Meet The Feebles (1989)
...more like Meet Your Childhood Demons… Not an easy film by any stroke of the imagination. A film directed by the man that somehow made the transition from B movie gore filth 'Brain Dead' via MTF's to possibly the biggest high budget movie series ever. 'Lord of the Rings'. MTF is the story of …….well a cabaret show looking to make it big by producing a hit performance that will ensure them a TV network syndication. The characters in this film have been likened to The Muppets taking acid. Although I have never seen a Muppet take acid, having watched this film I have seen a frog injecting heroin, a walrus fucking a cat, a cow in a bondage suit (will all the teat piercing) and a female hippo with enormous breast running amok with an M60 machine gun. Jackson has redefined poor taste by filming scenes with 'Muppet' type puppets that would never, ever, be passed by censors if this were to include human beings. Jackson savagely attacks and perfectly captures the world of the 'stage.' No one is spared, from the camp theatrically obsessed director (a fox whose crowning 'glory' is the sodomy song…) the brutal and merciless producer ( a walrus with an insatiable sexual appetite) right down to the variety hack (quite literally a fly on the wall, captured perfectly gorging on a lumpy shit floating in the toilet.) The characters are savage, morbid, tragic and vile - and yet somehow depicted with a Henson like humanity that will leave you very, very, very disturbed. Make time for this film, but prepare to be traumatised. - Jason Rea.
Dreamcatcher (2003)
Starring: Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant It was one of them Blockbuster moments you have with your girlfriend, "you pick a film". - " no you pick, I picked last time". " I'm not bothered, you pick something". Truth is I'd seen most of the good stuff, and being a little hung over wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, and besides, we usually did end up picking something I wanted to see. So, not wanting things to escalate I picked up Dreamcatcher out of desperation because she'd started reading the back of 'Love Actually'.
I'll have to admit I didn't have a clue about Dreamcatcher, it had gone completely un-noticed by my film radar, so I thought 'what the fuck, I'll give it a day in court'. So it was something of a surprise when I popped the disk into the machine and realised that this was a Stephen King adaptation (are people still fool enough to make Stephen King films?), but it had Morgan Freeman in it, and he'd never lend his skills to a shoddy production would he? It started off fine, with quite a good premise - 4 old school buds who all have a telepathic 'gift', which they use in their current careers as car sales men and psychiatrists and, erm university lecturers. That's when the alarm bells rang. Don't trust a Stephen King story that starts off good, he'll only ruin it by going all weird!
Needless to say that's exactly what happened, after half an hour the plot descended into one of the cheesiest B-movies I'd seen in years. Complete hokum: aliens, monsters, cheesy 'FX'- the lot. The dialogue was awful and the acting bad. Morgan Freeman mustn't have read past page 5 of the script. And hang on, this looks familiar: a bunch of characters who share a 'secret from the past' ( "It"), scenes of school kids wandering down a railway line ('Stand By Me'), ands the fate of the world resting in the hands of the most unlikely character ("The Stand").
Now I'm no expert on King's oeuvre, so there must be some more stuff I missed. To be fair, King admits (in one of the DVD extras), that he wrote this whilst he was recovering from being run over, and I haven't read the book, but…. The script was co-penned by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan (who also directs) who between them have brought us Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi (Kasdan) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and A Bridge Too Far (Goldman). Tut, fucking tut. A good laugh, but wait till it crops up on channel 5. JC
Virus: Night Of The Zombies (1981)
...aka Inferno Dei Morti-Viventi, aka Cannibal Virus, aka Hell of the Living Dead, aka Zombie Creeping Flesh, aka Zombie Inferno, aka Zombie of the Savanna, aka A Steaming Pile O' Crap.
Italy / Spain Directed by: Vincent Dawn (Bruno Mattei) Starring: Zantoro........FRANK GARFIELD Lia Rousseau........MARGRIT NEWTON Lt. Mike London........SELAN KARAY
This is a real treat for schlock horror aficionado's and as you can tell by its many different names it has been repackaged and re-released numerous times , probably because the release rights where sold for 50p (and they still made money after production costs!), however this overwhelming cheapness does give the film the look of a serial killers home movie, which adds, somewhat, to the over-all experience.
The plot, from what I can decipher (and it is dubbed into English), revolves around a bunch of scientists doing some experiments; something goes awry and everyone turns into Zombies! Then there's a bit with some terrorists who get blown away by the shonkyest looking S.W.A.T. team ever, ( Dialogue: "Don't get your balls wasted"??).
Next thing we know the S.W.A.T. team are in Papua New Guinea, for some reason, and there's Zombies! here too. They meet a reporter and her photographer, who bears an uncanny resemblance to George A. Romero (coinci-dink??). They all team up and bump into some stock footage of Natives and Monkeys and stuff. The reporter says she's lived with the natives and knows how to 'mingle', so she gets her tits out, paints her face and goes for a wander. She comes across a village filled with stock footage of REAL corpses, dancing tribe folk, some animal being eviscerated, more dancing, corpses and monkeys and even, in a bit of blatant editing manipulation, a local woman apparently eating maggots from a rotting skull.
She gets back to her chums, puts her tits away and everyone gets eaten by Zombies!
The End.
That's it, honest! Go buy/download it if you don't believe me. Oh, the music's ok, by Italian horror soundtrack perennials 'Goblin'.
In a word: Repugnant. JC
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