Horror Comedy Movies about People in the Movie Business

Bringing you a review of two movies today.  This is partly because they're very loosely related, partly because I watched them back to back and largely because neither really has enough "meat" to merit it's own review.

I saw these both on Amazon Prime.  The two movies are: "Knock `em Dead" and "Caesar and Otto's Summer Camp Massacre".

A quick disclaimer needs to be stated here.  I am starting a new gig soon and was studying and making notes for it during both of these movies.  I REALLY don't think it affected my ability to follow the very thin plot lines, but I may have missed a visual or two that could have  improved my experience.   I know most people are distracted when watching movies at home now, so I feel distracted watching sometimes gives a more realistic review experience.  I may check my phone or play with the dog or do some other "home chore" that anyone else running a movie as a distraction may do, but I feel like it deserves to be mentioned when I am actively participating in something else.  I know it's not entirely fair to the movie, but I think the thing that really takes you "out" of both of these films is their insider's peak into the film industry.

"Knock 'Em Dead" is a David DeCoteau film with a killer cast, if you're a fan of 80s and 90s T.V.  Rae Dawn Chong, Anne-Marie Johnson and Debra Wilson play out of work, down on their luck actresses, each facing a different major life hurdle.  Rae Dawn Chong turns in the best performance of the bunch, but Anne-Marie Johnson and Debra Wilson do a great job of delivering over the top, tongue in cheek, b-movie dialogue driven performances.  For much of the film their characters are putting up a front, and so the nature of their acting fits that characterization.  You'll recognize other cast members as well, including Jackee Harry and Betsy Russel.  The whole cast does a fine to good job.

The plot is pretty straight forward.  A group of actors and filmmakers, who did a very popular horror movie a decade earlier, are brought back together, on a private island, to take a shot at making a sequel.  They all parted ways on terrible terms all those years ago, but now they're left with no opportunities, except this one.  Once on the island for a weekend of shooting, with no cell phones and no contact with the outside world, things start to go wrong.  (This isn't a surprise.)  As the bodies pile up, a mystery starts to form and a bit of comedy finds its way into the mix, but really, there weren't many big laughs.  It was more of the characters making fun of each other with tired old insults. (Check the trailer below.)  The kills are unique to say the least.  Everything is used from wild animals to explosives.  We're told these are kills following the ones from the original movie, but we've never seen the original movie, so we sort of find this out after the fact and I think that hurts the impact a bit.

By the end there aren't many suspects left, but I was still guessing most of the way through.  Meanwhile, our three stars get to start liking each other again, all the while worrying if they'll make to morning, never mind Monday.  It plays very much like a TV movie from the 80s.


Technically, it's solid, with decent to good lighting throughout, clean enough sound, and special effects ranging from "wow that was bad" to "hey that was better than I expected".

If you're a fan of the core cast, give it a watch, otherwise it's more or less a movie worth having on your radar, but not worth watching over something else.


Now, for "Summer Camp Massacre", Dave Campfield stars, writes and directs this homage to slasher in the woods movies. (A man after my own heart.) I looked up some of his other work and found that Caesar and Otto are recurring characters in several movies like this.  I'm going to guess that if you like Caesar and Otto, you'll like Caesar and Otto in this.  It took me awhile to warm up to the characters and completely off the wall style.  Imagine "Airplane" or "Police Squad" as horror movies and directed by Lloyd Kaufmann while starring a guy doing his best impression of Lloyd acting like a bad actor.


I honestly don't know how else to describe it.


This one did require a bit more of my attention to keep up. Several of the jokes were visuals that were inconsistent with Caesar's account of things.  Again we're treated to jokes about life in L.A. and the film industry, which I really think are only funny to people who are in or know people in the film industry.  I guess that covers a lot more people now than it used to, but still, inside industry jokes always limit your audience.

Another set of jokes and plot devices relies on the audience knowing horror movies.  In a horror comedy, this is a bit more useful, since the viewer is likely to have seen at least a few horror movies.  Felissa Rose turns in a fine performance.


Again, for what appears to be a VERY low budget indie, this movie is technically solid.  Some of the camera work and lighting is extremely uninspired, but none of it is distractingly bad.  The audio is mostly solid and the effects are appropriately and intentionally cheesy.

The only real complaint is that if you don't relate to one of the loser brother characters of Otto of Caesar, you'll have nobody to like or relate to in this movie.  Definitely one for Troma fans or fans of horror who like to laugh at themselves and the genre they love.

If after these flicks you're looking for more monstrous laughs, go buy my DVD set of "Lumber vs Jack" and "Jack vs Lanterns".  (For a limited time that $25 includes shipping in the U.S.)

"Bog" - A Monster Movie Too Intelligent for its Own Good

"Bog" (1979) is an old school, B-title monster movie with a lot of the right elements and a few of the wrong ones.

On the side of "Creature Feature Right", the movie had a big, humanoid, lumbering monster with odd shaped claws that tore through doors like so much balsa wood and which could shake off bullets the way a bear shakes off honey bees.  We're treated mostly to extreme close-ups of the most impressive parts of the creature costume and left with poorly lit or extremely far away shots of the full costume.  This leaves our imagination to put together the full image.  I like that they covered what were likely short comings in the suit in the way most low budget movies did, by not giving us a good look at it, but they missed an opportunity to give us a good idea of what it looked like when a sketch artist draws a picture of it.  The characters pass around the sketch pad and look at it, each reacting to the horror on the page, but the audience isn't even given a brief glimpse of the monster's penciled image.  Even I let people catch a glimpse of "Cat-man-Do" in "Indiscretions" after Old Tom (Mike Christopher) sketched him.  And we hid the actor's/creature's face nearly the whole movie because we only had make-up for him on one day.


Another "right" is the cast.  These aren't big movie names that everyone will know, but all recognizable faces if you watched TV at the time.  They were seasoned actors (there's not one leading cast member who was under 40 at the time of filming.).  And this is where the cast becomes a bit of a "wrong" too.  I have nothing against adults playing adults, but movies like this tended to be for younger audiences and there was nobody for them to connect to in this flick.  As for me, it made for a lot of characters I could relate to and I enjoyed that for a change.  In recent years watching teenagers be stupid in the face of danger has gotten more annoying than entertaining.  So, it's a solid cast, but a mixed bag on the fact that some audience members may find nobody relatable to root for.

There was also an odd love story included between the two doctors.  Not odd in a real world sense, but unusual to have two mature characters actually be the central romantic characters in a horror movie.  Usually you see that more in a Western.  The other problem I had with the love story is that is sort of drifted in just to create a damsel in distress situation later.  It wasn't necessary enough to warrant slowing down the action.

And that's this movie's biggest failing, even though it's one of the things I enjoyed the most about it.  It got bogged down in the science.  The two doctors were constantly discussing the creature's physical characteristics.  How and why it sucked blood.  Where it may have come.  What animals it was like.  I love science in my sci-fi, but this script had two problems.  One, creature features generally have a very lose sense of science to keep the action moving.  They don't get tied  up in a lot of details.  T.V. and low budget movies may use this dialogue as filler ( I know I have ) and that's okay IF, in the end the science all leads to at least one of two things:

1. Where the creature came from.
2. An effective method to stop it.

If either of these things resulted from the science talk, I missed it happen.  So, while interesting in each incident, it built  up to very little. So, too much science for a B-monster flick AND it turned out it was pointless science that didn't even help to resolve the problem.

The final and big "right" this B-monster flick had going for it?  It seemed like one of those movies the whole town was in on shooting.  Police and fire trucks were involved.  We got a big confrontation between the monster and the townspeople.  It gave the movie a scale that a smaller production like it may not of had without support from the town.

Overall, it makes for  good late night or rainy day viewing if you like old school monsters.  No flashy CGI here.  Just a guy, in a suit, which you don't see much of, sucking blood out of townspeople and carrying off women.

This trailer is actually a pretty accurate representation of the movie.  They do spend a lot of time asking, "What is it?" and never answering that question.

And the trailer for "Indiscretions", mentioned above.

If you like cheesy monster movies, we've got one for you!

Grab your DVD copy at www.hocfocprod.com/jackvslanterns 

 

"Mad Cow" - Self Aware Camp Done Right

The movie "Mad Cow" (2010) has been showing up in my Amazon Feed for awhile now.  The cover art wasn't shy about he lead creature's costuming being a bit "guy in fuzzy pajamas", and so I put off watching it for quite awhile.


If  you're looking for strict horror, keep looking, but if  you're searching for laughs with gory moments, this movie is for you.  "Mad Cow" is one of those films with a title that should tell you that you're not in for a very serious 90 minutes (Sort of like "Lumber vs Jack" or "Jack vs Lanterns" ).  The movie is distributed by Troma, so there's another clue that it's bound to have a campy edge.  And, like so much modern camp, it was aware from moment one that it would be a campy movie.  Unlike many other campy movies, however, this one doesn't shy away from its comedic nature.


Right from the opening it makes it clear that you should expect jokes and it keeps delivering.  It's got an almost "Airplane" (1980) quality to it in its absurdity.

The movie involves an experiment to reanimate the dead and create a super soldier, but something goes wrong with the intended head and a hapless assistant is sent out to secure a new one.  What she finds is a barn, so she returns with the head of a cow (a nod to Frankenstein and the abnormal brain ).  The result is a man/cow hybrid which is enraged whenever someone eats meat or uses dairy.

Leads, Tanya Van Graan and Greg Viljoen turn in solid performances.  They keep the acting "straight" through the most absurd circumstances.  The rest of the cast is hit and miss on talent, but overall they fit the tone of the movie.  Some over the top, some very understated and one incredibly self-aware that she's in a movie and it makes for a perfect performance.

Technically it's well shot and the audio quality is fine throughout.  The special F/X range from quirky to silly, but again, they all fit into the patchwork that is this film that knows it's a film and never once pretends to be as serious as the people who are acting in it seem to be.

Self aware camp can go wrong in so many ways, but this movie had me laughing even when many of the jokes were clichés from other campy movies.  The one or two really creative gags made up for the run of the mill stuff.

It's not "Young Frankenstein" (1974), but for an indie effort with an IMDB reported budget of $50K, it's impressive.  Definitely worth a 3 AM watch if you have a Prime Membership and want something funny with a chainsaw wielding, vegetarian, animal headed monster in it.

The trailer really doesn't do it justice.

Oh, and if you're looking for something short and silly to watch, may I suggest giving "X-24" a view.  At the end of July 2018 it will no longer be "free with ads" on Amazon. To give you an idea of the type of monster movie it is, the working title was "Monster Mop" and it was shot in about 8 hours for $4. (I had to buy a fresh mop head because the used one was too disgusting for any of us to handle without gloves on.)

Brewier Welch stars in "X-24"