Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

After reading this hilarious comment on IMDB about the TRAILER for Hellraiser: Revelations I just had to watch one of the old sequels again and my choice fell on the one I’ve seen the least times, Hellraiser: Hellseeker. Now, I’m one of those that don’t consider any movie holy. They could have remade Hellraiser as a romcom for all I care! The original movies still exist and can be enjoyed whenever I want to. Regarding Revelations it’s probably shitty, it’s just a movie that was produced to keep the rights to the franchise and nothing wrong with that. Art is business, make no mistake. I’ve been defending the Hellraiser-sequels since as long as I can remember, and I still will do that. It’s just something with them that attracts me. Like a twilight zone in the Hellraiser-mythology…

Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is now a grown woman and has left her terrible history behind her, living a fantastic life together with her husband Trevor (Dean Winters). A terrible accident kills her and leaves her husband alone in the world with a mind more and more confused for each day. He starts seeing visions and his paranoia starts to grow. The police think he killed Kirsty and his memory-loss gives both him and us some clues of what really happen! Soon his closest friends starts showing up dead, brutally molested and isn’t that a certain Cenobite lurking in the dark of his mind…?

Like the excellent Inferno, and the sequels after, Hellseeker is a typical mindfuck movie. What I heard all these sequels were other movies from the beginning, but was rewritten to be Hellraiser-sequels, which makes them have a distance to the Cenobite-mythology, only using it as a background to some very fucked-up characters. What’s good with them, with the possible exception of Hellworld, is that the originals scripts used are quite good. Not especially original for us who have seen a lot of movies, but more ambitious and dark than most other DTV-sequels out on the street.

But I like them, and Hellseeker - while not in the same league as Inferno – is a fun and nasty sequel, dark and downbeat and even of the character of Kirsty is not that well-written, it’s nice to connect the story back to the original movie. I mean, why not? What gives the Hellraiser-sequels more respect than for example the Children of the Corn-franchise, is that they trying to keep the stories true to the downbeat tradition of the original. Sure, Hellworld is a slasher in (a not convincing) disguise, but the rest are actually quite non-commercial for being cheap sequels produced for the home video market.

There’s not need to complain about Hellseeker, everyone else does it so well. If you can ignore the holy Hellraiser-movie by Clive Barker (and maybe part 2) and just watch it like a separate mindfuck-movie with Pinhead and his friends in cameos, I think much more of you would appreciate what they’re doing here.

If you are true Clive Barker fans, I’m sure you would wait a thousand years for a proper new Hellraiser movie, or…?

Amavas Ki Raat (1990)

It’s always nice to see generic slashers from another country than the US, and this Hindi slasher, Amavas Ki Raat, don’t stray that far away from the classic template. Not a remake of any kind, but the story is so standard and everything done thousands of time before this one, so you know what to expect as soon as the movie start rolling. But of course, it has a couple of the typical Bollywood-twists and it’s a very entertaining piece of trash in the end.

A witch, I guess - or just an old crazy woman who happens to know black magic - controls a muscular, bearded man to kill innocent women by, most of the time, stabbing them or throwing them from the third floor. The police are nearby and finally they kill him, shot numerous times in the chest! The only survivor from the last killing spree is a little boy, and soon after they killer has been buried he wakes up screaming after seeing him in his dream. To prove to him that the killer is dead two cops makes the not so smart decision to dig up the corpse and show the dead body to the boy! Guess what happens, yes… the killer wakes up and continues killing everyone he sees! Now the police have to hunt a living dead serial killer!

This is as stupid as it sounds, and add to that singing and dancing and a 100% pointless plot with a couple of idiotic comedians trying to be funny by making funny faces, you have yourself a true Bollywood horror movie. If the filmmakers had been smart, they would have skipped the comedy part and they would have a fun and very generic slasher with a killer which is the total opposite to Michael and Jason, he roars like a monster and never stalks his victims. He just jumps out at them and kills them brutally. The killer also died in the beginning, so begins to rot during the movie and look quite hideous at the end.

Amavas Ki Raat is a slasher that desperately trying to entertain its audience by putting as much stuff as possible into the storyline. We have, if I didn’t miss one, at least four times when the police think the killer is dead, drops their guard and he wakes up and continue his killing spree! Four times, maybe five! That’s just awesome, and a bit tedious to be honest. But expect the idiotic comedy parts this is a fun movie, never boring and gives us enough slasher action for at least two movies. It’s not gory, but some blood is visible and it also has a very bloodless head-explosion for those who are brave to sit through the whole movie.

I think I can recommend this to most of you, but prepare to watch it without subtitles – as usual ;)

Oh, don’t worry, like all Bollywood movies from this time, it also has a Kung Fu fight in a park. Not bad, eh?

Ladies Hostel (1990)

I’m quite sure most of the eurocult aficionados out there are familiar with 100 Days, the Bollywood-remake of Lucio Fulci’s masterpiece The Psychic. Even Fulci was aware of it and seemed quite proud of have being remaked in India. But I’m not sure he – or many of his fans – is aware of Ladies Hostel, a Bollywood horror from 1990 which is a scene-for-scene remake of Aenigma! Nowadays it seems like a quite odd movie to remake, but in 1990 it was still quite new and had probably left its mark on the home video market. I have no idea if it ever went to cinemas in India. Even if I think Aenigma has a few flashes if brilliance (very short ones) it’s still one of Fulci’s weakest movies from the time and is terrible slow and have a pace worse than Dances with Wolves. It just goes on forever!

The story is basically the same; a girl is exposed to a cruel prank and gets seriously wounded after getting hit by a car. At the hospital she’s paralyzed, probably in some kind of coma, but has developed a telekinetic power that she uses to take revenge on the students that caused the accident. One by one they are killed in spectacular fashion until a brave doctor gets too involved to let it continue…

I don’t remember the details of Aengima, but it feels like the same movie just in a different language and… much better! Yes, here the remake really boosted the quality of the story and made it a lot more fun. It’s a clearly superior film compared to Fulci’s vision. No, there are no snails in the Bollywood version, but the statue is there and the rest of the murders – very different ones – are shot with a lot of style and with cool special effects. My favourite scene is when the walls of a house is ripped apart, the camera flies in and we witness a girl getting take from the bed by an invincible force.

I think Ladies Hostel is a bit longer and also contains a couple of song- and dance-numbers it also has a lot more energy and power, and here we actually feel involved in the movie, in the thrills, without looking at the watch wishing it would end as fast as possible. It’s a very eighties movies and the students looks like they are at least 35 years old, but it adds to the charming corny feeling of the movie and the entertainment value surely grows with such a bizarre cast. Not a bad cast by any means, but they hardly look like young students.

Ladies Hostel is a Bollywood horror movie worth seeking out. What I know it’s only out on VCD with no subtitles, but if you have seen Aenigma there’s not problems following the storyline.

The Marsupials: The Howling III (1987)

The Howling is like the slutty cheerleader of horror franchises, everyone who want’s to fuck her can do it without much work or pay. It seems so anyway. But for a person like me who are very fond of trashy unrelated sequels this is of course a godsend. The Howling III is one of the least loved parts in this long series of failures, but I like Philippe Mora’s often very outrageous viewpoint at his source material. His movies are often over-the-top (just watch The Howling 2, probably the craziest sequel ever produced) and injected with an interesting tongue-in-cheek approach which both can been seen as very stupid… or brave.

This movie starts in something claimed to be Siberia, which is just a place with very little snow and an Asian dude in a fur coat. He’s killed by a werewolf and suddenly we cut to Australia were a woman is found in a park by a young man, a filmmaker. He falls in love with her directly, gives her a part in the movie (“Shapeshifters part 8”, which is kinda ironic because soon Howling Reborn, part 8 in the series is being released on DVD and Blu-ray). But soon she’s kidnapped back by three werewolf nuns to her tribe in the backwoods and a ballet dancer also finds herself called out in the wilderness. The government wants to kill them all, but a friendly scientist understands that they are humans like us, just a bit hairier…

First of all, as you might understand when you see the title, this is not werewolves, this is weresupials (complete with a pouch on the belly and everything) based on the Australian animal species. One of the characters is a Tasmanian Devil for example, which is kinda cool. Second of all, this is by no means a scary movie. It’s mostly a very absurd take on the werewolf-myth, and to be honest, if it wasn’t for the Howling-title this would probably have gotten a bit better reputation over the years. It’s quite original, have an off-beat humour and a couple of very cheap and unconvincing transformation scenes, but the sheer amount of twists and absurd characters makes it more entertaining than I expected at first. Just don’t expect any gore or violence; this is something very different from the other movies in the series.

I’m sure this movie came to existence in this way: someone realized they could make some good money by producing a movie in Australia, something with tax returns or… well, something like that. They gave Mora the mission and he just decided to have fun with it, just be silly. Partly a send-up on other Hollywood-movies, maybe satirizing the concept of Hollywood and silly sequels and at the same time make something closely connected to his home country. A former painter and involved in the art circles of Australian, I’m sure that affected his work as a filmmaker and gave him the confidence to do something far-out every time he got the chance. Right now he’s making Dali 3D with Alan Cummings, examining the art of Salvador Dali… in 3D of course.

But back to Howling III, watch it on your own risk and don’t blame it on me if you don’t like it!

The Nest (1988)

Terence H. Winkless The Nest most be one of the most forgotten creature features ever. Produced by Concorde Pictures and with Roger’s wife, Julie Corman as producer, this is a small but ambitious killer insect-movie in the same tradition as Slugs and Squirm. I guess it was dumped to video directly, which probably made it less known than the titles above. Not that The Nest is a masterpiece, but it has an overall feeling of “fun” and “goo”, and I’m sure most readers of this blog like that.

A fishing village is invaded by roaches, first just irritating bugs like they always been, but soon they start to eat flesh – human flesh. They are also, of course, mutated! So soon more bizarre creatures show up, and attack our hero – the brave sheriff and his girlfriend, the daughter of the man who brought the secret testing facility to the town! Melodrama! Well, what more can I say? The story is all what you expect from a typical killer insect-movie!

I admit it looks a bit flat and the budget was propably spent on a few of the more spectacular effect-heavy scenes, but The Nest is just good old-fashioned monster-fun. First of all, the key to all good monster movies, a good cast: Franc Luz as the sheriff, Robert Lansing as the patriarch, Lisa Langlois as the girl and Terri Treas as the bad mad scientist responsible for the mayhem. Everyone do their best and even an old pro could have chosen to sleep through his part, but do a nice performance that ends in an awesome sequence when he… well, I’m not gonna reveal it to you, but like the restaurant scene in Slugs this is as least as memorable.

While the story is standard and offers nothing new, the fun and likable cast puts of a good fight against thousands of cockroaches and a couple of cheap but very gory and slimey monsters. The cat/roach mix is a fun monster and the Lansing-creature is very good, the final monster is the best. It’s a bit stiff, and don’t move so much, but it’s very inspired by the last creature from The Thing mixing body parts and with animals and a nice gory sequence with the bad guy gets what she deserves, in blood-spurting fashion!

The Nest might be a shallow little movie, but filled with love and atmosphere, monsters, blood and gore. It’s out from Corman’s own company and possible to buy from them via eBay. My wish is that it would come out in a remastered edition, because I think the flat look of it would disappear if some work was invested in the movie and if they made a new master from the original negatives.

Not a classic, but a must for fans of good old monster films!

Killer Rats (2003)

Oh boy, Tibor Takacs, I just love you. Really, but I guess you – and most of your enemies - never would believe that. Sure, you made The Gate, a very fine Canadian mix between family movie and monster flick, and the equally entertaining and underrated The Gate 2. Not to forget I, Madman, a slow but gorgeous looking (and original) horror movie. But the biggest love you get from me is because of your proud career as a DTV-director, churning out movie after movie about spiders, snakes, rats, earthquakes, volcanos and yeah, every kind of threat towards mankind we can imagine. Many of them produced by Nu Image or similar companies, but always a step above the rest of the crap being released direct to home video each year. Killer Rats might not be one of your more famous works, but even if it’s a bit slow, it’s fantastic piece of ratsploitation with Ron Perlman doing a great job as usual.

Set in Philadelphia, but shot – as usual – in Sofia, Bulgaria, this is the story about a home for troubled teenagers (and dwafs, because I see one at the end). Jennifer (Sara Downing) is the latest one, and she’s taken in because of depression and just being a typical young woman without hope for the future. She’s taken care of by Dr. William Winslow (Ron Perlman), the Chief Psychiatrist at “The Brookdale Institute for the criminally insane”. But he’s not just a typical doctor, he’s a mad doctor but don’t know about it yet – because his work has created hundreds of rats, hungry for human flesh, and they are lead by one nasty big rat who happily takes a bit from everyone that comes his way!

Director Takacs creates, with a meager budget and a cast of unknowns, a lovely little movie. Slow at times, because the script is thin and Takacs always loves to squeeze some atmosphere out from every shitty script that comes into his hands. I’ve seen worse stories, and the characters are OK and most of the actors do more than what was probably expected by them. Ron Perlman, a true trooper when it comes to cheap exploitation, does what a real pro does: his best, and gives everything he’s got. I always respect that! Another fine performance comes from always reliable Michael Zelniker as the slow-minded janitor who has some form of telepathic connection with the rats (something that makes this movie a bit similar to Willard).

And I’m no one is kidding themselves to believe this is big art, so how about the effects, the rats, the gore and action? There are plenty of rats, both real, rubber and computer generated rodents. Something for everyone! The big CG rat looks quite good in some scenes, but is very uneven effects-wise. The rubber-version just looks a rubber-version being shaked so it would seem alive. The gore, nah – not that much really, but you got bloody aftermaths and some limbs here and there. It’s not a dry movie when it comes to the red stuff, but never goes to any extreme hights.

I really enjoyed Killer Rats, maybe more now the second time. It’s a well-made and good-looking rat-movie, another excellent DTV-piece by the one and only Tibor Takacs!

Terror in the Midnight Sun (1959)

The original Swedish title, Rymdinvasion i Lappland, is actually the title I prefer, but for your sake I will us the British title Terror in the Midnight Sun and not the very silly and un-stylish “Invasion of the Animal People”, which was a different cut anyway. I first saw Terror at a bad movie festival in Östersund and it was an enormous success. But I think it’s important to realize that even if some parts are bad, it doesn’t mean that the whole movie is bad. It’s just so easy to laugh at everything on the screen when you just watched someone trying to imitate the Sami language. In comparison with other similar movies from the same time it’s not that bad, it’s just the script that’s very weak and a few absurd details here and there.

A UFO has landed (or maybe crashed) in the northern regions of Sweden, Lapland, and a team of fifties stereotypical scientists are sent there to investigate. The handsome scientist Erik Engström (Sten Gester) falls in love with the daughter to one of his colleagues, and she’s of course a famous Olympic figure skater played by Barbara Wilson who likes to shower. Up in Lapland they find out that it’s only a strange UFO creating tension, there’s also a huge hairy Chewbacca-type monster roaming the mountains attacking the Sami’s and eating their reindeers! What a life!

Terror has a lot of stupid stuff going on, but it’s also short and keeps a good pace from start to finish. Even of the Stockholm-scenes are a bit talky and stiff, the fun starts fast when they arrives to Lapland. A quite unexpected shower-scene and a performance by legendary Swedish singer Brita Borg (not at the same time of course) and the fantastic locations make it a unique old school sci-fi. Not much seem to have been shot in sets either, so it has plenty of fantastic sceneries. I mean, I hate skiing – but this movie makes me wanna ski! The snowy landscape and place of the UFO also reminded me of The Thing, both Howard Hawk’s and John Carpenter’s, but a lot cheesier.

The aliens themselves are just pale, big-headed guys wearing anoraks but their pet, the Chewbacca-monster is quite impressive. Without a doubt one of the best looking creatures from the golden era of monster movies. The sequence when the monster attacks the village is really well done with more than excellent miniatures being trashed by the beast. I think one of the reasons it looks so good is that it was shot on location with natural lightning, because details like that helps a lot creating more believable effects.

What makes this movie weaker than it should have been is the sudden ending, explaining absolutely nothing! I don’t demand explanations, but here it’s just no reason for the aliens to come to earth. They hang around for a while, their pet escapes and then they go away again. No actually communication occurs between the humans and spaceman and in the end everything leads to nothing and another movie is over.

Terror in the Midnight Sun is not bad, it’s very uneven. It’s worth watching for the cool monster and lovely locations, so if you’re into fifties sci-fi I think you could appreciate this classic co-production between Sweden and United States.