Cult Movie Round Up #1

A Review by Nick Peron

In order to facilitate efficiency and productivity in the competitive internet reviewing market, I have taken it upon myself to write a series of articles titled "Cult Move Round Up" where I review three or four movies in one review. This is to give myself more time to "fuck myself" as many of my detractors on YouTube who don't like me making fun of Transformers would suggest I do. So without further adue, let's take a look at what I've got this time around:

Anchor Bay's Cult Fiction Series:

Before I go into reviewing some actually movies, I should let you know about Anchor Bay's recent line of movies. Since this past Halloween, it looks as though Anchor Bay (who have brought us some awesome movies on DVD like Evil Dead, Hellraiser and Dawn of the Dead) has been experimenting on doing different themed releases. In Halloween they launched their `Cult Classics of Horror` line which featured the DVD releases (or re-releases in some cases) as Evil Dead, Hellraiser, Children of the Corn, and House among others. I wasn't really impressed with that, considering most of the movies in the line I already bought from Anchor Bay and had no intentions of buying them again (no joke, thanks to them I bought Evil Dead three times. Although the second time it came with a really cool book of the Dead case, and the second time I thought I was just buying an Evil Dead lunch box and got the movie inside it as well.)

Just recently they've released a line of movies under the title Cult Fiction, which features different cult movies from different eras, and movies that either were released in North America or internationally. Some of the movies have been previously released by Anchor Bay (Like C.H.U.D. and Night of the Living Dorks) but most of them -- at least as far as I know, and care really (so please, hold your e-mails) haven't been released through Anchor Bay. There are a lot of cool movies in the set, I recommend you check it out.

Now, on to my reviews!

Eaten Alive:

Release: Two disc set through Dark Sky Films

What's It About: This movie follows the owner of a motel who is bat shit insane, and owns a crocodile (or was that alligator?) as a pet, and has a nasty habit of feeding his customers to the creature. He attracts all the wrong sort of attention when he feeds his croc a young prostitute and the same night her family shows up coming to look for her. People get tied up, a little girl hides under the porch, Robert Englund gets laid, and at the end of the day, the hotel owner gets eaten alive by an alligator

Why This Movie Should Have Been Good: Tobe Hooper and Robert Englund being in the same movie, thank about that.

Why It Isn't Very Good: Because it was early on in both men's careers.

Why This Movie Is Bad: Well, given that it's an old independent film, even though it's gone through a restoration process, it still doesn't look or sound all that great, which when most of your movie features people screaming or yelling and having dramatic chase music. Having a crappy re-mastering of the original mono-audio always sounds like it had to pass through somebody irritated colon before being digitally recorded. You can hardly understand what the people are saying half the time.

The DVD touts that it features "Robert Englund" but he has a very small, and very disturbing role. And I don't mean disturbing in a cool watching a movie sort of way, but in a disturbing, oh man I just caught my parents having sex kind of way. He plays a minor role of a character named Buck, who's contribution to the movie is pretty much that he likes to fuck. He even says that "I'm Buck and I Like to Fuck" and stick around for the disturbing scene where he's parading around in tighty whities. The only redeeming thing from the whole experience is that his character is fed to the alligator near the end of the movie.

It also has the slowest pacing, and tries too hard to go for the same level of degradation and brutality that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had, and fails at it miserably, because the main character is an old codger with a wooden leg and his pet croc that's behind a fence. Not exactly all that menacing.

Amusing Moments: Wait around for the young family that came to stay at the hotel. The parents are high out of their minds, and the little girls puppy (named Snoopy, even though it's not a Beagle) get eaten by the gator.

The Man Who Fell To Earth:

Release: On DVD through Anchor Bay, part of their "Cult Fiction" series.

What`s this one abut: David Bowie plays an alien that comes to Earth to collect water for his family, the sole survivors of an alien race, but gets very distracted making a fortune with technological wonders, getting drunk, and having sex with all sorts of women. Then he's forced to reveal that he's really an alien, but all the tests make him stuck in his human form.. or something.

The Main Problem With this Movie is: It drags on forever, and it never ends. You figure you've reached the end of the movie, but then a new scene starts up and you're left to wonder if it will ever end. This movie is so fucking long, at the time of this writing it still feels like I'm watching it. I'd like to think I have a pretty good attention span, but this movie (which most people out there in internet land herald as "brilliant" and "bold") goes off on so many tangents and different directions it's hard to keep up, or even care for that matter.. And the pay off? No return to outer space, no we see the alcoholic, cheating, space alien take a nodder while his space family dies of thirst.

What Should Have Made This Movie Cool: David Bowie

Why it Failed: He's not singing "Dance Magic Dance".

Thanks to This Movie I can Now Say: That I've seen David Bowie's penis at different stages of erection.

Dawn of the Dead 2: Contagion:

Release: On DVD from Anchor Bay

What's Is About: People at a mental institute that get exposed to a zombie plague.

Why This Movie Pisses Me Off: While it's obvious that with a resurgence in popularity of Romaro's zombie movies, that the studio that owns the rights to the name "Day of the Dead" would want to make a sequel, but Jesus ass-raping Christ, what the fuck were they thinking when they hired some asshole to write this movie?

It touts itself as "part prequel and part sequel" to the first Day of the Dead, like you're supposed to ignore all of Romaro's other movies (either that or some idiot in marketing didn't know or didn't expect you to know that this movie was the third in a series.) that is supposed to explain how the world came to be infected with zombies.

Of course, this involves attractive, yet troubled teenagers that live in a mental ward who some how manage to get a hold of a viral contagion that turns them slowly into zombies. The movie takes a lot of liberties and totally ignores all of the "rules" of Romaro's zombie films, it's an awful film, don't waste your money on it, I turned it off about 45 minutes in. I haven't seen such a bad zombie movie since I watched Vampires VS Zombies.

How They Could Have Made This Excuse For a Movie Better: Obviously they had a limited budget and could only do so much with this movie, but the major problem with this movie is the fact that they probably hired somebody who LOVES zombie movies but had no clue how to write on, let alone write a zombie movie in the Romaro style. Even though, hiring a die hard fan to make your movie is a kiss of death because usually they've got such a huge boner to be working on the project that usually what they churn out is pure shit.

This movie is what is about the zombie movie equivalent of what would happen if you got a Transformers fan to make the blockbuster Transformers movie that came out last summer. A big pile of shit, that nobody else is going to like, and make fun of you on the internet for. Like I'm doing right now.

So to the person who made Day of the Dead 2, what the fuck were you thinking? Are you an incompetent writer? Or did you make this pile of shit movie as something else and then the movie studio told you to slap "Day of the Dead" on the title? Because that's even worse than making the movie under the title Day of the Dead 2.

What a piece of shit this one is.