Hallucinations (1986)

The plot of Hallucinations, the Polonia Brother's first movie, is that brothers Mark and John (played respectively by Mark Polonia and John Polonia (R.I.P.)), and their stepbrother Todd (played by Todd Michael Smith) are home alone while their mother works a double shift. Suddenly, they all start having gruesome hallucinations, and none of them knows why. Their mom calls telling them she's going to be gone another day, and the three brothers must work together to figure out the cause of the hallucinations before it's too late.

First, let's talk about the hallucinations themselves. Some of them are pretty funny, but some are also surprisingly scary. Among said hallucinations we have a hilarious scene where a cat is torn up by a sentient chainsaw, a man vomiting and crapping out a purple liquid and then crapping out a knife, a man being attacked by a pipe creature in the shower, and another man being attacked by a demonic baby doll.

Now let's talk about the explanation for the hallucinations. For most of the movie, it is suggested that a "monk" who talks to one of the brothers may have something to do with them, but for the most part things are kept pretty vague, that's a good thing, the lack of explanation adds to the creepiness of the movie. We actually do get an explanation towards the end of the movie, but it doesn't make any sense.

Now let's talk about gore, gore hounds who are also fans of SOV horror and are therefore willing to look past some budgetary constraints are going to be treated to some surprisingly decent gore including the chainsaw scene with the cat I mentioned earlier, a wrist slicing, blowtorch torture, and a surprisingly good decapitation.

Another reason this movie is so scary is the fact that the only people in the movie are the three teenage brothers, who are home alone, and there seems to be nobody around who can help them, so they are forced to fend for themselves and face whatever force is causing these supernatural events alone. That's scary.

As far as technical issues go, some of the normal SOV issues are present, particularly the fact that it's shot with a home video camera. Keeping that in mind, the quality is a lot better than some of the other SOV movies I've seen. Lighting isn't really an issue here. The sound cuts in and out every once and a while, and towards the end (when everything is explained) the music drowns out the actors. Being a veteran SOV viewer, I can look past things like that as long as they're not too extreme, it's pretty forgivable here.

Scary, creepy, surreal, gory and silly all at the same time, Hallucinations surprised me, in that the Polonia Brothers actually made a good movie, rather than just an entertainingly bad one. Honestly, I still get the shivers thinking about this one.

8 out of 10 garbage bags

A Fucking Cruel Nightmare (2010)

A F**king Cruel Nightmare (I'll call it AFCN for short), is a homemade splatter movie that's wholly illogical, pointless and shows no semblance of any sort of plot. However, not only is it incredibly gory, it's unforgettably bizarre and even somewhat engaging.

The story of AFCN is that a man is plagued with horrible nightmares where a masked killer savagely tortures and kills several seemingly random people. Is it just a nightmare, or is it more than that? Confronted by a dark past, the man must confront his inner most demons and plunge into the deepest depths of his mind to unlock the secrets of his f**king cruel nightmare!

Um... Okay, that's not what happens at all.

The real "story" of AFCN does center around a man who's having a nightmare. In this nightmare, he wanders through a corridor, in each room a person is being tortured by a person in a mask. One by one, he looks in each of these rooms and watches the brutal acts of torture inflicted on these people.

This is the first 30 minutes of the movie.

Eventually, the man wakes up, puts on a mask and goes back to sleep. Where another masked person leads him down the corridor again. Again, he looks in each of the rooms and watches as people are brutally tortured, but this time, it's the victims getting revenge on the masked people and torturing them. This is the rest of the movie.

So, yeah, this movie is basically just a continuous montage of people being tortured to death one by one, with some random scenes of a masked person mutilating himself in between. You would think this would make for a very boring 90 minutes, but this is not so because of several factors. All of the kills are incredibly gory, very sadistic, brutal, sometimes pretty creative and, mostly, keep from becoming repetitive.

The kill scenes, which are already pretty gory to begin with, keep getting progressively gorier as the movie goes on. Starting out with gratuitous blood splatter and progressively goes into full-on dismemberment and mutilation. It all looks great considering this is a low budget movie.

There are also some nasty scenes including a necrophilia scene and some gory penis abuse. Some of it is pretty cringe-inducing, but it's also very fake and unconvincing, and never actually disturbing.

If you're looking for an extremely gory movie to watch, and are willing to look past any flaws, including complete lack of coherency, as long as the movie delivers on gore, then I fully recommend AFCN.

Oh, I almost forgot, they say the name of the movie in the movie, that's another plus. 

7 out of 10 garbage bags

Vampire Academy (2014)

I'm not one to bash or criticize other people's opinions, but quite frankly I'm amazed at all the positive reviews.

In my mind, if your not a girl between the ages of 8 to 16 then this movie has nothing for you. This movie was not funny, it was annoying, actually it was really annoying. The harder it tried to be funny, and the more irritatingly stupid dialog spewed out of these generic teenage character's mouths, the more annoying it got.

While the gore is rather heavy by PG-13 standards, the action scenes were nothing to write home about for the most part.

I found the movie to be a little hard to follow, but not because the plot itself is confusing, actually it was because the movie had a very hard time keeping my attention, mostly because I didn't care about many of the characters. I didn't care about Generic Hot Teenager #1's secret crush on her teacher, I didn't care about Token Annoying Girl, I didn't care about Generic Bad Boy Chick Magnet, and I definitely didn't care about Stereotypical B**** Character and Stereotypical B****y Head Mistress.

Well, now that I've bashed the movie into the ground, I would like to say that I actually think that the VA series could have some potential to be good if, no, when they make it into a franchise. If they would lose the clique teen vampire movie plot line, and not skimp out on the gore, or at least make it more interesting. We'll see what happens.

I think I'm being a little hard on this movie, I was actually going to give it a 4, but then I decided to lower my rating, hoping in vain that I would even out the scale a little bit. This does not deserve the 7 that it currently has.

Generic, clique, annoying, stupid and boring. But it could have been worse.

3 out of 10 garbage bags

Dawn of An Evil Millenium (1988)

I was looking online for some splatter shorts and I found this little oddity from Damon Packard. This isn't splatter (though it has a few moments), what it is, however, is incoherent, insane, hilarious, and, in a way, mesmerizing.

The plot centers around a demon from an alien planet who is sent to earth to destroy all mankind while riding around in a custom 1970's Oldsmobile. He splits up into two beings, one of them good and one of them evil. A cop and his partner are after them, there's something about gnomes controlling the forest, I don't know. Some of the characters are difficult to understand because of heavy echo and distortion effects, I probably wouldn't have understood half of what was happening if I didn't read the description before I watched. But I don't think the point of the movie is to understand it, I certainly didn't care either way because I was just so mesmerized at the images being placed before me.

This movie is often very comical with it's randomness, I laughed out loud on several occasions.

While it may not be for everyone, Dawn of an Evil Millennium is surreal, crazy, off-the-wall and fascinating in it's bizarreness. I will definitely be looking into more of Mr. Packard's works. 

8 out of 10 garbage bags

The Nut Job (2014)

Because I was walking into this expecting it to suck, it was nice to know that it actually wasn't that bad.

I do have to agree with one reviewer about the animation being what saves the movie, because it really does look good.

As far as everything else goes, chances are this one won't veer too far from your expectations. Plenty of tired jokes abound, also some fart jokes which I found to be funny, but that's just because I'm really childish. Since this is a PG movie there really aren't that many nut puns, which was actually kind of disappointing.

As for the plot line, it's pretty much the usual clichéd family movie setup: Main character is really self-centered, main character goes out on his own to prove he doesn't need anybody (actually he's kicked out but you get the idea), main villain plots evil scheme against main character's former friends, main character has a change of heart, main character reconciles with friends and saves the day.

Despite these shortcomings, I actually kind of enjoyed this one, the animation was good, and some parts were kind of funny. What can I say? I have a soft spot for this stuff! I'm sure the younger children will love it, there were two kids in the theater I was in laughing their heads off. 

6 out of 10 garbage bags

Kettensägen Zombies Redux (2010) (Short)

This short was co-directed by Andreas Pape, who also directed a splatter movie called Hunting Creatures (reviewed here) which I really liked, this one not so much sadly.

Luckily this is pretty short, if it was a full-length movie there is a good chance my rating would be a lot lower because this is a pretty boring short, even during the gore scenes! Various people have various body parts cut off, most of the time in full view, with a chainsaw, an ax, and some other weapons. It looks good, but how this movie managed to make it so boring is beyond me. The long dragged out scene of the guy riding his bike didn't help either.

If this is one of those movies that you really, really want to see, at least go in with very low expectations, something I always try to do anyway.

4 out of 10 garbage bags

Mutation (1999)

The good: There is some nice gore. The computer effects, make-up, and CGI were very well done for a low-budget movie like this. A lot more creative and ambitious than most. The fake documentary at the beginning was cool.

The bad: Confusing plot, bad CGI effects for some of the gore scenes, the gore itself is rather sparse, the movie manages to be rather boring a lot of the time, and (while this doesn't really have anything to do with the actual movie) the subtitles on the version I watched were poorly translated which made the movie even more confusing.

I do have to give the movie extra points for ambition, as said before a lot of the effects are really well done, especially for a debut feature, and the movie is more creative than most movies of this sort. But unfortunately, the low budget held the movie back, and the general boredom and lack of gore dragged the move down. 

5 out of 10 garbage bags