Home Sick (2007)

The plot of Home Sick centers around a group of friends who get together one night for some drugs and smoking, where they are visited by a strange man with a suitcase full of razor blades who asks them who they hate the most, and cuts his arm with a razor blade once for every person named. One of the friends names everybody in the room. The next day, a masked killer starts killing off everybody named in excessively gory ways. Will one of the friends' chili-enthusiast war vet uncle provide any help?

So, this is a pretty strange movie, with characters that behave strangely and deliver their lines in bizarre ways. I was a little put off at first and it took me a while to find out whether I liked it or not, but eventually the movie grew on me and I found it to be quite charming.

Of coarse, the high gore level also helps. This one takes a while to get going but once it does we are treated to several good looking gore scenes including but not limited to a foot being cut in half...

A torso cut in half...

a hand that punches through a head...

as well as some inferior-looking head crushing...

There are two memorable scenes in the movie, both of which involve actress Tiffany Shepis' character. One of them has her snorting coke at her place of work and ninja training with a mop...

and the other involves her stripping down to her underwear and rolling around in the pool of a dead man's blood for no apparent reason.

Quite bizarre, but amusing and good fun. Home Sick may not be great, but it delivers the goods.

Gore Meter: 4/5
Nudity Meter: 2.5/5

7 out of 10 garbage bags

Butchered (aka The Hazing) (2003)

Masked killer stalks and gorily kills teenagers in a sorority, that's pretty much all you need to know about director Joe Castro's 2003 teen slasher Butchered (aka The Hazing). Actually I will go into some more detail. Basically, these two girls are trying to get into this sorority and are told by two other sorority girls (one of them played by Phoebe Dollar) that they have to spend one night in an abandoned and supposedly haunted funhouse. As an added surprise, the other sorority girls and their boyfriends plan to sneak into the funhouse and scare them. Little do they know that a masked killer with a machete is waiting for all of them.

I really don't have a lot to say about this one, this is just another stupid teen slasher, made watchable by a lot of gore and Phoebe Dollar. The only reason I was even remotely interested in this movie in the first place is because it's directed by Joe Castro, who is pretty reliable for delivering on gore, and this movie is no exception, including but not limited to very bloody stabbings, decapitation, disembowelment and head crushing. Also, for those of you who are fans of T&A, the blonde girl (I can't remember her name, but she's the only blonde in the movie) gets naked twice.

Well, I guess all I have to say is don't expect anything other than a lot of decent-looking gore and some nudity with Butchered. I personally recommend Maniacal, one of Joe Castro's other films that is actually mentioned in this film and is much better than this film. It's not that bad, as long as all your looking for is gore and some nudity... oh, and Phoebe Dollar.

Gore Meter: 3/5

Nudity Meter: 1.5/5

5 out of 10 garbage bags

Death Stop Holocaust (2009)

The plot of Death Stop Holocaust centers around Liz (Lisa Krenisky) and Taylor (Jenna Fournier), two young women who travel to a remote island for a vacation only to be followed and eventually run off the road by a white van. When the girls stop at a convenience store for gas, the driver and passengers reveal themselves and the nightmare begins.

Now, there are two things I want to make clear. The first is that this '70s grindhouse throwback is not just your average torture porn, if you look at the cover and go into this expecting a brutal torture film with an abundance of cruel, sadistic and nasty torture (like I was), then you will probably be pretty disappointed (even though it does have it's moments). The second is that if you look up the definition of the word "Holocaust" in the dictionary, you should get a definition similar to "a great or complete devastation or destruction" or "any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life", which is another reason you may be misled into thinking this movie is something it's not. Without spoiling too much, there are only about four victims in the entirety of the movie, I'm not sure if I would call that a holocaust.

Now, I say that the movie veered from my expectations, is that a bad thing? In this case, not really. The kill count is pretty low, but the suspense level is pretty high. The movie takes a while to get going, for a while it adds to the tension, but after a while it just starts getting slow.

When it does pick up, the movie spends most of it's time showing one of the main females (I won't tell you which one because of spoilers) trying to evade her masked pursuers, who always seem to be one step ahead of her. Most of these scenes seem to only be there as filler, as the bad guys repeatedly grab the girl only to let her escape (while standing and watching as she does so) and she drives to another location. Eventually she ends up at her dad's summer home, which is when it really starts getting intense as the bad guys finally take her car keys.

This is about when the gore meter goes up a notch, as a young couple appear on screen only to be disemboweled and strangled with barbed wire.

The bad guys eventually do get her in the last 15 minutes of the movie, and I can tell you the ending is probably not what you would be expecting, so I will stop there.

The movie succeeds at replicating the old, grainy look of the films it's paying homage to, complete with missing reels and the classic "Feature Presentation" stamp (you know, the one from Tarantino/Rodriguez's Grindhouse).

This one wasn't bad. As I said earlier, I was expecting a gritty and nasty torture porn, but what I got was more of a gritty suspense-thriller with some gore. A very admirable effort with a good style, but could have been better.

Gore Meter: 1/5

Nudity Meter: 0/5

6 out of 10 garbage bags

Alien Opponent (2010)

The plot of Alien Opponent is that a redneck man catches his wife cheating on him and chokes her before the woman's mom kills him with a hammer. At around the same time this is happening, an alien spaceship crash lands by the mom's junkyard. The mom and daughter are now looking to collect the dead husband's insurance money, but the alien took the body. So they offer a $100,000 reward to anyone who can find the body and kill the alien intruder. Pretty soon the junkyard is populated with the likes of a priest, a war vet looking for his daughter, a martial arts instructor and his students, a baseball and football team, a man with a flamethrower and a welding helmet covered head to toe with metal, and more.

The movie, for the most part, is pretty good fun. A lot of the townies competing for the money are pretty weird, but very few of them are really memorable, with the exception of the priest and flamethrower guy. There is also way too much CGI. I could get past the fast that the titular space-suited Alien Opponent was animated entirely in CGI because he (or it) looked pretty good, but I really don't like CGI gore. It's a shame because there is a pretty good amount of it here. For the first half it's mostly just gunshots and other small wounds, and a lot of the more extreme stuff is kept off-screen, but it picks up during the second half, where a man is cut in half, another has his head caved in by a baseball and bat after being zombified, and another is gorily killed with a chainsaw.

While it may not be great, Alien Opponent is a pretty welcome distraction. Those of you who like action, sci-fi, gore and b-movies may want to check it out.

Gore Meter: 3/5

Nudity Meter: 0/5

6 out of 10 garbage bags

Death Kappa (2010)

WARNING!!! This review contains SPOILERS!!!

I had heard of Death Kappa before I even really got into the Kaiju genre, I had seen the trailer a couple years back while scrolling through the horror movie section of Verizon FIOS' On Demand service. Being that I'm a fan of the genre now, and because Verizon FIOS was having a huge premium freeview event, I decided to check it out. The reviews for this movie seem to be either love/hate, and I personally have to disagree with the hate crowd. Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't love it, but I sure was entertained. I get it, there are people that will be bothered by the low budget, or the fact that all the vehicles are toys, or the fact that the reporter burning alive in front of the camera is a doll...

I have no words

... but that only added to the enjoyment for me, as a matter a fact, I don't think the movie would be half as entertaining as it was if it wasn't for those things.

As far as plot goes, the film centers around a young pop star who is sad because she has no talent and is moving back to the country to be with her grandmother, who raised her after her parents were killed in a car accident. When the grandmother is run over by a car, her dying wish is for her granddaughter to protect the Kappa, a mythical troll-turtle-frog-bird of Japanese folklore who loves cucumbers, dancing, and has a very special skill: Sumo wrestling.

The Kappa loves to dance to a song by the pop star that is so nonsensical and hilarious that it really can't be put into words:

"Someday, we'll be together, you and me / I'm wearing panties again today / The stars above are all lucky, happy / I'm going to end up putting our secret inside a treasure chest / I promise I'll bleed with a smile on my face near the seashore."

Then there are some government people who kidnap the pop star (did the movie even tell us her name?) and take her to their secret lair. There, a psychotic woman shows her their collection of biologically mutated fish soldiers, which she created to carry on the research of her late grandfather (who she pushes around in a wheelchair). Then they electrocute her and try to turn her into a fish soldier as well, until the Kappa comes to save the day. The psychotic woman then shoots everybody and finds a nuclear bomb that will obliterate the secret lair and all of her research and, for WHATEVER reason, decides to use it, and of coarse blows all of them up, resulting in a pretty cool looking explosion.

I don't know what effect they used to make this, but I like it.

Said explosion results in the birth of a giant reptilian creature (where it a actually came from is never explained) who obliterates the city and proves even the military's strongest of weapons to be useless.

That is, until the Death Kappa (who has grown to ginormous size as a result of the blast) comes to save the day once again.

Somebody wanna explain the cat to me?

After Death Kappa wins the battle, he starts destroying the city himself, until the pop star comes back, (completely unharmed and still in on piece despite being blown up by an atomic blast) and sings him that song again, oh man. She soothes him by pouring water on his gigantic bald spot. The Kappa then swims away and everyone waves goodbye. The end... or is it?

The problems with Death Kappa only make it that much more enjoyable it knows it's bad and on top of that has a bizarre sense of humor that suits my taste perfectly. A running gag in the movie is that several characters will yell "Mommy!" before being killed somehow.

Good? Maybe not. Entertaining? You bet your nozzle!

Gore Scale: 1/5

Nudity Scale: 0/5

7 out of 10 garbage bags

Reviews

The reviews below are some old reviews I took from my IMDb profile. My newer reviews will be a little different. They will be longer, include pictures, a gore meter and 50% less trans fat.

Sabotage (2014)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest actioner is a bit of a disappointment to be honest. It's not the action, trust me. When it comes to action, this movie delivers in spades. Which makes it even more irritating that flaws dragged the movie down.

Like I said earlier, the action delivers in spades, the movie definitely surpassed my expectations in that department. Every bullet results in a copious amount of blood. There are also some fairly graphic aftermaths of disemboweling and some scattered body parts after an accident that were very welcome surprises.

Now on to what dragged the movie down.

Don't expect the action to be non-stop, trust me when it happens, it HAPPENS, but the movie gets very talky on several occasions, which wouldn't be an issue if the plot was interesting, which it wasn't. Basically Schwarzenegger's character is in the DEA (as you can tell from his hat on the cover) and he's being double-crossed by somebody and there's an investigation and whatever. All I really cared about was the action.

The entirety of Schwarzenegger's crew (including the woman) were all the tattooed macho muscle-bound tough guys you would expect from this kind of movie, and as such you an expect a lot of swearing, particularly "F"-bombs. Now, I am definitely not one to complain about language, but there are scenes where these people can't get past a single sentence without a "f*ck you" or "f*ck that" or "suck my d*ck" and so on. It was amusing for a little while, but it got very old very fast.

Now, the plot does take some interesting turns as the movie goes on and it progressively gets more and more engaging, but the good final 30 minutes can't make up for the OK first hour.

Oh, and did I mention the action is incredible?

6 out of 10 garbage bags