The phone sex line was for fantasy… now it’s for murder!

I was surfing On-Demand the other night to find a free horror movie to watch, lazily buttoning around in my usual lackluster manner… until I happened upon Out of the Dark. I could barely believe my eyes: cult stars Karen Black, Budd Cort and frickin’ Divine starring in a film about a slasher in a clown mask with a taste for phone sex girls! Where has this movie been all my life?!

I pressed play and settled back into the lazy boy with a big shit-eating grin on my face. Within the first few minutes some lady’s bare jugs were bouncing across my flat panel TV in larger-than-life-size glory, and I felt like I had struck cheesy horror B-movie gold.

Bobo is one seriously messed up clown, a few rings short of a three ring circus. He’s into self-mutilation and talking dirty, slicing his nipples in masochistic masturbatory bliss while making regular death threats over the phone to the sex girls at “Suite Nothings”. The ladies get a little creeped out, but not too bad… until one by one, they begin meeting grisly deaths!

The first half hour was awesome, but then I started noticing that the killings were a little, well, dead. Not very creative, and not very gory. Downright boring, to be honest. Then Karen Black mysteriously disappeared about halfway through the movie, which didn’t help at all. It was kind of like the writer just plain forgot her character existed. Bud Cort turned in a cheesy but very brief appearance. And Divine was onscreen for only a few moments, playing a startlingly straight role. I learned later that this was Divine’s last role before his untimely passing, which is a little sad.

My initial excitement was slowly getting strangled to death like one of the doomed phone sex girls until it finally breathed its last breath during the last 30 minutes of the movie, which sadly devolves into clichés like “They got the wrong guy!” and “Boo! I’m not actually dead!”. All in all, what started out as a pleasant surprise that I felt lucky to stumble across ended up stumbling unpleasantly, which isn’t very surprising given how obscure this film has managed to remain despite its B-movie star-power. Maybe if I was one of those unlucky folks who are truly terrified of clowns I would have liked this one better…

Meanwhile the Anime Network is planning to simulcast subtitled episodes of High School of the Dead, which is being directed by Tetsuro Araki (Death Note, Black Lagoon). The episodes will be available via the Anime Network official Website’s online player. The series debuts in Japan on July 5th, and the first episode will be available on the Anime Network site at 12 AM (midnight Sunday) Central Daylight Time. Subsequent episodes will be streamed at 10 PM (CDT) on Sundays.

Me and my buddy Shipwreck Will just watched Sars Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis, and it was off-the-wall asinine good times! With a name like that, you know its got to be. I thought the Japanese made some crazy ass movies, but the Thai really claimed the crazy crown with this one. It was super awesome, not only were there bloodthirsty zombies running around to worry about, there were also murderous (yet goofy) gangsters to watch out for, and to top it all off there was also a huge mutant snake that would swallow people whole! One thing that made it extra crazy was that the actors continually broke the 4th wall, commenting to the audience about how ridiculous the movie was, and how much money they were wasting while filming it. I’m not gonna lie, I found a lot of parts very confusing, and a lot of parts very corny. Maybe that’s what made it so awesome. If you like crazy asian comedy along the lines of Tokyo Gore Police and Meatball Machine, then don’t miss this one! Check out the trailer:

I just finished up the bonus disc of “Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy“, which means its time to write some ridiculously retarded ramblings and try to pass them off as my “review”. Yeah yeah, so I’m not the first person in the world to review it. Bite me! Its 480 fucking minutes long, and I got a life! It took a while! Not that I’m complaining, mind you… because its 480 minutes of full-on Freddy fantasticfulness.

Freddy Krueger has always been my favorite of all the “slashers”. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I like Jason and Michael alright. But Freddy’s got style. He’s got character. He’s got personality… he doesn’t hide behind a mask all quiet-like, instead he puts his big ugly melted mug out there for the world to see, and he cracks enough one-liners to be last comic standing, (regardless of the fact that he killed all of the other stand-up comics so that he could win).

Unlike Jason and Michael, where you pretty much knew exactly what you were going to see before you even paid the price of admission, Freddy always had a trick up his red-and-green-striped sweater sleeve. Anything can happen in the world of dreams, and anything can happen in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. With the barriers of reality smashed to bits we were guaranteed some insane and nonsensical surprises… but the flip-side was that sometimes this gave the Nightmare directors the freedom to push it a little TOO far. For example, take the ass-snapping towel shower scene in “A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge”. Hoo-boy. On second thought, take that whole movie while you’re at it. Intentional or not, it is possibly the most homoerotic horror movie in history, and its fun to see half the cast slyly admit during the interviews that they picked up on that fact, while the other half shakes their heads and wonders how they could have been so ignorant at the time. There are lots of good-natured jabs at the second Nightmare on Elm Street movie throughout the documentary, the cast and crew have a really good time with it.

Full disclosure: I’m accustomed to spending hours doing nothing but sitting on my fat ass, but a 4 hour documentary still usually feels like a 4 hour documentary. Not this one. The first disc is 240 minutes long, but it felt closer to your average feature film length. Things don’t seem to slow down until you get into hours 5 through 8 on the bonus disc, which I couldn’t watch in one sitting. Its lots of cool stuff, but only true Fred-Heads will be able to take it in all at once.

As one would hope with a run-time of 8 unholy hours, this documentary is comprehensive as ALL HELL. Its so chock full of Elm Street info that even the most hardcore Fred-Head is bound to learn something new. Now as much as I love the guy, I don’t consider myself to be a Fred-Head, so I was in for all kinds of surprises. Of all the behind-the-scenes stories, the ones I enjoyed most were the stories about the special effects mishaps… people getting electrocuted, people getting trapped and needing to be rescued, stuff like that. Good times.

I also really enjoyed the part where they discussed what happened when they toyed with the idea of not bringing Robert Englund back to reprise the role of Freddy in one of the sequels. They showed test footage of some guy they hired to try to play Freddy shambling around like some Boris Karloff wannabe while crew members admitted in the voice-over that it was a huge mistake. In a moment of candor, someone mentions that Robert Englund IS Freddy, and no one can replace him because he’s a true original character. Whether this was intended as a dig at the new Nightmare on Elm Street remake is left up to the viewer, but most fans will probably take it as one. I know I did!

There are brand new interviews with just about everyone involved with each and every Nightmare movie except for the really big shots, namely Johnny Depp and Patricia Arquette. Which is really sad, because both of these folks got their start in the Nightmare movies. Literally. It was their first movie ever. It really seems like they could have spared a few minutes for a documentary about the movies that kicked off their careers, but hey, I guess being super rich and famous keeps you busy.

Bottom line… Freddy fans, don’t pass this one up! If you think you’ve seen it all, or that you know it all, you’re dead wrong… “Learning is fun… with Freddy!”