July 7th, 2015 - The Devil's Nightmare (1971)

So what I *think* I have on my hands is the English dubbed version of the Italian release of the Italian/Belgian La plus longue nuit du diablo (The Longest Night of the Devil) - it's French (and official) title. The Italian version (above) translates as the Terrifying Night of the Devil, whereas us English-speakers get The Devil's Nightmare. Anyways, the film was a really nice surprise from the Pure Terror budget set. You never really know what you're going to get from these sorts of things - it could be anything from a bland, cheapo time-waster (here's looking at you, The Dungeon of Harrow) to a legitimately solid well-executed horror/thriller. What I *definitely* don't expect? Baby-stabbing and softcore porn. Let me explain.

The Devil's Nightmare starts out in 1945 Berlin. Baron von Rhoneberg is (I'd guess) a higher ranking official in the German army - and he's holed up in a bunker somewhere with his wife, who is just about to give birth. Bombs are dropping overhead, and the end of the war is near. Rhoneberg's wife dies in childbirth, but the midwife manages to save the child. Rhoneberg asks repeatedly "is it a boy? Is it a boy?" - but the midwife says no, it's a girl. Rhoneberg sends everyone away from them and proceeds to stab the baby. WTF? It's not really brutal or anything - I mean, really, he's just stabbing the pile of sheets next to the baby - but still. The concept of it is particularly nasty, and something I don't think I've ever come across in a film before. So thanks for showing me something new, The Devil's Nightmare.

July 6th, 2015 - Trapped (1993)

Trapped is the kind of movie that makes the whole "watching a horror movie every day" thing worth it. There is just no chance that I would have ever watched this thing otherwise. The story sounds pretty bland - three escaped convicts kidnap two young women and end up trapped (naturally) in a mine shaft with an unspeakable evil - the box art is unattractive, and I've never heard it mentioned on any other website or anything. And while it's far from "good" in the traditional sense, I'll be damned if I didn't have a really good time with it. I'm pretty sure that a lot of it has to do with the fact that it seems to be  targeted right at my personal nostalgic bad-movie sweet spot. Despite a release date of 1993, it was actually filmed in 1988. And it's got 80's cheese written all over it. Over the top villains, bad (yet very watchable) acting, a great/terrible synth score, and Cameron Mitchell - it's almost like Trapped was made especially for me.

So while it'd be hard to recommend it to everyone (or even most people), I feel like it's a bit of a shame that Trapped isn't at least a little more well known. I mean, it's certainly a bad movie, but a lot of bad movies at least have followings, you know?

July 5th, 2015 - The Canal (2014)

The Canal does for canals what Jaws did for sharks... okay, so that's not true. Maybe if you're really prone to taking ghost stories too seriously, this would make you not move near a canal. Or at least, not near a canal that is attached to your home by a series of secret tunnels. But I think that's just plain old good advice period - fear of horror movies or no.

Anyways, The Canal is a well-made psychological-thriller/ghost story hybrid about a man named David (Rupert Evans) - he's a film archivist and has a seemingly happy life. He likes his job, is happily married to his lovely wife Alice (Hannah Hoekstra), and has a precocious five-year-old son that he loves dearly. But that all changes when he's at work looking at some turn-of-the century (1900) footage of a crime scene - unbeknownst to David and Alice, their home was once the scene of a brutal murder. Around that same time, David starts to get a sneaking suspicion that Alice may be cheating on him. And when Alice mysteriously disappears, David is the prime suspect - the investigating officer says "people always suspect the husband. You know why that is? Because it's always the husband, every f---ing time." David is steadfast in his innocence, and begins to think that the ghosts that he's beginning to see - in his house and in the nearby canal - may be at fault. Is David just going mad? Or has he unleashed a heretofore hidden paranormal energy feeding off the history of occult worship and murder in his house? Tune in to find out!

July 4th, 2015 - Nurse (2013)

Nurse just kind of sucked. I don't really know what I was hoping for - Single White Female in nurse outfits? Kind of. Gratuitous nudity? Yep.  Some kitschy gore and questionable gender politics - I guess... but still the whole thing just didn't work for me. I felt like it kind of wanted to latch onto a pulpy storytelling style but stay kind of grounded at the same time - and the two tones just didn't mesh in a good way. Plus, bad acting, too many loose ends story-wise, and too much CGI gore.

Nurse is about a couple of nurses - Danni Rodgers (Katrina Bowden) is a new hire fresh out of Nursing School, and her assigned mentor, Abby Russell (Paz de la Huerta), who is a well tenured nurse but also a crazy murder. Abby is mostly well-liked by her coworkers at the hospital, but her side job is killing "married lying scum... [that] destroy unsuspecting families" - just the cheating *men* of course. In fact, before the opening credits role, we see Abby, "look[ing] like a slut" (her words, not mine) tempting a married man before she seduces him, slices his femoral artery, taunts him, and then throws him off a building. So there's no mystery here - you know right of the bat she's crazy, and enjoys killing people.

July 3rd, 2015 - Zombeavers (2014)

I guess Zombeavers is the kind of movie that you know going in if you have a chance of liking it or not. I mean, a title (and subsequent premise) that stupid automatically eliminates a good section of the potential audience. And what with intentionally bad movie mash-up titles (I'm looking at you, Sharknado), I can't blame them. But Zombeavers isn't intentionally bad - it's actually pretty good. Sure, it's stupid and sophomoric - but the entertainment value comes from it actually being funny/entertaining, rather than constantly winking at the screen being all like "we're in on the joke too." It just doesn't feel cynical like so many SyFy movie-of-the-week entries - you get the idea that co-writer/director Jordan Rubin didn't set out to make a "bad" movie, he set out to make a "fun movie" that just happens to share some elements with many bad ones. Zombeavers is the right kind of stupid, and I had a lot of fun with it.

It starts out with two truckers (comedian Bill Burr and an unrecognizable John Mayer) hauling some toxic waste around. They're joking back and forth (it's pretty funny), but then get distracted and hit a deer. This causes some waste to roll off their truck and land right by a beaver dam, which sets the whole shebang into motion. When I was in eighth grade, I was in a home-made movie with some of my buddies that started off very similarly, so I certainly appreciated the way the zombeaver menace began here.

July 2nd, 2015 - Body Snatchers from Hell (1968)

my VHS box art is in less
than mint condition

More popularly known as Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell... which I like more, but would have been tougher to sell to an American audience. Hence the title change and the white people on the cover of my crummy old VHS copy. Which oddly enough seems to have been copied onto a blank tape and sloppily restickered (and not even on the front of the tape)... and the outside art has been cut up and pasted to a plain old sheet of white paper. Damn you, closing Video Update that I got this from 15+ years ago! I should call VCR and report pirated copies going around:

they *might* not be around anymore

At any rate, Body Snatchers from Hell was a surprisingly solid watch. It's a sort of cheesy but still substantial Japanese sci-fi film with some good old fashioned over-enthusiastic English dubbing and solid special effects.

July 1st, 2015 - Zombie Nation (2005)

Really, really, really bad. For some reason (maybe in an attempt to thwart screencappers everywhere) the title is broken up into several parts. This is the one that best sums up my feelings toward the film. The whole thing just felt so cynical - there *clearly* isn't enough in the budget to make a decent movie... so just don't try! But I guess enough suckers (i.e. me) will watch it if you have good (and misleading) enough cover art, so I'm sure this pile turned a profit. Just throw "zombie" in the title and people will watch it. But man, from the bad acting, to the terrible sets (like, the *worst* I've ever seen), and the general "who gives a shit" attitude of the whole thing - it's just kind of a despicable film in every respect.

I mean, everything in here is so, so bad that it's hard to even know where to start. It's tempting to just make a list and call it a day. (And people have, check imdb. It's pretty damned funny. And really long.) But cripes, I may as well try...