VHS Cover of the Day: El Canibal aka The Manhunter (1980)

Siri: The Christmas Horror Movie Trailer

Wow. I'd pay to see this.

You've Got Personality....

Heads Up: Birdemic now on Netflix Instant

Watch it right now!

Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

Italian horror/sci-fi movie Alien 2:On Earth is supposed to be an unofficial sequel to the 1979 Ridley Scott Alien. While it doesn't really have any echoes of that movie other than having, you know, an alien in it, it is pretty creative init's own right. The beginning is kind of slow, following a group of spelunkers on their way do their thang. Once they get down in the ground, all hell breaks loose when they discover a organism down there that kind looks like rocks. I kinda dug this movie quite a bit, for what it is.



I get why they wanted to hop on the Alien-train and cash in, but really there's not a thing about this that reminds me of Alien. It's present day it seems, and the alien I guess is more of a shape shifter rather than a recognizable creature, but this has more to do with budget limitations I'm sure. It's almost like The Descent meets The Thing meets Zombi 2. If you dig Italian zombie movies I say definitely check this out, blu-ray if you can, and be patient during the opening act, and you'll see awesome things like this:

As always I may be in the minority on stuff like this, but give it a shot. It's not art. It's not cinema. But it's pretty fun. Grab it from Amazon.

Juan of the Dead Trailer

From Slashfilm:

I would rip off someone’s jaw to see Juan of the Dead right now. That’s how cool this first trailer is for what Latino Review calls “Cuba’s 1st Horror Film” is. Written and directed by Alejandro Bruges, Juan of the Dead takes place 50 years after the Cuban Revolution, where the island is overrun by zombies the government swears were sent by the United States. Social commentary aside, it’s then up to one man to attempt to solve the problem. Part Shaun of the Dead (obviously) but with a grittier look more akin to something culty and cool like Six-String Samurai, you’ve gotta see this bad-ass trailer for Juan of the Dead.

Fuck yea!

Woolite Commercial: "Torture" (Directed by Rob Zombie)

VHS Cover of the Day: Ghosts that Still Walk (1977)

via critical condition

VHS Cover of the Day: The Nightmare Never Ends aka Satan's Supper aka Cataclysm (1980)

via critical condition

Endings don't get much more wack-a-doo than this there. Prob should check it out.

Grizzly 2 (1983-ish)

So there are a lot of sought after and legendary pieces of media that aficionados discuss and speculate about, like the Beach Boy's Smile album or Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown cried, some of which have eventually surfaced or been released, and for my money, destroy the mystique and never live up to the built-up hype. Chinese Democracy, anyone?

Anyways, to a lesser degree I guess you could call Grizzly 2 one of those, only for the reason that it featured early appearances by George Clooney, Laura Dern, John Rhys-Davies and Charlie Sheen. I had read recently that a copy of the work print surfaced and through some digging, researching and haggling, I got a copy of it and also now have GoldenCasino.com tattoos in my arm pits.

Being a work print, it's very unfinished, so it's hard to say what level of awesome it could have wound up being. In its current state...it's pretty ridiculous. Awful sound, not much grizzly or any effects for that mater and a terribly incomplete finale are what we get. And I've actually seen finished movies that resemble this completeness, so I assume this could have been an awesome crazy Jaws-like huge animal rampage story.

still from horror movie diary

The premise is that there's a huge concert going down in the woods, and nearby hunters kill the huge cub of a huger mama bear who decides that killing all peoples is her only recourse. Almost like Orca or Jaws 3. That's it. With finale pretty much unfinished, how it ends is a little mysterious, but what we do know is that this gigantic bear ends up with a front row seat to the show, and by that I mean tangled up in a wall speakers flailing around. The huge crowd loves it! Here's a fan edited version of the finale to try and make sense of it:

But the best part is the music! The (temporary?) soundtrack consists of two Michael Jackson songs on repeat and the groups playing concert are hilarious italo-disco bands like Toto Coelo and other euro-dudes with short shorts. There's some pretty awesome rehearsal scenes for fans of camp, which we are.

THE BURNING QUESTION: Clooney, Sheen and Dern all die at the hand of the bear POV camera, and their total combined screen time is maybe 5 minutes max. So there.

The production was shut down for now unknown reasons, though speculation has run from dried up financing, to being ousted by the Hungarian government over paying for permits to special effects problems with the grizzly. Nick Maley who did effects on the movie has said that wasn't an issue though, but I dunno, the little that was produced look butt junky. Who knows. There are a few articles and interviews online that discuss the production, but now that it's semi-available, I can't imagine anyone caring. The mystique is gone! The film is unfinished! I can't say it's worth the effort or money or emotional/physical sacrifice to track this down.

Joey aka Making Contact (1985)

One christmas, my parents got me what they considered to be a pretty sweet gift for a kid, a Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist's dummy. And by all accounts it would have been awesome for a nerdy kid like myself, were it nor for the fact that I had recently seen Roland Emmerich's Making Contact. I can't recall the specifics from that first viewing, but I remember the experience clearly, and I remember thinking "Why are these people (my parents) letting me watch this?! It's horrifying! Why aren't they horrified?! Why don't they love me enough to make me turn it off?!"

Needless to say, the Charlie McCarthy dummy got more dust than use, much to my parent's confusion.

It took me 20+ years and a search on kindertrauma to rediscover this childhood horror. We open on the funeral of Joey's pops, and quickly jump into discovering that Joey's dad is now a ghost who calls him on a toy telephone and teaches him esp stuff like moving a glass of with his mind. And although all this hocus pocus is going on, Joey's toys seem to be independently alive, I don't get it.

Anyways, Joey then discovers a ventriloquist's dummy named Fletcher in a basement that shoots lightning form his eyeballs and growls a lot (that scared poop into my pants when I was a kid) who is also alive and reveals to Joey that the man on the phone is not his father, but am old timey ventriloquist! Or is he lying?!


I hate to say stuff like this in sci-fi-ish movies, but a ton of implausible stuff happens, mostly character stuff (so Joey's teacher sneaks into peoples homes and they don't care? In fact he stays for dinner?) The dummy goes on a rampage and traps some of Joey's schoolmates in the cellar where he was first found with all sorts of wack-a-doo magic happenings. It's up to Joey to go in and use his newly discovered telekinetic powers and shut that bitch down, america style.

The movie's pretty trim at 79 minutes, though the German version has about 20 minutes longer. I'm not sure what the differences are, so please don't ask. It's available on youtube though.

So many movies like this seem awesome when we're kids, but suck lion turds on rewatching. In this case, I think having seen it once and being horrified and seeing it again only now actually helped it. That and it's many references coupled with decent production values make it a cut above similar wannabes. The whole thing reeks of ET, Poltergeist, maybe some Goonies as well and even Star Wars references including ripped off R2D2-like robot that hangs out with Joey the whole movie.


We all know Emmerich went onto to bigger and bigger and BIGGER HUGER WORLD ENDING things. Every movie he makes apparently needs to out do each previous film. That man isn't content destroying the world twice for chrissakes. But here, being a super early work, his limitations in budget and effects help keep the story kind of grounded. I cant imagine if he were making this movie now how it might turn out. "Ok so instead of the dummy just terrorizing kids, I think it'd be more powerful if he runs for president and then tried to explode the world with aliens before he changes history!" "What?" "I know!" I cant guarantee you will like this not having been traumatized as a child though, because it certainly isn't great per se, but I found immensely more watchable than many of Emmerich's more recent disastersplotation films.

More than anything, this has me pumped to see Super 8. But you can buy Joey on DVD at amazon.com for now

Watch Buffy, Freddy and Machete Fight George Romero in Call of the Dead Video Game Trailer

Holy shitballs! I want this.

(via Nerdcore)

How to Make a Horror Movie (Infographic)

Click to view larger.

Check out the Action and Animated movie versions here.

Movie Poster of the Day: Rubber (2011)

Yep, the movie is about a "killer tire"...and we couldn't be more excited for its upcoming release on April 1st. Watch the trailer here.

VHS Cover of the Day: The Power (1984)

Michael Jackson's Ghosts (1997)

Man I don't know where I was when this came out; hopefully getting laid. But I had never heard of this before now, and only discovered it by accident on Amazon. I think MJ was trying to recapture some of his "Thriller" glory as his popularity waned in the late '90s and he started to really embody the whole Wacko Jacko name. But he spared no expense here, the video is directed by effects master Stan Winston and based on a story by Stephen King, MJ and Stan Winston. Pretty wild bunch eh? This apparently screened in some places with King's Thinner movie that same year, and then was subsequently released on video.

And dig this description from IMDB, I was laughing pretty hard:

"The story tells of a small town that is very much bothered by a very strange and weird man living in a visually haunted house. One day the mayor decides to go with a couple of people from his town to the weird man who's living up the hill, and tell him to leave. When they reach the mayor starts convincing him to leave his town, but the people with the mayor started liking Michael Jackson, and he started singing to them and scaring the mayor. Until in the end the mayor gets too scared and runs away, and the people come to know that Michael isn't too bad after all."

The more interesting thing is that Mike also plays the mayor and the final video shows the process to have him done up like a cranky old white man. Wikipedia says this is considered by Guiness to be the world's longest music video, and I guess. I always thought 8 Mile was.

Michael Jackson - Ghosts by Wakazai

This appears to be out of print on DVD. However, if you're feeling especially saucy you can buy the Ghosts VCD at amazon.com.Hurry, there are only 15 left!

Then and Now

Child actors all grown up. Some campy and some not. I'll keep adding to this list if you suggest it.

Alex Vincent - Child's Play:

Ariana Richards & Joseph Mazello - Jurassic Park:
Brian Bonsall - Blank Check:

Carrie Henn - Aliens:
Cary Guffey - Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

Danny Cooksey - Salute Your Shorts/Terminator 2:

Danny Lloyd - The Shining:
Daveigh Chase - The Ring:

Elijah Wood - Back to the Future 2:
Felissa Rose - Sleepaway Camp:
Harvey Stephens - The Omen:

Ivyann Schwann - Problem Child 2:

Jason James Richter - Free Willy:

John Lipnicki - Jerry Macguire:

Joshua Miller - Near Dark:

Lisa & Louis Burns - The Shining:

Michael Oliver - Problem Child:

Miko Hughes - Pet SemataryNoah Hathaway & Barret Oliver - The Never Ending Story:

Patty McCormack - The Bad Seed:

Peter Billingsley - A Christmas Story:

Peter Ostrum - Charlie and the Chocolate factory:

Stephen Dorff - The Gate:

Veronica Cartwright - The Birds:
Will & Hank Deutschendorf - Ghostbusters 2:

From a Whisper to a Scream aka The Offspring (1987)

"It'll take two men and a young gorilla to satisfy that!" Horror anthologies get it wrong so much of the time, it's real fun to see one get it right. And how come we don't get comedy anthologies? Or like, action anthologies? Would be sweet. Make it so.

So From a Whisper to a Scream kicks it off with a bit o' Vincent Price-ism to frame the stories of an evil-spirited town, Oldfield, Tennessee. The stories are pretty fun, and get more gory as they go. Spoilers within. Kick it Vince.

Sho' nuff.

The first story is a pretty weird/effed up story of Stanley, a murdering, sister sexing, mutant baby fathering dweeb. It's campy, but not in the ways junk like The Willies or Nightmares is; it's genuinely a sleazy junky story. I wish we had more of a finale, but I'll take a mutant baby when I can, no questions asked. This stars the funtimes man Clu Galager from Return of the Living Dead. He's pretty great as Stanley, I'd take a whole movie of that character.





Jesse Hardwicke (who will always be Bernie to me) is a good-for-nothin trailer park inhabitant who gets shot, and nursed back to health by an old-timer in the swamps. He reminds me of an eye bulger. While looking at an old scrap book, Jesse figures the old-timer to be immortal and demands to know the secret. It's a pretty solid story with mild gore, as compared to the previous story's pretty absent gore. It's actually a really good segment.




Next Mr. Price tells the story of carnival freaks under the rule of the voodoo Snake Woman. Specifically the Glass Eater and his forbidden love, Amarillus. It's not the best, kinda interesting though. I like the concept of the ending, but wish there was more with the other freaks overall. Like No Face man. "I'm a glass eater; I'm a freak!"





Lastly we get the goriest of the bunch, a Civil War, cannibalistic Children-of-the-Corn-ish yarn starring Cameron Mitchell. It's relatively tame in the gore department compared to other flicks, but within the context of this movie, it's more intense. This segment a pretty solid one as well, I found it kind of believable almost. Maybe more Lord of the Flies





For director Jeff Burr, this movie led to a bunch of middle of the road type of '80s/'90s horror junk sequels like Stepfather II, Leatherface (TCM 3), Pumpkinhead 2, Puppetmaster 4 & 5. Truthfully, I've never seen any of those (no joke) but I'd bet this is better. I know I don't seem too enthusiastic but I did enjoy this. It's better than getting a titty twister.

I don't know why it would be called The Offspring for it's theatrical release, since not all the stories really have to do with kids. It is a more '80s marketable title though, I'll give it that. Check it out.