Since I have some plans for later today, playing cards with a group of friends, I thought I would get a head start on getting movies watched, and reviews wrote up. Since I am broker than broke at the moment, I can’t rent a movie, so I went searching for something to watch for here on Netflix’s Play Now feature. This is a nice feature, since you can watch films via your computer, without paying extra for them (depending on your plan with them). I eventually decided on Return To Sleepaway Camp. The Sleepaway Camp films have always been a fun set to me. I never thought they were truely great films, except for the first film’s ending. Did anyone honestly guess the twist ending? Anyway, the sequels were the same way, never thought they were great, but they were a fun watch. A forth film was eventually planned, and shooting had begone on it. It quickly ran out of money though, even though not a whole lot was filmed. The footage that was filmed managed to show up on a special disk for the box set of the series. Then a few years ago, word got around that Robert Hitzik, the writer/director from the first film, was planning a sequel that would bring back some of the original cast members. This caused some excitement. After all, who better to bring back Angela than the man that started it all?

In Return To Sleepaway Camp, we start things off with a bunch of newspaper clippings, to catch us up to speed with what we will be walking into. It is basically a recap of events of the first film, and short history of the camp since then. From there, we head to Camp Manabe, where we meet the main character of the story, Alan (Michael Gibney). Alan is on the chumby side of things, as well as being pretty tall, who gets picked on a lot by those that are more popular. The kids that are more of the shy, quiet types, get picked on in turn by Alan. Even though Alan is really simply trying to fit in, it is hard to feel sorry for him. Alan rarely changes his clothes, even after they get dirty from different things. Since he wants to fit in, and wants Karen (Erin Broderick) to like him, he can be a little too trusting. Because of these things, and more really, it is easy to see why he gets picked on so much. Before long though, people start to get killed off. Is it Alan getting revenge? Or could it be that Angela has returned?

If you take the film as is, it appears that they ignore the sequels that were made with Pamela Springsteen. In interviews, which I didn’t get to actually watch, it is stated that this wasn’t the intention. There is supposed to be a bigger twist than what we got in the film, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t come out in the film itself. I bring this up first, because the whole film feels this way, that Robert Hitzik dropped the ball. It has been a while since I have been this disappointed by a sequel. There isn’t much that was done right in this film, at least it felt that way to me. To start, our main character in Alan is hard to get into, mostly because it is so hard to feel sorry for the guy. There are very few characters in the film that doesn’t come across as a bully in some way. I know when you get a big group of teens together, there will always be some that bully others. It just seems that Return To Sleepaway Camp centers on these types, and these types only. Another problem I had with the film is that it takes so long to get to any killing, and then the kills are just so bad. On top of that, they take forever to play out sometimes. I understand what Hitzik was going for in these scenes, tension. But instead of creating that, it comes across as plain stupid. The worst offence to this was a pointed stick coming up through a hole in the floor board. Never mind that the stick was too long to go straight up like shown in the film. It is the fact that after the stick misses the intended target, which is obvious that it would. The target then looks into the hole, not once, but many times after that. Sorry, but if a pointed stick just came from the hole, I’m not going to put my eye right over it numours times, let alone one time. I’m not saying I want the world’s smartest people in ever movie, but is anyone honestly that stupid?

The effects were okay at best. There were some that turned out pretty good, but nothing really jumped out at me. The best was saved for last in the film. There is at least one creative kill to be found, amazing I know. I will simply say it has to do with a bed of nails. It wasn’t that the effects were bad, just average I guess. They did make the film slightly better, so I can’t complain about them all that much. I do wish they would have shown more effects though. One kill is done by having the screen go completely black. I thought something had gone wrong, but no, that is the way it was filmed. On the other side of things, the acting was gernerally bad. Not all was lost, but for the most part it got very bad. Even though his character was very annoying, Michael Gibney does do a nice job playing it. When the actors were being their normal teen selves, if they are actually teens that is, the acting wasn’t all that bad some of the time. It was when they needed to react to something bad happening that it starts to really get bad. Either they do it in an over the top way, or in a no big deal way. Again, not all was that bad. I had heard that Felissa Rose, the original Angela, would be returning. She does just that, but is given such a small part of the film, it is truely a shame. To my surprise, she wasn’t the only returning cast member of the original film to return. Paul DeAngelo and Jonathan Tiersten can also be found. Isaac Hayes puts in a small performance as the camp’s cook, known as “The Chef”. Little bit of a South Park wink there. Vincent Pastore is also in the film, but like Felissa, isn’t given much of a role.

I don’t think I went into this movie with my hopes up to much for it. I wanted to like it, since I liked the movies that came before it, but I didn’t go into it expecting a great film either. Maybe the worst part about it is the people that explain everything away as “it’s just a horror movie.” I know horror films are known for their bad films, but that doesn’t excuse a bad film. There are plenty of horror films out there that are great. They may never win a major award, but so what?!? Another excuse people throw at Return To Sleepaway Camp, is that it was trying for the ’80s feel that so many other films tried for, and failed. It doesn’t take itself all that serious, which was fine with me. But with all that was bad about this film, it was actually painful to watch in places. I think it would have been better if that had just given us Angela right away. Isn’t that the whole point of the Sleepaway Camp films anyway? If you should decide to watch it anyway, keep watching through the credits. You will find an extra kill there. Suggested for those that feel they have to watch all sequels. Stupid people like myself in other words.

2 out of 5 Seriously? You call that a twist ending?

When watching horror movies, there are some that I get more excited about than others. I don’t always mind remakes, believe it or not. Sometimes sequels can be a good thing, most times they aren’t though. I love a good ghost story, I will go out of my way to catch a good one. There is also another, and much smaller, sub genre that I have started to notice, and I’m really getting into it. These deal with World War Two themed horror films. There seem to be a few out there that deal with the Nazi’s, usually in present day. With the events of this time in history fast approaching seventy years, how can the Nazi’s still be around in these films? Simple: they are, more often than not, zombies now. Like any genre, or subgenre for that matter, not all the films are good ones. Some films, like Oasis Of The Zombies, are just so bad that they are embarrassing. While a few, like The Bunker, are not half bad. When I came across Outpost, on Fearnet, I checked out what it was about, and had to watch it.

In Outpost, we meet Hunt (Julian Wadham), who is meeting with DC (Ray Stevenson) to hire him and his men. Hunt is wanting to go to an old Nazi outpost where he promises to find enough gold to go around for DC and his men.The men in question are mercs for hire. Hunt explains he needs an armed escort because there are other men that know about the gold, and are also on their way to get it. The employer that Hunt works for is willing to pay a little extra for the hired mercs, so that they can get to the gold first. This is supposed to be an easy 48 hour job, or so Hunt tells them. What he doesn’t tell them, until later, is that there is no gold. He is there to find something the Nazi’s were using to try and create a soldier that will not die. They find what they are looking for, but they also find the soldiers that were left behind. As the tag line for the movie says, “You can’t kill what’s already dead.”

I ended up liking this movie, but at the same time it turned out to be an odd one. It didn’t become a great movie to me because of the way the plot ended up being handled. It is a simple plot in truth, but Rae Brunton managed to make it confusing all the same. We first discover that there is a pile of bodies inside the outpost, and at least one of those bodies happens to still be alive. This guy never speaks, but we later discover who he is, thanks to an old film that is found in the outpost. His story, along with the other bodies in the pile, felt incomplete, and not needed for the overall plot of the movie. The German soldiers are something of a mix of zombie and ghost. For a while they just show up at odd times out of thin air, and disappear just as quickly. They are solid though, as bullets can make contact with them. They can seemingly enter and leave the outpost whenever they want, but stay outside of it for the most part. If they leave the general area of the outpost, we are never told about it. I am assuming that we are to believe they remain in the general area of the outpost though, but why? I never had a real problem with Hunt, or the mercs. I did start to wonder just how much ammo they ended up bringing with them though. They were going through magazines like there was no tomorrow for a while there.

Since I watched this on Fearnet, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be edited or not. It didn’t appear to be, since there were some pretty gory effects to be found. The only thing I found by watching it on Fearnet, is that they threw in some commericals about half way through the film. Anyway, the effects, while not many, are actually pretty good. A lot of gun shot wounds, and stab wounds, can be found through out the film. Perhaps the best effect was the head crushing scene. I won’t say anymore than that about it. The acting was a real surprise here. I can’t say that I have watched Ray Stevenson in anything until now. He is mostly known for his role on the HBO series Rome. He was also the newest Punisher recently, which I don’t think did very well. I felt that in Outpost, he can lead an action movie. Julian Wadham also did a very nice job with his role. You can also find Richard Brake, Paul Blair, Brett Fancy, Enoch Frost, Julian Rivett, and Michael Smiley.

Zombies and action seem to go hand-in-hand really. I mean, in most of today’s films, Outpost excluded really, we see our hero’s trying to get head shots of any kind in order to kill the zombie. You are looking at a good mix for horror and action film because of that. Even though in Outpost the zombies appear to be unstopable using guns, that doesn’t stop our group of mercs from pumping all kinds of bullets into the zombies, and to try to blow them up with land mines. You have to give them credit for at least trying, you know? Even when they realize bullets aren’t working, they still use them in order to give them some breathing room at least. There is a good mix of action and horror here, it is just too bad that the script wasn’t better than it ended up being. I’m all for letting the viewer make up their own minds as to what the film means, or what happened in the film, but sometimes it is nice if they give us a nudge in the right direction. That is something that would have been nice with Outpost.

3 out of 5 Awaiting the next Nazi zombie

Hello, Top Horror Movie Clubbers! I’m Curt from Groovy Age of Horror, and Rachel has kindly invited me to talk here about what first interested me in horror. That’s too hard to say, since I literally can’t remember a time when I was not interested in horror. Some of my earliest memories are of watching Groovie Goolies cartoons (that must have been during the 1975 rebroadcast), and I even had the toys.

But since this is a horror movie blog, here’s a memory that’s more on-topic. For the first seven years of my life, my family lived in Johnstown, Ohio. We got the Columbus newspaper, and I guess Columbus was big enough even way back then to have so many movie theaters that it took several pages to print all of their advertisements. In our household, these were simply known as the “movie pages” and I was forbidden to look at them almost from the instant I discovered them. The reason? My saucer-eyed interest in the horror movie ads.

I’m sure there were some real hum-dingers that would have been totally inappropriate for a child of my age, especially since that was the early ’70s, but let’s just say my mom snatching them away with a horrified look on her face did nothing to diminish my curiosity about them.

Any Texan’s in the house?

Horror Remix has organized 3 free screenings of 3 eighties shopping horror movies !! How could a movie called Chopping Mall be anything but (to uses Heathers terminology) So Bad its Good!

For more detail on why where and how check out Horror Remix

It took me just a little longer to get a new post here than I had planed, but hopefully it was worth the wait. I decided to find a movie I didn’t know was out yet, until I had read about it on another blog. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus created a stir when the trailer was released to Youtube. You could see that it wasn’t going to be the greastest film ever made, but everyone was wishing it to be a great “so bad it’s good” type film. When the trailer shows (all the good parts) such things as mega shark chomping on planes and bridges, along with other things, it was hard to not at least laugh at it. Once I learned it is now out there, I rushed to the rental store. To my surprise, they had two copies of the DVD. Which is actually two copies more than I thought they would have.

In Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, we meet up with Emma MacNeil (Deborah Gibson, yes the singer). Emma has a job that deals with the ocean, I don’t remember what her title was, and neither can anyone else it seems. Anyway, she is in a mini-sub type thing, that she took without asking by the way, with a budy of her’s. They are checking out what the whales are up to under the ice, when a low frequency sonar type thingy gets dropped in the water. This messes with the whales, sending them crashing into the ice, which just happens to have a frozen giant octopus and mega shark. What are the chances? The whales or the sonar, or maybe it was Emma’s stare, frees the two somehow. Even though they have been frozen for a very long time, they wake up within a few seconds and off they go. Of course Emma doesn’t actually believe what she saw, until a whale washes up that has a very large shark tooth in it, that happens to look nothing like a shark tooth. She recruits her former teacher, Lamar (Sean Lawlor), who then is contacted by Dr. Shimada (Vic Chao), because he believes an oil platform was attacked by the giant octopus. It was, and the only person that lived was the only American working on it. Anyway, we now have a team! Now the American goverment wants these two things stoped, because they are destoring everything in their paths. That is where Allan Baxter (Lorenzo Lamas) comes in.

With this kind of movie, you know it is going to be silly. The question remains though, will it be silly good? Or silly bad? Either way you know it isn’t going to be a good movie, just a movie that you can, hopefully, have fun with. It doesn’t take long before you notice things like stupid CGI effects, and that Emma apparently only wears nail polish on one hand. These things, and other silly stuff like it, are things I was expecting though. While the film did make me laugh at times, I was disappointed by it at the same time. As much as I enjoy funny and stupid dialog, the real reason to watch this film is to see the mega shark and giant octopus. This is actually where the film fails. We do get to see the mega shark try to eat different things, even though it makes no sense as to the damage he does, or doesn’t cause. It can bit through some things, but not other things you would expect that it could. So we get to see the mega shark here and there, and cause a lot of damage to things. The giant octopus, on the other hand, gets very little screen time. I’m assuming that might be because there would be more CGI effects involved when it comes to the octopus, so they don’t show it as often. It would have been nice to watch it cause more damage as well, like the cruise ship we see on the DVD cover. It is interesting what one can learn from movies like this. When something drops off the radar or sonar screen, it is natural to assume the target has been destoried. Mega sharks and giant octopus can grab a plane out of the sky. The shark can supposedly swim as fast as a plane can fly, but it sometimes has trouble catching up to subs and mini-subs. Oh, I can’t forget the most important thing, “Those guys have been frozen in ice for millions of years. Wouldn’t you be a little horny?”

All the effects are the CGI kind. From the big shark and octopus, right down to the small explosions, it is all done with some CGI work. While I have watched movies with much worse CGI work, it isn’t the state of the art work being done for this film either. As CRwM noticed, at And Now The Screaming Starts, the shark seems to get bigger as the movie goes on. Another draw back with the effects, is that they tended to use the same CGI effect over and over again. It might be a little different at times, like a slightly different camera angle on it. The acting wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. This was the first time I have watched Debora Gibson as an actress. I didn’t think she was outstanding, but she did surprise me a little bit. I’m sure it is hard to act in a movie like this one though. You know it isn’t going to be a great film, and more than likely not a lot of people are going to watch it. While not everyone was doing a good job with their roles, overall it wasn’t all that bad.

One of the things that bugged me bad about this film, was when they went into the lab to try and find a way to lure the shark and octopus to a certain location. Why did this bother me? For one thing, I couldn’t figure out what they were trying to make in a lab that could lure these two where they wanted. Second thing was, all they appeared to be doing is mixing one chemical with another, looking at it, and shaking their heads in disappointment. Having been in a lab many, many times, I know there is a lot more to things than just pouring one chemical into another. This is all they appeared to be doing, and for a good long time at that. Of course this eventually leads to two of the characters wondering off for a little sex time, which leads Emma to the solution to their problem, pheromones! Of course this works because they happen to know the sex of the shark, and his buddy the octopus right? So that is Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus in a nut shell. I thought it was a little too stupid in order to be very funny. It had its moments, but didn’t hold up as well I as I was hoping it was going to. If it had more shark and octopus going around destorying things for the hell of it, it would have been a lot more fun.

2 out of 5 I think the octopus should sue for equal screen time