Badass Monster Killer (2015)

Jimmy Chevelle is the monster killer mentioned in the title. He rolls around Camaroville killing all sorts of Lovecraftian horrors while scoring with the ladies. It’s okay though because he works for the Department of Supernatural Security which gives him his badge and gun! Thru a series of flashbacks, we see that his former partner was murdered by a cult lead by the most evil of dudes the Reverend Dellamorte. Their latest plan is to summon the bride of Cthulhu while cornering the weed market so they can distribute a special blend that will encourage the citizens of Camaroville to join their cause. Jimmy and his various lovely sidekicks must stop the bride and save the day. Even if he gets kicked off the force.

There is a lot to like about Badass Monster Killer and a lot that goes sideways. The good stuff is that they totally nail the dialogue and characters. This is a blend of Blaxploitation and Mythos monsters done on a budget. There is a groovy vibe, and it is a bit repetitive but silly fun to watch Jimmy dropping the same pickup line on different ladies before killing the bad guys and taking them back to his pad for some grown up time. This isn’t being played seriously but for laughs and honestly it works well. I liked the cast, and the actors have some chemistry with one another. Plus, it is clear that they are having fun, which is a must for a flick like this. We also get many pretty women in skimpy outfits as well as some topless ladies in the few scenes set in strip clubs. Hey, the bad guys even have topless dancers, which really is a must have for any secret lair in my humble opinion.

I was shocked at how the various Mythos creatures are accurately named and the job that the filmmakers did to bring them to the screen. Who the hell knows what a Shoggoth looks like, other then a Lovecraft nerd like myself that is. They did a decent job with the creature design and by God it is latex and rubber. We also get a spine ripped out, a fun looking bride of Cthulhu complete with he “squid chin”, and some cool body melts as the “acid titties” take their toll. There are a few shots with puppets and some miniature work that I thought was a lot of fun. I dig it when a movie tries to give me some old school effects.

Sadly, there is also a lot of badly done CGI here as well. Giant monsters stomping around, heads popping off, and many kills are cringeworthy. I get the lack of budget and can forgive the above but then they double down. Most of the movie is shot on a green screen with a comic bookish looking city scape behind them. Hell, most of the movie was likely show with a green screen and a few bits of furniture used to dress the different “sets” which are again just green screen and not actual locations. This feels like a flick that was shot completely in a warehouse. I can forgive some bad effects work but at least have some sort of gritty locations to shoot scenes in. The damn movie is almost completely set in a sketchy strip club/cultists hideout and in an alley. Would that have been too terribly difficult?

Too much greenscreen for me

The other thing that sort of bugged me was the length of the movie. This is a fun gimmick, but it will wear out its welcome sooner rather than later. This flick clocks in at a surprising hour and thirty-six minutes! Why? There are a few characters that could have been deleted and jokes that didn’t need to be revisited. For example, the dumb investigators that keep popping up only to get their noggins ripped off aren’t necessary. Same goes for his inspector who brings nothing to the story. One of the things that I notice with a lot of low budget filmmakers is that they either edit the movie themselves or hire someone as equally invested in everything they shot. You could have told this story with a lot tighter runtime, which would have helped immensely. Cut fifteen minutes and this is a way more fun experience.

Now I didn’t hate Badass Monster Killer. It was a fun mashup that treats both the subgenres (Blaxploitation and Lovecraftian Mythos) with respect. But perhaps they were a bit too ambitious with their available resources and needed an editor to cut things down. Still, I’ve seen much worse and think that there enough going for it to check out the movie.

 

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer

Call Girl of Cthulhu (2014)

It doesn’t happen often anymore that I pick up a movie solely based on the title, but that is exactly what I did here. While browsing for a copy of Bone Tomahawk, which I will eventually get around to reviewing here, I saw this on the shelf at my local used shop and had to have it. I think we can all agree that most of the time this sort of purchase ends in disappointment, but not this time around.

The story opens with a man named Carter being questioned by the police. They mention that they are dealing with forty-three bodies and a new STD. This movie already has my attention. Thru a series of flashbacks, we see that Carter is an artist and virgin who becomes obsessed with a hooker named Riley. The thing is he really is a good guy so when he hires her to sit for one of his paintings, she takes a liking to him, and they start to date. But things go wrong when a crazy one-eyed professor asks Carter to recreate a book, the Necronomicon I think, so that they can stop some cultists from summoning Cthulhu. Many weird things happen before we get what is an ending that is honest to the Lovecraft universe.

I kept things a bit vague above to not spoil the movie. But be warned that the rest of the review is going to ruin some of the coolest gags in Call Girl of Cthulhu so if you don’t want that to happen skip to the last paragraph. To begin with the basics this is a very low budget flick that uses the resources at hand very well. They have a smallish cast and just a couple of locations that I think could have all been sets in a single warehouse. They keep the cast small, though we do get a lot of faceless cultists and a nice batch of demonic hookers. But as far as speaking roles go, they kept it to a bare minimum.

Why is this important? Every penny they didn’t spend there they were able to dump into the practical effects work. We get so much good stuff like monster boobs (who knew internet porn was bad for you?), exploding heads, tongues cut out, death by dildo, some girls lose their heads, some minions’ heads explode, and a tentacle is jammed thru yet another noggin’. This is a very bloody movie filled with nifty practical effects work. It reminds me of the glory days of the eighties and that wasn’t even the best bits. Riley goes thru a change from attractive working girl to full on latex monster. Along the way we see her grow vagina tentacles, pee acid in a golden shower gone wrong, drops some monster feet on a fetishist, and eats her customers in very bloody ways. You know this one might not be for the kiddies.

Toss in some surprisingly plentiful sleaze and nudity with some jokes that land well, and you have a decent flick. Oh hell I didn’t even mention the STD that gives one unfortunate fella a monster dick and not in the good way! Call Girl of Cthulhu checks so many boxes that I can’t help but to highly recommend it. It is a fun trip from start to finish and I’m glad that the title caught my attention. Check it out.

 

© Copyright 2022 John Shatzer

Castle Freak (2020)

Well, there is another remake of an old Charles Band flick. I liked Puppet Master Littlest Reich so maybe this will be decent. Plus, I was never a fan of the original Castle Freak, so I don’t have an axe to grind with this one. For my plot synopsis I debated pointing out the differences as I explain the story but decided against it. I figure that if you are reading this you have either seen the original and don’t need my help or haven’t and don’t care. With that bit of business out of the way I suppose we might as well jump in and see what we have.

We meet our main characters Rebecca and John as they are partying with some college friends. This is important as they are students at some college in Massachusetts. I’m thinking it might be Miskatonic University since this movie leans heavily into the Lovecraftian mythos and one of the characters is sporting a t-shirt from that fictious institution. John gets liquored up and gets behind the wheel leading to a horrible accident, one that blinds poor Rebecca. Later, they don’t specify how long, the pair are in Albania checking out an inheritance from Rebecca’s long-lost mother. You know that sort of thing never ends well.

Some shenanigans happen as Rebecca hears something moving in the walls, a local drug dealer gets killed, and we get a lot of flashbacks of Lavinia, Rebecca’s dead mother. There is of course also the freak running around. Some friends from school show up to help move the furniture and sell off the valuables from the castle, which means they basically came to up the body count. People get murdered, cultists stop by for a summoning, and I think that the world comes to an end as they summon the old ones. If you know anything about Lovecraft’s fantasy world you know what that means.

I have some good things to say about this movie, so I figure that I’ll start there. I liked the cast of unknowns. I mean at least I haven’t seen any of these actors before, so it was a pleasant surprise when the lines were delivered with competence. There are a few vapid and one-dimensional characters but that isn’t the fault of the cast as they aren’t given much to work with. Many of them exist solely to get killed off anyway so I’m not going to pick at them or the movie about this.

The creature design is solid, and the freak looks as good if not a bit better than the original. It is an honest to God actor in latex, which if you read my stuff you know how much I enjoy that. We get some nice sticky and gooey kills. Highlights are a head twisted around like a corkscrew, some self-mutilation thru religious practices, eyes are gouged out, and a head is squished like an overripe grape. We also get some rather disturbing… well I guess for lack of a better word alien “junk” on display as at least one character is inseminated with the seed of an elder god. This movie goes some very disturbing and fun places.

Now we come to my one complaint and it is a sizeable one. Most of all the good stuff I talked about with gore and twisted story bits happen in the last twenty minutes of the movie. This is one of those flicks that backloads all of the good stuff and doesn’t give the audience much to chew on before that. Since this movie is an hour and forty-five minutes long that is a very bad thing. Hell, the friends aka. additional victims don’t even show up until the fifty-minute mark and then wander around for half an hour before anything happens.

This seriously uneven pacing makes the first hour plus of Castle Freak a chore to get thru. While there are some cool easter eggs here and there including a random Cthulhu statue and a copy of the Necronomicon it isn’t enough to make it interesting. I don’t hate this movie and it does have a payoff at the end, but I can’t imagine every sitting thru it again. For me there is zero reason to revisit it now that I’ve seen the ending and now how things shake out. I suppose if you are a big fan of Lovecraft this one might be worth a watch. Though I can honestly say that unlike The Unnamable, another Lovecraft flick I revisit every couple of years, I won’t be watching Castle Freak again.

 

© Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

 

Cabin in the Woods (2011)

Have you ever wondered why the characters in horror movies all seem to do the dumbest things? Why do they go off in the scary woods to make with the romance? Are they really stupid enough to play with the creepy stuff in the basement? Well Cabin in the Woods gives answers to all of these questions and more.

Things start off in an office building where we see some workers discussing how the Swedes have failed and it is up to them or the Japanese to get the job done. Um okay… Then we see college kids hop into an RV and head off for a weekend trip at an isolated cabin. Along the way they meet up with a creepy gas station attendant that is sort of a harbinger of doom. They get to the cabin, act stupid, and generally give you what you would expect from a horror film. Then we are back to the workers taking bets. There is a pool on which monster the kids will choose to bring about their doom. What the Hell movie?

Okay so here is the skinny on what is happening. There are elder gods locked deep within the Earth that require a sacrifice. But the key to this is that those sacrifices have to be young and have to of ended up dead by their own choices. So, the governments of the world setup young people in situations that can and will go horribly wrong. Apparently, it isn’t against the rules to nudge or help the sacrifice along thru the use of chemicals and gas. Want people to get frisky in the woods? Pump some pheromones into the environment. Need a smart person to make bad decisions? They have a gas for that. Hell, they even sneak some chemicals into hair dye to make the fake blonde girl act like a real blonde!

Weed saves lives!

I enjoy it when filmmakers take a genre and turn it on its head. This is exactly what Cabin in the Woods does. They take all the expectations of an eighties horror movie, dumb kids, drug use, sex in the woods, etc. and explain it all in the most clever of ways. I was amused the first time that I watched Cabin in the Woods and I still enjoy it after several viewings. Cabin works both as a horror movie and as a parody of one. That is a rare thing. But where it gets really nifty is how the system breaks down on them. One of the sacrifices is a stoner whose chronic weed smoking has immunized him to the drugs they use to influence their behavior. He is the only one that questions everyone else’s behavior. Why are normally smart people acting dumb? Why is the friendly guy suddenly turning into the “alpha male” and the nice girl getting slutty? It is a fun flip of how these sorts of burnout characters are normally handled in horror flicks. He sort of becomes the hero in the end.

Damn they even do a decent Werewolf!

In addition to being clever and well written the movie does deliver the creatures. While they choose a family of zombie hillbillies to be their killers, they had other choices. When they escape into the facility underneath the woods, they let the rest of their potential monsters loose on the facility and the workers. We get to see a werewolf, a pinhead want to be, creepy ballerina, ghosts, killer clowns, and my personal favorite a unicorn. Don’t laugh those horns are sharp! I almost forgot the merman… don’t want to do that.

The final thing that I wanted to mention is the ending. While the rest of the movie has a tongue in cheek feel to it the ending is awesomely horrible. Spoiler alert. A couple of the kids survive, and the movie ends with the old gods rising and destroying the world. How is that for an ending? This movie is funny, twisted, and depressing all at the same time. I love it and recommend checking out Cabin in the Woods.

© Copyright 2020 John Shatzer

The Cthulhu Casebooks – Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities by James Lovegrove

This is the second book in the series that mashes up Conan Doyle’s famous detective with the Eldritch terrors from H.P. Lovecraft. I loved the first book which was reviewed here and this one isn’t any different. Author Lovegrove nails the style of both Doyle and Lovecraft again in bringing a new story that combines what fans love from both authors. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

This book takes place around ten years after the first. It is hinted that Holmes and Watson have had many run ins with the servants of the Elder Gods and are a bit worse for wear from it. Though they still have been successful in keeping the forces of chaos at bay and keeping the general public from finding out about the horrors that exist in the world. This story opens with them being summoned to Bedlam, a very famous institution for the insane, to see a patient that is writing in a language that he shouldn’t know. Not only is the man horribly mangled, clearly insane, but he hails from America, specifically New England. Between that and his connections to Miskatonic University Holmes decides to investigate.

This eventually leads the pair to an isolated farm inhabited by a strange man and the creatures that are at his beck and call. Here is where Lovegrove does something very clever. Using the literary trick of having them read a diary about half of the book is the story of the characters that Holmes and Watson are dealing with and how they ended up in England. This allows the author to tell part of the story in a familiar Lovecraft vein, not only in the setting but the style before switching back to the “present” with Holmes and Watson to wrap things up.

I made a point in my earlier review to mention how Lovegrove tells his own story while being respectful to two incredibly important and legendary authors. Not only does he do it just as well here, but I think that the story is even better than the first. Some might be disappointed that there is a bit less of the classic Holmes and Watson in Miskatonic Monstrosities, but not using the classic villain Moriarty in this book and instead giving us an antagonist more fitting a traditional Lovecraft story was a nice addition. Sure, almost half the book shifts away from the main characters, but there is something fun and appealing about getting the background to those doing battle with them. Have no fear though because we aren’t done with Moriarty quite yet if the ending of the book is any indication! Okay maybe that was a tiny spoiler.

This was another fantastic read that I highly recommend if you are either a fan of Sherlock Holmes or the twisted world created by H.P. Lovecraft. The writing is easy to get into and flows nicely along. Twice I stayed up way too long to read “just one more chapter.” That is when I know that I’m really digging a book. Seriously guys you need to check out this series from James Lovegrove. Highly recommended.

© Copyright 2018 John Shatzer