few seconds. Lead guitarist Horror Illogium has described Portal's intent as "to capture a cinematic horror scope". Dude, you fucking succeeded beyond your wildest, twisted dreams. I couldn't be more horrified if I was hogtied naked, bent double over a butcher's table, watching baby animals get slaughtered alive in an abbatoir by a naked guy wearing a hogs decaying head and wielding a chainsaw whilst "The Sound Of Music" blasts over hidden loudspeakers at top volume. Metal music and horror movies have always gone hand in hand, but Portal has actually raped, sodomized, murdered and dismembered both and then stitched them back together into a patchwork skin coat. Writing for Popmatters, Adrien Begrand noted that "death metal always pretends to be scary, but... it's all rather harmless. That said, however, I make no mistake in saying that the death metal peddled by Australia’s Portal is truly friggin' terrifying". In other news, rice is white, rain is wet and the Duggar sons might not be the best choice to babysit your children.

Seriously, check out this fucking creepy mini-movie/music video for the song "Curtain" based on the poem "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan mutherfucking Poe. Just LOOK AT IT, for fucks sake! Gah! The only way this shit could get any creepier would be if they shot it on the swollen belly of a pregnant spider that had just crawled out of a festering pustule on a corpse's ass.

That was a compliment!
And I still want to know why I am JUST NOW hearing about this band? I mean, geez - I know I never buy magazines, listen to the radio or attend concerts unless garbed in full Hazmat gear and barbed wire, but GEEZ! You'd think I would have heard of them before now! Where the fuck have you guys been all of my diseased, tumultuous, mentally disturbed life?

"We can go now, dear."

A belated R.I.P. to Betsy Palmer (Patricia Betsy Hrunek)
November 1, 1926 -  May 29, 2015

Did you know that she and James Dean had a thing for a while?
She was badass.

Fucking brilliant artwork by WeirdoFish

The Taking of Deborah Logan

The following review was not written by me, although I agree with it 100%. I just don't get the hype around this flick.  I was too lazy to craft a review for it myself, so I found someone else to do it, because I'm a horrible person. The author wishes to remain anonymous. Let's call him Buck Naked. Because we can. And no, he is not a porno actor.

To this review I will add my unasked for opinion, which is that this movie was only made because of Jill Larson's creepy-ass cameo in Shutter Island.

 

Another Pretentious Found Footage Flick

a justified rant by Buck Naked

The Taking of Deborah Logan is a horror movie bloated with potential greatness.  It has a talented cast that includes the great Anne Ramsey and it tells a story about something that has, in one way or another, touched the lives of most of us, maybe all of us: Alzheimer’s disease.  A documentary crew moves in with Deborah Logan, who is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, to chronicle her descent into the disease, which gradually erases people in the most horrible way imaginable.  But we soon discover that Deborah’s problem is not only medical, but supernatural.  I wanted to so much to love this movie.  I wanted so much to finish this movie.  But I could not.

Instead of giving us what could have been a powerful experience, director, co-writer, co-executive producer, and co-editor Adam Robitel chose to make The Taking of Deborah Logan as a found footage movie.  A movie that had all the ingredients necessary to blow us away is yet another notch in the belt of this trendy and far from beloved (except, bafflingly, by filmmakers) movie style, which was dead immediately after The Blair Witch Project was released.

The Blair Witch Project worked because the style was fresh, original, and unexpected.  It did not signal the beginning of a new wave in horror movies.  It was a little movie that tried something different, pulled it off, and found great success.  Now it seems that half the horror movies being made are found footage.  Have we seen a wave of found-footage romantic comedies?  Found-footage action movies?  Found-footage superhero movies?  No, we have not.  But the horror genre has been buried under them. And it is being smothered to death.

 The Taking of Deborah Logan is a beautiful example of the damage found footage is doing to the genre.  I admired so much about the movie, but I don’t happen to enjoy watching movies with spastic camera work.  In fact, I won’t.  I am insulted that I am expected to sit through that kind of amateurish, distracting, sometimes nauseating shooting style and become emotionally involved in whatever story it is being used to tell.  A story that could have been gut-wrenchingly emotional as well as terrifying was lost in the jittery camera work, the unintelligible dialogue that required subtitles, the jarring editing, the overall sloppiness that is the hallmark of found-footage movies.

The found-footage style detaches the audience from emotional involvement.  Watching a movie about a video of people is not nearly as interesting as watching a movie about people.  Found footage is the unnecessary and harmful middleman in a baffling equation.  Why is it there?  Just show us the story.  Involve us in the story.  Don’t add another layer of distance from the emotional content of the movie.

The Taking of Deborah Logan would have been a much richer, more moving, and more terrifying experience had we been involved in that story, had we been inserted into the situation as an unseen observer.  You know, like in a movie!  It still could have involved the documentary crew shooting their movie, but instead of being confined to the crew’s cameras, we would have been emotionally involved with the characters.  It could have achieved the kind of greatness we don’t see in horror movies anymore.  But that potential was ripped out of the movie with the decision to shoot it as found footage.  That was a stupid decision that I cannot understand.

 It is no longer clever.  It is no longer original.  It has not been either of those things for about 16 years.  (The Blair Witch Project was made in 1999, for you math buffs.)  Found footage is perhaps the worst thing that’s ever happened to horror movies, the only genre in which you find them.  Every time one is made, it’s another knife stabbed into the back of the genre, which relies on some kind of emotional involvement to work.  Distancing the audience from that emotional involvement is like cutting all the songs out of musicals.

It’s time to stop supporting these movies and the misguided people who continue to make them, even though the vast majority of horror movie fans I have talked to are sick of them.  You can still be a diehard horror movie fan even if you don’t see every single horror movie made.  Start avoiding these non-movies.  See something else.  Do something else.  Found footage is gutting the genre on the screen, and there is no better proof of that than the profoundly great horror movie that The Taking of Deborah Logan could have been.