This post is composed of brief reviews
of a number of different films that showed at my work place the Sci-Fi Center
in Las Vegas recently, except for the film called Slaughter Disc where I just
got a promo DVD at a Sci-fi Center event.
In all cases, people involved with making the films were on hand to
answer questions and do promo for their projects. I have decided to include the reviews
together to give a sense of the general vitality of things going on specifically
at the Sci-Fi Center and also the general vitality of things taking place in
the world of independent horror production.
Caroline
Pierce who is best known as an adult film star, although she has collaborated
with a guy named David Quitmeyer (who also just put out a novel about killer
bed bugs called Shady Palms recently under the name Allen Dusk) on some more
horror oriented films. I got two DVDs
free at the event, Slaughter Disc and Tales from the Carnal Morgue (an
anthology disc of three shorts), and a copy of Shady Palms. These films actually came out a number of
years ago, but they are new to me and would be to a lot of people. Slaughter Disc is yet another film that plays
with the whole snuff flick death on video kind of thing. It’s a little bit different from other
murder caught on film/video type films in that this one involves a supernatural
element, with people getting sucked into television screens, as in the 80’s
film Poltergeist. I suppose I should
warn audience that a good portion of the film is essentially pornography
sequences, and is arguably as much or even more so a porno film than a horror
film. Well, how is it? I must be honest I’m a horror film person
and not much of a porno person. This one
kind of addresses that kind of an impression of pornography though, because the
main character has a very clear addiction problem with pornography. The main
character is sort of odd, he chooses masturbating to pornography over spending
time with his real girlfriend, for which she dumps him at the beginning of the
movie. That’s the one thing that is very
interesting about the film- it’s a porno film about an individual destroyed by
pornography. I actually feel the
depiction of pornography addiction in this one is psychologically dead on. He
comes across this haunted DVD and Caroline Pierce plays an evil female
demon/ghost/whatever. The filmmakers did
not have a whole lot of money to work with, but the film is fairly gory. The soundtrack music is actually pretty good-
apparently it was done by Peter J. Gorritz the bassist for the goth band The
Last Dance. At the Sci-Fi center event we screened two films from Tales from
the Carnal Morgue, Mail Order Bride and Sustenance. Mail Order Bride a guy orders a robot woman
on-line, the robot woman is shown violent film footage which screws with her
programming and then she kills the guy of course, it’s comedic in tone. The other film on the DVD that was screened
at the Sci-Fi center was Sustenance. Sustenance is about a woman who enters
into a weight loss program where she is put in a kind of solitary confinement
and fed her own flesh. Fans of extreme
horror will most likely enjoy the third film on the Carnal Morgue disk. People who are fans of Caroline Peirce for
her work from adult films will likely prefer Slaughter Disc. I’m an extreme horror guy and not a porno
person, so I preferred Sustenance. I haven’t gotten around to reading Shady
Palms but it looks pretty decent.
The Perfect House is a recent
horror film. We had one of the directors
Kris Hulbert and the producer Andrea M. Vahl and over and screened the
film. This is actually an excellent
film. I had initially identified the
film as an anthology style film, but I was corrected and told by one of the
director Kris Hulbert that sequels are planned in which the details of the
storylines in the film become clear. The
general gist of it is that you have a couple looking at a house for sale, and
they are surprised that the price is as low as it is, but this because a series
of highly violent events have taken place in the house stretching back from the
200’s to the late 60’s which are shown in flashback. One of them involves a dude killing his neighbor’s
entire family in front of him for not returning his weed whacker. There’s
another one about a family with a disturbed mother. Another one involves a guy
who keeps a woman prisoner in small cage in his basement and brings down other
people he kills because he enjoys having the prisoner watch. It is the only film I’m aware of in which a
victim with multiple stab wounds is thrown in salty bathwater, which is one of
a few prolonged torture sequences in the film.
As you can tell, this film is obviously released by Disney. Family fun
for children of all ages! Atom
the Amazing Zombie Killer is a comedy more than anything else. A bunch of guys from Denver, Colorado made
the film and dropped by the Sci-Fi Center.
The main character Atom is leader of a bowling team, who through a head
injury suffers from hallucinations that he is surrounded by zombies, and starts
hacking them up, but it’s actually just real people. There are a number of other plot elements
that have to do with the rival bowling team and their leader who steals Atom’s
girl. The theme music was done by the
Las Angeles punk band the Radioactive Chicken Heads. The violence in the film is strictly
cartoonish slapstick, and there is a fair bit of gross-out bathroom humor. It’s pretty funny. Good times.
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