"And Now A Word From Our Sponsors" - - The Camaro Monologues

My friend Liz often says I'm the funniest person she knows. That's a bit of an exaggeration, or she doesn't know many people. And while I can usually change her mind about anything else, when I try to convince her otherwise, she just won't listen.

She's also been asking me lately why I never review comedies.

"It's because they are either terrible or funny. There is no in between," is my response. See, a horror movie can not be scary and still be good. "Cabin In The Woods" is not as scary as "The Ring" but it is incredibly entertaining. A Science Fiction movie can have a just a touch of Sci-Fi elements, like "Deja Vu" or "Primer" and also still work.

"The Conspiracy" - - Brilliantly Scary and Scarily Brilliant

If the producers of "The Conspiracy" need a pull quote from a critic for their marketing materials, here is mine:

"'The Conspiracy' is brilliant and terrifying, watching this movie feels like a criminal act. You'll be looking over your shoulder for days after the movie ends. One of the best horror films, and hands down the best "Found Footage" movie I have ever seen."

It's a little wordy, I know. And if you can count I've now used the word "brilliant" three times including the headline of this post.

This movie is that good.

"Zombie Massacre" - - Farfrommovin

I rarely know what I'm going to get when I start a movie. I don't like to watch the trailers before I watch most movies; the less spoilers, the better. I know that seems odd considering I always include trailers and spoilers with my reviews, but for me, I'd rather go in blind.

So when I popped in "Zombie Massacre," or any zombie movie for that matter, I was filled with giddy anticipation. Will this movie be scary? Will I not want to go outside to take out the garbage? ("Event Horizon" caused me to leave my full garbage can to remain full until the next morning.)

Or will it be terrible?

The movie starts off in a nameless small town. Black rain pours from the sky. A woman gets a few drops on her hand . . .

Someone needs a Zombie Manicure! Ha Ha, I'll be here all week! 

Oh my God! That is so creepy, this movie is going to be hella good!

Wait . . .

Uh oh . . .

"Right At Your Door" - - Beta Radiation

"Right At Your Door" is an interesting movie as in it is realistic and frightening until it isn't.

Let me explain.

I slept through 9/11. My alarm clock went off but I didn't wake up. The news reports filtered into my dreams though. I dreamt I was in a burning skyscraper and then a helicopter picked me up on the roof. As the helicopter flew away I could see the Pentagon burning in the distance. By the time I actually did wake up, m alarm clock had either shut itself off or I clicked it off in my sleep.

The Baconator Part 1: Rise of the Baconator!

Reviewing movies is a perilous job. There are a couple different types of people you run into during this job. You meet people who are passionate about movies and disagree with you, and then you meet total nut jobs who impersonate you and then argue with themselves online.

 

 

This is about the second type.

 

The Baconator Part 2: The Bacon Sizzles!

The Baconator finally started an account called JasonOCarpenter2 because that looks totally legit and started arguing with himself on other message boards because he knows he got beaten in public on the World War Z board.

So how does this work? If I play basketball with myself, but sometimes wear a Kobe Bryant jersey, can I tell people I beat Kobe Bryant at basketball?

"Killer Holiday" - - Feels Like Corn

I watch a lot of bad movies, and because of that I have developed a high tolerance for them. A lot of people will say "X is the worst movie ever made." Sometimes it's hard to resist the temptation to label a movie as such.

And sometimes, it is impossible.

I will not say "Killer Holiday" is the worst movie I've ever seen. But it ranks up there as the worst slasher movie I have ever seen. Don't worry, valiant readers, I have proof.

"Curse Of Chucky" - - Kick It's Face Off!!!

The Child's Play series has always been an odd duck of a horror franchise in the sense that it is a series of rated R movies made for an audience of children. Adults don't find the idea of a killer doll scary.

Well, some do, but it's usually because they saw a killer doll movie as a child.

So you have this weird cycle: the only people who find Chucky scary are kids or grown-ups who were scared by Chucky as kids. Yet this franchise has continued on for nearly 15 years even though the audience shouldn't even be watching these movies. It is the ultimate "Slumber Party" franchise and the one parents should know better than to let their kids watch.

I've been a late-comer to the Child's Play series (and horror movies in general, if you can believe that.). The first Child's Play movie I saw was "Bride Of Chucky," which I actually saw at the theater opening night. I forced my (at the time) girlfriend to take me because she was a manager of the theater and that way I could get in for free. Because I'm a cheapskate. I loved it. I thought it was gross and hilarious. Even without having seen the previous 3 movies I was able to follow the plot of "Bride" but, come on, it's not like a movie with a killer doll needs an elaborate backstory.

A few years later "Seed Of Chucky" came out and I was stoked. I remember reading an article in Fangoria or Empire or some other old media magazine about how good it was going to be with all these elaborate kills.

"When the guy's guts hit the ground, you can actually see the steam because the floor is cold!" I remember the article proclaiming. Wow! That sounds ridiculous I have to see it!

The only steaming pile that fell to the ground was the movie itself. For argument's sake, it really was my fault thinking a movie called "Seed Of Chucky" would be any good. The movie poster was sperm in an eyeball, for crying out loud. It might as well be saying "Watching this movie will feel like spermatozoa is headed towards your pupils."



Just deliver me my money back
and we'll call it even.

"Trailer Time" - - The Visitor

I've never heard of this movie, but it looks amazing. I'll be sure to review it as soon as I get a copy.

"Don't Deliver Us From Evil" - - The Downward Spiral

"Don't Deliver Us From Evil" doesn't have a trailer as far as I could tell but the above video sums it up: This is the story of two girls on a random warpath of destruction during an otherwise lazy summer.

Anne and Lore are two 8th graders who have decided that sin is the greatest thrill one can experience. As students at a local Catholic school, they play the part as good students but spy on their teachers, steal vestments, and pocket communion wafers instead of eating them. Their goal is to become "brides of Satan."

Everything they do is about sowing seeds of chaos. It is never clear if they truly believe that Satan is some sort of god to them, or that they just choose him as an outlet of total rebellion against their church, but it doesn't matter. For Anne and Lore, anything goes and motive seems thought up after the crime.

Anne is the dominant of the two and Lore is her loyal follower. Their parents are aloof and unaware of the warning sings the children are showing. Anne tortures a cat twice in front of her parents with little reaction. The kids become bolder: they rat out a nun for being a lesbian, they set fire to a neighbors' hay stockpile, and they kill the mentally disabled groundskeeper's prized bird collection
.
"We kill them one at a time," Anne tells Lore.

"Why?"

"So he suffers more. If well kill them all now, he'll have a bad time once then get over it."

"Choose" - - Snooze

Years ago, I caught a movie channel surfing called "Shredder." It was about a killer snowboarder killing other people who snowboarder, or a guy who hated snowboarders killing snowboarders or something. I don't remember.

What I do remember was Lindsey McKeon. She was the hot blonde who just wanted to soak in the hot tub and hang out with some friends, but instead she gets stabbed to death. But not before she stole my heart. I remember I was at my grandmother's house watching it and my mom walks into the room and asks: "Why are you still watching that gross movie?" Then she saw Lindsey in a bikini, muttered under her breath, and left the living room.



I did not have to Google for this picture. This is in my "Wallpapers" folder.

"The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)" - - Even This Review Is Disgusting

When I was a kid, I was an idiot.

One day, I was chasing my older brother around the church parking lot and the ground was wet from the rain. Long story short, I smash through a stained glass window and slash my hands to holy hell. I got a ton of stitches and then one day I tripped and fell and ripped those stitches out of my hand.

I'm telling you this story because, while it hurt, I certainly didn't die. The pain was manageable. So if my mouth happened to be stitched (or in the case of this movie, stapled) to another man's ass and he begins to have explosive diarrhea directly down my throat . . .either I'm losing my mouth or he's losing his butt hole. But I'm out of there.

"Hey, it's me, the guy stapled to your ass . . .could you make sure
 that dog food is gluten free? Thanks."

"The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)" is the sequel to "The Human Centipede (First Sequence)" and heir apparent as the most distressing mainstream movie made in the past decade. There are other, more visually horrifying films out there but few have achieved the press and notoriety as The Human Centipede (THC for short) series has. Even "South Park" had an episode based on this concept. There's even a video game. So until we see "A Serbian Film" skit on SNL, I think it's safe to say this series will be the gross-out king for most people.

Buckle in, kids. It gets pretty bad from here on out.

"THC 2" is the story of Martin, an obese security guard who spends all night watching the original Human Centipede and all day scrapbooking about it. He also has no dialogue in the film. He's not a mute; several characters reference the fact that he has talked to them, we just never hear him. Other than giggles, screams, and masturbating-with-sandpaper-induced moans, Martin is silent. The first part of the movie, and the most interesting, focuses on Martin's life and why he's such a weirdo.  He lives with his shrieking mother who tries to get him killed by a skinhead and when that fails, tries to murder him herself. Why does she hate her son so much? Well, he was raped by his dad and his mom blames him for the length prison sentence that follows such horrible acts. And now, as an adult, he sees a counselor who seems to have more than a professional interest in the already emotionally and physically scarred man-child.

So is Martin being set up as a victim? Someone we should feel sorry for? I think that might be up to the individual viewer but I never felt that way. His actions compared to the violence done against him don't come close to weighing out. However, it did make him a more understandable villain than the first THC and it's "mad scientist" gimmick.

One thing that is interesting about Martin's characterization is the fact that he's not an idiot. He comes across as feeble-minded but his plan to sew 12 people together ass-to-mouth requires a lot of planning. Jason Vorhees is more of a victim of circumstance than Martin is. Vorhees is a force of nature who simply acts on impulses. Martin is rational enough to plan events out weeks ahead of time. If he had not become obsessed with "The Human Centipede" movie something else would have trigged his path towards mass murder.

Martin collects people from his job as a security guard job. Every night he watches people looking for their car in an underground parking garage and then he walks up to them and either hits them over the head with a crowbar or shoots them THEN hits them over the head with a crowbar. Anyways, all of his victims are basically an assemblage of every type of person that a fat, white, basement-dweller like Martin sees as "part of the problem." We have Alpha Males, attractive happy women, and black people. Basically it's like if the Internet could choose as victims, these are they people they would sew ass-to-mouth to each other. Tom Six, the director, knows his audience.

His audience.

There's a scene where Martin attacks a black family in the parking garage, but spares the toddler. He even tries to console him before putting him back into the car. It could be seen as his attempt at sparing the boy the pain that he himself had been subjected too, but I saw it more as the boy was too small for his centipede plans. And if you have any doubts about his one act of true kindness, it is quickly forgotten as he beats the kid's pregnant mom down with a crowbar.

The middle bulk of the movie is Martin bashing people over the head with a crowbar to knock them out which became tedious and/or hilarious depending on the situation. A smash to the skull is not like a rag of chloroform. Martin is lucky he didn't end up with a Human Centipede that couldn't even make it into the Special Olympics. Everyone gets bang on the head multiple times and at one point it becomes like Wack-A-Mole as he walks around his warehouse bonking people on the head. And thus we begin the biggest problems with this movie.

The last part, nearly 30 minutes long, is Martin assembling his centipede. There is a long scenes of:

1) Knocking a dude's teeth out with a hammer, then scooping the broken teeth out of his mouth like candy corn (I'd rather swallow broken teeth than candy corn by the way.)

2) Cutting ass muscles open and killing a guy that way.

3)Stapling peoples mouths to other people's buttholes.

4) Having asthma attacks.

The best drinking game in the world would be if you took a shot every time Martin has an asthma attack. It's pretty sad when the dude who's mouth is full of diarrhea can breathe better than you. I guess it's supposed to build suspense, but come on, every 5 minutes Fatty Magoo is reaching for his inhaler. You want me to believe this guy hauled 12 bodies into and out of a van by himself? You don't have to outrun Martin, you can out walk him. You can probably out-stand him.