Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 6: 47 Meters Down (2017)

While there are obviously many important elements involved in making a movie "good," a truly great premise is one of the best elements to work from. It doesn't have to be an original premise or even especially unique, as long as it's solid.

Two people on shark-cage diving when the cage sinks to the ocean floor? That is a real humdinger of a premise. You've got built-in antagonists via the sharks, plus the myriad of dangers that result from being trapped that far underwater.

Unfortunately, even a great premise does not automatically make for a good movie. And make no mistake, 47 Meters Down is not a good movie.

I had a bad feeling when the film introduces us to its two sister heroines when Lisa (Mandy Moore) is knocked off of her floating lounge chair in a pool by Kate (Claire Holt), and we see Lisa's glass of red wine billowing in the water significantly. I'd make an "auteur" joke here, but given the title appears to us as "Johannes Roberts' 47 Meters Down," the movie already made the joke for me.

Even less promising is that when Lisa leaves the pool to go call her boyfriend who didn't join them on the vacation, Kate calls out, "Nice ass," to her. Now, I can only speak to the sisters I have known in my own life, but I haven't known any who would loudly shout out a compliment to each other's asses across a crowded pool.

It doesn't help that they look as much like lovers as they do siblings.

At any rate, Lisa soon confesses to Kate that her boyfriend actually broke up with her and the only contact they've been having has revolved around texting him the plans for removing his stuff from the apartment. Lisa claims he left her because she was "boring," so Kate decides this means that they need to prove to her ex that she is not, in fact, boring.

The first step is going out that evening. As if to hammer the point home, Lisa is incredulous that anything would still be open past midnight in a Mexican tourist trap. However, a night of drinks and meeting two handsome locals is just the beginning, because said locals know of a cage-diving tour run by American ex-pat, Captain Taylor (Matthew Modine). And before you know it, Kate is convincing Lisa that no boring girlfriend would ever go cage-diving.

Captain Taylor looks rather scuzzy, but he seems to be a decent fellow so Lisa begrudgingly agrees to go along with the plan. It's rather a shame, since Matthew Modine seems to be trying his best to have fun with the character and I bet he'd be so much more fun as a straight-up villain.

Then again, nobody wants a repeat of Shark Night 3D.

At any rate, Lisa tries to calm her nerves by wondering aloud to Kate if her ass looks good in the wetsuit.  Again, actual dialogue that happens in this movie, folks.

It isn't long before CGI great white sharks are swarming around the boat and the diving part of the tour begins. Presumably for safety reasons, only two divers are sent down at a time so the two guys who turned them onto the tour in the first place take the first turn. Their dive goes just fine, but when it's the girls' turn things start to rather quickly go awry.

First, Kate borrowed a camera from one of the guys and she manages to drop it through the bottom of the cage, where it is immediately eaten by a shark.

"Goddamn paparazzi!"

Secondly, Lisa starts to panic. When Kate radios the boat to pull them up, the winch chooses that moment to break.

The sequence of the cage plunging to the ocean floor should be gripping and suspenseful, but through a combination of poor CGI and being edited together without enough sense of panic...well, it comes off as more silly than anything else.

At any rate, the two find themselves trapped 47 meters below the surface with their air rapidly running out. Worse, they're so deep that they risk getting the bends if they try to swim to the surface and the boat's radio is just out of range.

Well, it's out of range unless they swim out of the cage and several meters closer to the surface. Kate does just that in order to contact the boat, which involves her having to squeeze through the bars without her tank or mask because the broken winch fell on the cage door.

Of course, leaving the cage means exposing themselves to the sharks that are still hanging around. Luckily for Kate, the shark that takes an interest in her narrowly misses. However, another shark tries to get at them in the cage and succeeds in bending the bars before it loses interest. So, yeah, they're in a bad spot and the fact that Captain Taylor assured them that his first mate was coming down with a spare winch is small comfort.

"Well, I mean, he really can't say you're boring now, right?"

Well, naturally, this first rescue attempt fails and it does so pretty spectacularly. The first mate manages to get himself eaten and, following his flashlight to find him, Lisa nearly suffers the same fate. She does manage to get back to the cage with the spare winch cable--but her fears that it seems to weak are justified when it frays upon them being lifted almost to the surface and sends them hurtling back down.

Now Lisa's leg is pinned under the cage and their oxygen is running out. When Kate once again risks swimming higher to reach Captain Taylor on the radio, he tells her that the Coast Guard is on the way with rescue divers and he will be sending down two spare oxygen tanks. Now, Taylor points out that he had a good reason for not doing so earlier: nitrogen narcosis. The longer they are down there, the more likely they will suffer its effects, which include hallucinations and erratic behavior.

Just what you need when you're surrounded by sharks, eh?

And, frankly, this is where I found myself most disappointed by the film because it sets this up and then pays it off...but then seems to lack the conviction to do so properly.

See, Kate goes to recover the tanks, since they land several meters from the cage. She dodges one shark attack, but the second one seems to get her--leaving the spare tank just out of Lisa's reach. Lisa, desperate for air, manages to get it by using the spear and line from the deceased first mate's spear gun to drag it to the cage. She changes the tank...

...and then she hears her sister on the radio. She's surrounded by sharks and wounded, but Lisa bravely frees her leg and goes to rescue her sister. Using flares that were included with the spare tanks, she manages to fend off the sharks surrounding them in a physically impossible manner until they can safely decompress.

"Rar! Please help us, we can't stop floating in place menacingly!"
"We are literally going to drown, we can't move water through our gills like this!"

Unfortunately, as they are within inches of safety and the boat, a shark grabs Lisa by the leg. However, she manages to fight it off and climbs aboard the boat. Lisa happily embraces her sister, but then notices her wounded hand is billowing blood into the air as if she were still underwater...

That's right, it's the old An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge twist. Unfortunately, it's done without any sense of why that twist worked, because shortly the Coast Guard divers come and rescue Lisa. Sure, it's sad that her sister got eaten, but--that twist doesn't really work with a "happy"ending. Considering this almost got dumped straight to DVD before The Shallows turned out to be a huge hit, one wonders why they gave it an ending that feels like it was the product of test audiences and focus groups.

Honestly, I'm just shocked none of the rescue divers complimented her ass.

Of course, it should be obvious that 47 Meters Down has nothing on The Shallows as far as quality. I won't spend the rest of this review comparing them, however. The two films are, after all, quite different aside from the basic premise of a white woman (or women) on vacation in Mexico being trapped in a life or death struggle involving great white sharks.

For one thing, there's no show-stealing sea gull in this one.

No, 47 Meters Down owes a lot more to Open Water, which--to my great amusement--has a sequel called Open Water 3: Cage Dive that actually played before this movie on the DVD copy I watched. I haven't watched any of the sequels so I can't speak to them, but Open Water had a budget much lower than this one and no name stars in its cast. The sharks it used were real, as opposed to mediocre CGI creations, and it told a much more straightforward story.

It was also a much better film than this one.

That's not even to say that 47 Meters Down is a terrible film, since it really isn't. It's actually something far more frustrating: it's blandly bad. If I were to grade films, this would probably be C-level work at best. It's technically competent, the acting is fine, and aside from some truly awkward dialogue the script is fine.

And yet, it never engages and it barely even entertains. It's never quite full-on boring, but it certainly teeters on the edge. It's a real shame, too, because I wanted to give this movie a chance and I wanted to really like it--especially when it pulled that twist ending.

However, this film just simply isn't good. It's not quite bad enough for me to wish I had those 85 minutes back, but you better believe I would have preferred to spend them in the time of a better movie.

Welcome to the Day Six of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for F!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 5: Endless Descent (1990)

When watching movies, whether for fun or fun and blogging, you're likely to come across a very particular sort of film. It may be a new film, an old film you never heard of, or even one you eyed many a time at the video store but always passed over. Regardless of how you finally came to see it, you will begin to wonder why it took you so long.

I refer to the fascinating case of, "This film isn't actually good, but by God it was made for me."

Naturally, today's film is one such example. I saw it on the video shelves as Endless Descent but when the wonderful human beings at Kino Lorber saw fit to give it a Blu-ray release, they released it under its alternate title: The Rift. However, they were also kind enough to fit it with a reversible cover so I could display it on my shelf under the title I knew it so well as.

Now, based on the film's release year and both of its titles--plus the scuba diver being devoured by tendrils on its poster--you may have already surmised that this film was part of an inexplicable trend in the late 1980s and very beginning of the 1990s. That being the creature feature set beneath the ocean, following in the footsteps of The Abyss, Leviathan, or Deep Star Six. Why this was a trend at that particular time in our history is rather beyond me, but I can't deny it is a fascinating one all the same.

If nothing else, it was a new and innovative setting in which to place incredibly boiler plate plots.

This film is no exception to that part. We open by being introduced to submarine designer Wick Hayes (Jack Scalia) being summoned to Washington, D.C. It seems that Wick designed two submarines for a corporation with a government contract, but then resigned in a fury when he realized they altered his final designs before the subs were complete. Well, now he's being called back because the first of the subs, Siren I has gone missing in the North Atlantic. They need his help recovering the black box, or else they will blame him for the sub's sinking.

Of course, they also guilt trip him by pointing out a friend of his was the skipper of the doomed sub in case threat of ruining his professional reputation wasn't bad enough.

Though the film intercuts this conversation with showing us the fate of Siren I, so we already know that there was an incident where a guy who's a dead ringer for Louis C.K. got chased through the halls of the sub by an unseen assailant and then Siren I imploded. But apparently only we are privy to this knowledge.

So Wick is sent to where the Siren II is docked, in Norway. Maybe someone should tell them it's bad luck to number your named submarines? Though I will pause to note that the shot of it moored at the dock is a pretty sweet optical effect. I'm guessing a matte painting.

Also, we're briefly told the sub has "radar cloaking" but isn't painting it bright yellow counterproductive?

On board the submarine, Wick meets the truly bizarre mix of expendable crew. None of them display much in the way of basic competence, even for a civilian vessel. Hell, the token black bridge officer Joe "Skeets" Kane (John Toles-Bey) alternates reminding of us of the fact that he is black with sexually harassing the sub's token woman bridge officer Ana Rivera (Ely Pouget). At least the sub's computer technician, Robbins (Ray Wise!) is clearly on top of his game, but he's also incredibly seasick so he maybe shouldn't be on a submarine.

Well, things shape up a bit when Captain Phillips (R. Lee Ermey!) of the US Navy arrives to take command of the Siren II for the mission. (Yes, he is the captain now.) He also brought along Lt. Nina Crowley (Deborah Aidar), because the mission to recover a lost submarine oddly requires a genetic biologist who has an awkward past with Wick. No, I don't care what the awkward past is and frankly the movie doesn't care all that much either--it's just shorthand for "you should care about these two surviving."

Seriously, all this movie needed was James Cromwell and it'd have "Hey, It's That Guy" Bingo.

Well, getting underway proves hilariously disastrous right away. Because of what the crew believes is a design flaw and what Wick insists is the company fucking with his designs, the sub manages to scrape its hull on an iceberg and barely escapes with minimal damage. Wick throws a fit at being blamed for the incident--though, to be fair, this sub is equipped with external cameras and they still managed to ram into an object by following their misaligned sonar so he may have a point--so Phillips orders him off the bridge to consult from the engine room instead.

Quickly the sub finds the signal of its sister ship coming from deep in an ocean trench. Bizarrely, however, the signal is coming from what appears to be a forest of kelp at a depth no sunlight can penetrate. Phillips orders one of their divers out in what appears to be a slightly altered wet suit (!) to get a sample of the strange seaweed and take photos of any wreckage. Well, the diver succeeds in the first task quite well. However, after a false scare with a corpse of one of the Siren I's crew (which, oddly, is quickly forgotten about), his attempt to photograph a damaged piece of the lost sub's hull results in the seaweed wrapping itself around him and crushing him to death.

Phillips declines to send the diver's distraught friend after him, since nothing can be done at this point. More alarming, Nina determines that the seaweed is some kind of algae and it has quickly grown in her specimen tank and infected all the fish in the tank. It seems to be feeding off of the fish, in fact.

The crew has no time to digest that fact, however, because they suddenly find themselves attacked by what seems to be an enormous sea slug of some kind. The creature is big enough to wrap itself around the sub and strong enough to quickly drag them down to the edge of the ship's crush depth. Only quick thinking by Wick allows them to electrify the hull and drive it off, and then he helps Robbins to wedge the sinking sub into crevice so they can avoid crush depth and be stationary for repairs.

"Hey, sorry, the giant squid was busy this week so I'll be your giant killer mollusk for the evening!"

Once operational again, they continue following the signal of Siren I's black box into a rift lined with boiling geysers. Stranger still, Robbins notates that there is a completely different signal up ahead, as well. Once the sub surfaces in a mysterious cavern, Robbins is able to determine that it's an SOS. The air within the cavern is deemed too toxic to breathe unfiltered, so Wick leads an away team outfitted with respirators, quarantine suits, and specially-designed guns intended to be able to fire underwater. They take an inflatable raft ashore to explore the cave on foot.

Robbins helps guide the team from the bridge while Phillips and Nina anxiously watch their progress. As you might imagine, things very quickly go pear-shaped.

First, they find body parts strewn throughout the cavern's tunnels. A fork in the tunnel forces the team to split in two, with Wick leading one team and Ana the other. Wick's team finds the source of the SOS at a computer manned by a skeleton in a lab coat, though helpfully the skeleton left a stack of disks that might have answers. Unfortunately for Ana's team, they discover one of the questions is, "Why is this tunnel riddled with holes that are actually the habitat of vagina bugs that have a poisonous bite?"

I don't even know what psycho-sexual issue leads to a bug monster with a vulva mouth and testicle eyes but here we are. 

After one of Ana's team is bitten by a bug, his whole body begins going through painful spasms so she is forced to shoot him. His head explodes like a ripe melon at this. Luckily the bullets have a simialr effect on the marauding vagina bugs. Unfortunately, those aren't the only menace in the caves. When Ana almost falls in a hole, she has to fend off what looks like a squid tentacle but is apparently a worm. Her hapless companion, however, is attacked by my favorite critter in the film: the fish lizard!

We sadly don't get too clear a look at the fish lizard, I'm guessing because it was a guy in a suit with severely limited mobility, but what we see is awesome. It's also rather hilarious, since it bites off the guy's leg and then runs off with it like a little scamp, so Ana is forced to watch him bleed to death.

Somebody pleeeeeaaaaase make an action figure of this monster!

Back on board the sub, however, things are also taking a bad turn because the algae has taken over several sections of the ship fed by its water supply--and after the engineer stupidly touches the algae, he gets partially melted. The crewman who found him made the mistake of drinking some of the ship's water and has to be quarantined.

Ana vanishes, so Wick has to head back to the sub with just Skeets and the other expendable dude. Unfortunately for our third fellow, the cavern's water is filled with what appear to be shrieking eels and when he falls out of the raft, they devour him.

"Grandpa isn't here to pause the story this time, Buttercup!"

The disks, despite appearing to be floppy disks, somehow contain a garbled VHS video of a man explaining that the mysterious lab housed a DNA accelerator. Nina deduces that such a device, combined with recombinant DNA technology, must have resulted in all these monsters. Somehow the company that commissioned the Siren subs is involved, too. I think. Honestly, the dialogue in this section really does a poor job explaining this.

Well they can't stay long, but Phillips refuses to leave without Ana so he goes ashore with Wick, Skeets, and Nina to find her--leaving Robbins behind to man the sub. Well, poor Ana fights her way into a strange chamber, warding off vagina bugs and lizard monster claws the whole way, as the others find their way to her. Sadly for her, she strays too close to a bizarre machine and finds herself dragged inside by furry tentacles.

When the others find their way into the chamber where she was, observing the huge pile of disturbingly viable gill-man eggs but overlooking the kaiju sea anemone on the wall, Ana has found herself inside the DNA accelerator and is begging for death. The sea anemone begins roaring at this point and Skeets makes the mistake of shooting and taunting it--unaware that the toothy mouth in the center of its tentacles is ambulatory. Exit Skeets, fulfilling his contractual duty as the expendable token minority character.

This was a really strange direction for Pixar to take the Finding Nemo franchise.

Luckily, the sea anemone has nested about a pile of flammable barrels and when Phillips shoots those this somehow blows up both the monster and the DNA accelerator without killing our heroes, despite them having been right next to the machine when the explosions began. Robbins now reveals himself as having been a company agent sent to cover up their mess and he tries to self-destruct the sub to seal the rift and escape in the sub's escape pod before the other three can board the sub again.

However, Wick is able to use his knowledge of the sub to fool Robbins into putting himself in a vulnerable position and after a quick tussle with Phillips, Robbins finds his face being shoved into some algae goop. Unfortunately, the algae also infected Phillips so he stays aboard while Wick and Nina take the escape pod to safety and the Siren II goes "boom" to seal the rift. The End.

Good night, sweet prince. *sniffle*

It should be clear that there are really no surprises in this film. Well, aside from its strange belief that a human being can go scuba diving in a basic suit at depths of 20,000 feet without dying at once. This is very much a stale script with mostly stale actors (Wise and Ermey being notable exceptions, obviously), and with a somewhat stale score that is rather amusingly composed by the late Joel Goldsmith--son of the late Jerry Goldsmith, himself!

The fact that this film was shot on a much lower budget than most of the films whose coattails it is desperately trying to ride is also always clear. The model effects for the subs are so woeful that in several scenes they opted to simply film them out of focus.

And yet, I find this film utterly charming. This is definitely a film that knew that the important part of it was always going to be the monsters and damned if it didn't make a genuine effort there. I suppose that's not all that shocking, given director Juan Piquer Simon is responsible for films like Mystery on Monster Island, The Fabulous Journey to The Center of The Earth, and Slugs. (He's also responsible for Pieces, the notorious Cthulhu Mansion, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite Pod People, but that's another conversation) The man may not necessarily know how to deliver convincing monsters, but by God he knows how to deliver fun ones.

And at the end of the day, that's exactly what this film is: fun. Is it good? God, no. I'm not even sure you could call it "good-bad" or "so bad it's good," because it isn't actually bad, either. However, it is an absolutely delightful flick with a menagerie of monsters and, at the end of the day, that's what counts in my book.

If you love monsters, you probably won't consider this some "lost classic" but I guarantee you won't regret wasting about 80 minutes on it. And considering some of the other schlock I'm looking at this year, that's practically a glowing recommendation.

Welcome to the Day Five of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for E!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 4: Deathgasm (2015)

It really doesn't matter what the concept for a horror comedy is: if you tell me it was made in New Zealand, I am instantly going to be more interested than I would have previously been. After all, I have yet to think of a time they steered me wrong. Whether we're discussing early works of Peter Jackson like Bad Taste and Dead Alive, the killer sheep and were-sheep romp Black Sheep, or the amazing vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows--they're just somehow on a higher level.

So I was a tad skeptical when I decided to give Deathgasm a whirl because, well, I'm not a metalhead and most comedy centered around metal tends to fall a bit flat for me. I also figured it would go for low hanging fruit and barely have any original ideas. I wanted to give it a chance, but I set myself up for disappointment.

And then I realized it was made in New Zealand and my expectations took a complete 180.

Life has taken a bit of a lousy turn for teen metalhead, Brodie (Milo Cawthorne), our sometimes-narrator. Well, to be fair when he opens the film he is covered in blood and apologizing for dooming the world, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. No, before he doomed us all, the problem Brodie found himself dealing with was that his mom had developed a meth habit and was institutionalized after a seedy incident with Father Christmas. Unfortunately, this means Brodie has been forced to move in with his more conservative Uncle Albert (Colin Moy) and Aunt Mary (Jodie Rimmer), whom he delightfully describes as "balls deep into Jesus."

Worse than that, his cousin David (Nick Hoskins-Smith) is the head of the local bullies. Since Brodie's lifestyle is already unusual and the first two friends he makes at his new school are the D&D nerds Dion (Sam Berkley) and Giles (Daniel Cresswell), he soon finds himself a new favorite target of his cousin and flunkies. It doesn't help matters that, against all odds, Brodie finds himself with a crush on David's girlfriend, Medina (Kimberley Crossman), who might actually be interested in him in return.

Y'know, just based on my own high school experience this is not a terribly unusual pairing to encounter.

Well, things pick up from Brodie's perspective when, at the only sufficiently metal record store in town, he meets Zakk (James Blake). Zakk is the real deal, and Brodie quickly forms a tight friendship with the fellow, despite Zakk trying to appear mostly aloof. Recruiting Dion and Giles, Brodie and Zakk form a band--which Zakk ultimately names "Deathgasm" after an amusing brainstorming session.

After filming a rather embarrassing music video, Brodie runs into Medina while still in his makeup. The get some ice cream and, to Brodie's shock, Medina shows a genuine interest in learning more about metal. He happily shares some CDs with her, but is too awkward to try and make an actual romantic move.

That night, Zakk has something of a surprise for Brodie. After leading Brodie to an abandoned house in the town, Zakk reveals he's learned that the famous and recently vanished metal musician Rikki Daggers (Stephen Ure) is hiding out in the house. Brodie is incredulous, but naturally Zakk is right.

However, the meeting with an idol goes...not as well as hoped. Daggers is asleep, clutching an album in his hands. He starts awake when they try to take it from him, only to suddenly cease attacking them and tell them to take the record and run. They manage to leave in time to avoid being seen by the mysterious man who arrives, seeking "The Black Hymn," and kills Daggers after determining he no longer has it.

Of course, anybody looking for "The Black Hymn" probably belongs to some nefarious group and sure enough our hitman does. So nefarious, in fact, that when he returns to the leader of his order, Aeon (Andrew Laing), he gets his head chopped off for failing to obtain the item.

Millennials are killing the ritual sacrifice industry!

Meanwhile, Brodie discovers that there is sheet music inside the album that Daggers had. Naturally, thinking nothing of it, he proposes that the band try to play it. The result is that the band goes into a trance, the lights in the garage flicker, and unbeknownst to the band people close enough to hear the song--including Uncle Albert--become violently ill. Brodie snaps out of it and stops playing, but the group is sufficiently unsettled.

However, when Brodie translates the Latin on the music sheet, he realizes that it advises the reader that the song will summon a demon and ultimate power. This is the last thing that Brodie needs to see, since he finds himself feeling extra low after two incidents. First, David beats Brodie up for showing interest in Medina. Second, Medina suddenly seems to avoid him--unbeknownst to Brodie, this is because Zakk told her that Brodie doesn't want to see her around any more and then Zakk hooked up with her himself.

Needless to say, Brodie takes his frustration out far too rashly when he talks the band into playing the whole song. This time everyone without the range of the song violently vomits up blood, their equipment blows up, and the band passes out.

Well, if there was any doubt that playing the song released some weird and dark shit, that doubt is removed the next day when it becomes clear that anybody that was within the song's range has been possessed by demons that delight in making their hosts expel bodily fluids and tear their own eyes out. And naturally, that's just the beginning because the cult has descended on the town in order to welcome the arrival of the archdemon Aeloth, who will merge with the most evil human around and then take over the world...

"What do you think? Are these enough horns or should I throw a few more on?"

Naturally, my partial synopsis is not getting into even a fraction of what goes on in this film. Simply read straight, you might be forgiven for thinking that this film is very typical and hits all the expected notes. To a certain extent, you'd be correct. However, there's a lot more going for this film than just the zaniness that automatically comes from a New Zealand horror comedy.

For one thing, while the main characters are definitely stereotypes, each of them brings a certain heart to their roles that elevates them. Sure, Zakk is mainly a dick who has a tiny shred of decency in him, but even he shows a bit more depth than you might expect.

The main standout, however, is Kimbereley Crossman as Medina. More than just the popular girl that the hero ends up with, Medina is a genuinely enjoyable character. The film actually does a good job establishing that she has lost interest in the boarish behavior of David instead of the usual case of "the love interest is dating a total jerk and is somehow okay with that until she falls for the hero." Best of all, she's just as awkward in her own way as the other protagonists and she is funny and adorable.

I can't make any "axe" jokes here because the movie makes them all.

Best of all, her conversion to full-on metalhead by the film's end doesn't come across as her simply changing her entire personality for the guy she likes. Maybe I'm speaking from a biased point of view and a female reviewer would disagree, but you genuinely get the sense that she has found a niche she actually feels like she belongs in.

While it's played as a joke and a callback to an earlier fantasy scene of Brodie's, the scene of her listening to metal for the first time really drives this home.

I have dated so many women who would have had this same fantasy...

So, it's great that the film has characters that are good, but what about the horror elements? It's clear from early on that this film is a bit on the lower budget side--I mean, Aeloth is basically just a very detailed fright mask--but it really knows where to put its money. From the amazing opening credits to the simple but effective demon designs, this film delivers on so many levels.

Now, this is not a film that everyone will be able to stomach. We're talking a movie featuring demons with explosive, bloody diarrhea and Brodie using a vibrator and a huge dildo to kill a few of the possessed. Even among horror fans, that's going to drive off some folks.

In spite of its more overt gross-out gags, I think the film deserves a chance. Is this a future cult classic in the making? Hardly. While I compared it to movies like Bad Taste, I don't think it quite achieves the same level as they do. It does, however, come mighty close.

And don't forget, if for some reason your best source of acquiring films is Wal-Mart, the pearl-clutchers that be insisted the film be renamed "Heavy Metal Apocalypse" before they would dare to let it darken their shelves. After all, the only fucking Wal-Mart approves of is fucking over their employees.

"Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers: The gun is good, the penis is evil."

Welcome to Day Four of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for D!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 3: Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959)

One of the greatest things about the modern age of media is the host of options for finding once obscure films. Twenty years ago, I would never have dreamed of the movies I would have sitting on my shelf in near-pristine transfers. You better believe Caltiki, The Immortal Monster is one such film.

When I was a child I first read about today's movie in Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Monsters, and even though he very much made clear that the monster in the film was not as horrifying as the one on its poster, I was fascinated all the same.

Well, fast forward to 2017 and the marvelous Arrow Video releases this film on Blu-ray and I immediately snatched it up. And you better believe I got my money's worth.

We open with footage of a Mayan ruin, while our typical somber narrator tells us about how the Mayans mysteriously abandoned their cities in the seventh century and fled into the jungle. As a nearby volcano dramatically erupts, the narrator warns that it had something to do with the return of a deadly goddess the Mayans worshipped named Caltiki!

Yes, I realize that it's an obviously bogus name for a Mayan Goddess. Just roll with it, okay?

We return to the film as a man carrying a revolver stumbles away from the ruins in a state of horror and shock. He returns to the camp of archaeologists he belongs to and collapses. And boy, the camp he returns to sure is made up of characters. The expedition leader, John Fielding (John Merivale) spends much of his time bickering with his wife, Ellen (Didi Perego), while his expedition partner, Max Gunther (Gérard Herter) spends much of his time trying to hit on Ellen. Max's wife, Linda (Daniela Rocca), is very much aware of her husband's interest in Ellen but seems to be more delighted in his failure than angry at his attempts.

I think we all know they only stay together because the hate-fucking is amazing.

Well, the soap opera antics stop briefly when their companion returns, especially since he was supposed to have been with another of their team and a couple native porters. His revolver is empty and all he can do is mutter the name "Caltiki." This leads Bob (Daniele Vargas), the team's other remaining and unattached archaeologist, to conclude that the afflicted man must have found some treasure and killed the others in a bid to keep it all for himself. However, that just doesn't track for the others.

When they explore the ruins, they find the missing man's film camera in a grotto, near a body of water beneath the statue of a goddess that they identify as Caltiki. However, they mange to overlook the desiccated corpse lying close by. When they develop the film, they see that something attacked the missing man from behind as he was filming and the survivor fired at it to no avail. Bob volunteers to wear the diving rig the next day in order to see if maybe the missing scientist ended up in the pond. However, he also ignores Linda's advice to not film the ritual dance that the natives are currently enjoying, laughing off the notion that it could mean death. He does, to his credit, have the decency to look a little sheepish when the sensual dancer at the head of the ritual catches him watching and she screams.

Well, he really should have listened to Linda. During his dive to the bottom of the pond--which is surprisingly well lit despite the only light source shown being the torches on the surface at least 20 feet above--Bob finds no evidence of the missing scientist, but does find skeletons and lots of treasure. He shows John and Max, and while Max is just as eager to recover more treasure as Bob is, John fears it's too dangerous for another dive. However, Bob is so eager to go down that John agrees, and that's when Bob discovers that the cross around his neck is no match for the goddess that lives in the pond.

When they feel something pulling on the line, the team on the surface pulls Bob up--only to pull off his diving mask and discover that he no longer has most of his face.

It turned out that the "take a dive in a huge pot of McDonald's coffee" challenge was a terrible idea.

Well, they don't have to wait long to find out what happened, because the pond churns and out pops a huge, ambulatory blob. And while it is very clear that this blob is actually a sack of something that has been covered in tripe, I still think it looks pretty awesome. However, despite how quickly it reduced Bob to a skeleton, Caltiki proves somewhat easier to outmaneuver on land. Hell, everyone has almost escaped when Max decides to run back to retrieve the bag of treasure that fell next to the beast.

Max is rewarded for his greed when he trips and falls right into the blob. Luckily for him, it only swallows his right arm and John is able to rush over with an axe and chop away at the blob until Max comes free. However, Max's arm is still covered in the blob and he is clearly not enjoying the experience.

"Now just hold very still..."

Well, John's immediate concern was getting Max to safety and making sure the native porters didn't touch the gunk on his arm, but the big blob is still a problem and it's coming out of the cave after them. Luckily, if inexplicably, there is a truck nearby full of barrels of gasoline. (Note that the truck has the wheel on the right side, which I'm pretty sure is not the case in Mexico) John points the truck at the blob and dives out just in time to ram the gooey fiend with the truck, causing a huge explosion rendered via some simply adorable miniatures. This is sufficient to kill the monster, luckily.

Well, Max is flown to a hospital in Mexico City, where we see the doctors graphically remove the blob from his arm--and much of his arm goes with it. In fact, we'll later see he was left with a skeletal arm which looks totally awesome but doesn't make any sense. I mean, wouldn't they just amputate it?

"Ouch, ouch, oooowwwiiiieeee!"

No matter, the important thing is that John is able to take the remaining chunk of blob to a nearby laboratory. There it is determined that the creature is actually an enormous single-celled organism, and a somewhat dubious machine is used to determine the specimen is twenty million years old. This is, naturally, a very big deal. However, it's also determined that the creature is not only radioactive, but that it absorbs radiation from outside sources--very quickly, in fact, as they almost cause it to grow out of the box it's in by exposing it to radiation.

Unfortunately, all the pieces are quickly set in motion for things to take a very bad turn. We find out Max is still being poisoned by the toxins the creature left in his system and it is affecting his brain, gradually turning him mad. (Which really just means he acts like more of an asshole than usual) John took a sample of Caltiki home with him to keep in his lab, which means it's in a prime position to menace them both Ellen and their daughter when it inevitably wakes up again.

Oh, and it will be waking up very soon, indeed. John had mentioned a Mayan prophecy about a sister from the sky arriving to reunite with Caltiki, which one of the other scientists felt was somehow significant. Said scientist visits an observatory to determine that there was a comet that passed close to Earth when the Mayans vanished, and that same comet is now passing Earth again--and it's radioactive.

Unfortunately, by this time Max has already killed a nurse and escaped the hospital to head to the Fielding house, while John is summoned to the lab where the other Caltiki suddenly woke up and killed the night watchman and had to be put down with fire. So by the time John hears about the comet hypothesis, his family is already in the sights of a homicidal madman and a rapidly growing and multiplying carnivorous blob...

Never invite Caltiki over. First she cleans out your fridge and then she eats your family.

It's easy to see where Caltiki, The Immortal Monster got its ideas. You have the character with a blob devouring his arm (The Blob), who then goes on a rampage with his damaged arm (The Quartermass Xperiment), and then you have the race to save the world from a radioactive blob menace (X the Uknown). It definitely lacks originality, but I have never found that to be an issue if the film still delivers on a good time and this most certainly does.

For one thing, the climax is not quite as dynamic as the American poster implies, but it is close. Instead of a giant blob destroying a city while tanks and soldiers face it down with flamethrowers, we see several gigantic blobs take over the hero's mansion while tanks and soldiers try to take them down. This film does not really have the means to pull off this climax, but it sure does try its hardest--even if the miniatures are hilariously bad.

And really, there is a lot about this film that is hilariously hokey, but it was also one of the first films where Mario Bava was credited as the director and it drips with atmosphere. Bava would later be known for his amazing use of color, but the man knows how to use black and white as delightfully as any earlier noir director. The visuals alone often elevate this movie to much more than just cheesy matinee fodder.

But make no mistake, this is definitely a cheesy film, and I love it all the same. Silly pseudoscience, obviously bogus history, and special effects that are woefully unable to keep up with their ambitions: I adore it all.

Well, not all of it, there's definitely some racism and sexism at work, mainly in the character of Linda. We're basically told that the reason Max is more interested in Ellen than his smoking hot wife, is that Linda is a "half-breed" and it's heavily implied she was a sex worker when he met her. Worst of all, she ends up being killed by him because she oddly loves this complete asshole so much that she tries to help him get his hands on Ellen before finally thinking better of it and taking a bullet so her blonde friend can escape.

Look, they're both gorgeous human beings, but Linda deserved better!

However, if you can look past Linda, the film is actually not as horrible on that score as most of its contemporaries. Even the natives early in the film, despite being a diverse group of what the filmmakers deemed sufficiently "not white", are treated with a lot more respect than you would expect. After all, Bob suffers pretty horribly for not respecting their traditions because he considers himself superior to them.

While I would have to say that Caltiki is not quite up to the level of the many films it imitates, it does come awfully close. After waiting decades to actually see it, I found it fulfilled my best hopes for it nicely and I highly recommend it despite its obvious flaws.

And naturally it must be said that Arrow did an amazing job with the Blu-ray. If you're considering getting it, I urge you to do so at once.

Welcome to the Day Three of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for C!

Hubri5Ween 2017, Day 2: The Bye Bye Man (2017)

Every so often a movie comes along that has a profound effect on anyone who sees it. It becomes impossible to imagine what life was like before this film came along because it completely changes the worldview of anyone who watches it. After seeing it, your very worldview will be shaken to the core.

The Bye Bye Man is just such a film. Without hyperbole I tell you that it is impossible to watch this film and not come away wondering how it is humanly possible for a movie to fail on every possible level.

Oh, sure, you scoff. You think I must not have seen Birdemic: Shock and Terror or Tommy Wiseau's The Room because those films are the true failures. However, those films fail on the level of something like Ed Wood's oeuvre--they were the unique visions of people who had no clue what the hell they were doing but somehow made movies anyway.

No, The Bye Bye Man is something on a whole other level.

For one thing, those other two films were passion projects that were less "released" and more "escaped." The Bye Bye Man, on the other hand, was given a wide theatrical release by Universal! Sure, its release date got pushed around a bit until it was given the standard "we have no confidence in this film" release slot of early January--but Universal could have dumped this on video much easier and they still didn't.

The other fascinating thing about this film is its director, Stacy Title, is an actual filmmaker. Sure, she directed Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror (which I suspect is not fit to shine the shoes of Tales From The Hood), but in she also directed the flawed but genuinely enjoyable dark comedy The Last Supper in 1995. So she's far from some wildly inexperienced newcomer who somehow conned a major studio into backing her bizarre vision.

Stranger still, this is an adaptation of, by all accounts, a genuinely disturbing short story. Though a quick Google can tell you that very little of the source made it to the screen. So that's one mystery solved.

Now, despite everything I said, one could be forgiven for assuming we were dealing with another Birdemic based on the film's opening alone. In what we are assured is Madison, Wisconsin in 1969, we see Larry Redmon (Leigh Whannell, whose acting has apparently regressed to the level of stilted it was in Saw) kill several people with a shotgun because they shared the name he told them about. This sequence is utterly hilarious--the theatrical cut see his victims falling down, bloodless, like NPCs in an arcade game and it's so awkwardly filmed that even having him muttering, "Don't think it, don't say it," as he guns down his victims just makes the sequence goofier instead of unsettling.

I totally forgot that the series finale of Murphy Brown had Miles go on a shooting spree.

Well, we next find ourselves at a University in modern day Madison, where we meet our trio of protagonists: Elliot (Douglas Smith), Sasha (Cressida Bonas), and John Henry (Lucien Laviscount). Yes, John Henry is black, and yes that does feel like an uncomfortably racist choice for a character name.

Now, you'd be forgiven for thinking our heroes are a polyamorous "thruple" since they're moving into a rented house together and they all seem wildly flirty with each other. However, Elliot and Sasha are in a monogamous relationship and John's not-so-secret desire for Sasha and Elliot's simmering jealousy of John is his main defining character trait aside from "wears Joy Division, Dead Kennedys, and Violent Femmes t-shirts."

At any rate, the house they move into is a dump, which is believable enough, but also Elliot and John apparently signed the lease for the place without visiting it. Even for college students that sounds woefully naive. Luckily, the completely bare house actually is furnished if you consider "all the furniture was shoved into the basement" to count.

Said furniture includes a nightstand which will turn out to be what sets this film's spookiness in motion. At a housewarming party that evening, Elliot's brother Virgil (Michael Trucco) brings his young daughter Alice (Erica Tremblay), and she promptly gets bored of the adults and wanders up to Elliot and Sasha's bedroom. The bedroom is set up so that it has two small doors on either side of the room and Alice finds a big gold coin next to one--not noticing that, behind her, the head of a monstrous dog has emerged to watch her.

This is filmed in a wide shot and the monster dog's head just casually appears from the door and then retreats before she can notice it. I genuinely thought I was seeing things on my first viewing of this film because it is played so flatly and casually, with not even a hint of an attempt at suspense--and somehow it manages to be just as hilarious as the film's flailing attempts later on to try and pull the BIG LOUD NOISES scare tactics.

"Zuul!"

At any rate, Alice tells Elliot about the coin as Virgil is leaving with her. So Elliot goes to find it on the end table where she left it, and discovers that the drawer has "Don't think it, don't say it" written on the inside in a spiral and, in one of many moments that had me laughing aloud, he reads the scrawled writing by turning the drawer in a circle. Of course, it somewhat undercuts the warning that whomever scrawled it just flat-out wrote "The Bye Bye Man" beneath the liner paper.

Of course, the film feels that is not sufficient to set the paranormal events in motion, so Sasha invited her psychic friend, Kim (Jenna Kannell) to help cleanse the house with sage and to give John somebody to hook up with. Well, Elliot proves to be the asshole skeptic and before you know it, they're having a seance.

"This is strange, all I'm getting is 'see you in the charts.'"

It goes just as poorly as you'd expect, though sadly not as bad as The Manitou. Sure, Elliot says "The Bye Bye Man" after Kim mentions the spirits of the house saying not to do that, but no heads appear on the seance table. The worst that happens is that the candles go out, Sasha develops a cough that will stick with her the whole rest of the film, and John can't get it up with Kim.

No, really, erectile dysfunction is a plot point.

From here on in, naturally, things escalate because it turns out that The Bye Bye Man (Doug freaking Jones!) is some kind of malevolent entity that is capable of altering your perception of reality. He only rarely appears, with his demonic dog in tow, but mainly he just sends hallucinations to try and turn his targets murderous--like, say, by preying on their jealousy of their roommate and girlfriend. Or by making said girlfriend dissociate and draw a picture of him and his dog, which she will seem oddly calm about.

"What, you mean you don't randomly scribble hell beasts?"

Sasha and Elliot decide to investigate that end table. Sasha finds out it belonged to Larry Redmon's widow, and Elliot manages to use the world's most oddly specific library search engine (it gets zero results for "Bye Bye Man") to discover a dead file that old Larry left behind. The librarian, Mrs. Watkins (Cleo King) helps him access it and he discovers it was a newspaper article about an Iowa teenager who said he went on a murder spree at the behest of The Bye Bye Man.

Elliot then, hilariously, both thinks and says it by telling Mrs. Watkins about the fiend. She then overly explains the film's concept that erasing an idea means erasing the thing itself, which must have been what Larry was trying to do when he killed all those people in the prologue and then--in a flashback we see now--drank drain cleaner while the Bye Bye Man watched.

Elliot decides to seek out Kim, unaware that she has just casually murdered her roommate with a hammer and intends to do the same to him, Sasha, and John. However, he is saved when she hallucinates a family in trouble by the train tracks they just drove over--for some reason she feels the need to leap out to save the family and instead gets splattered by the very real train that she didn't notice. This gets the police involved, mainly in the person of Detective Shaw (Carrie Anne-Moss!), who thinks Elliot is a suspect but also is totally willing to let him go.

After Elliot hits John in the head with a baseball bat because he hallucinated him having sex with Sasha, when actually John was just watching over her while she slept off her mystery illness, Elliot notices that Sasha found the address of Redmon's widow. After making sure no one can ever find the end table again by chucking it a few feet into the woods, Elliot leaves to visit the Widow. We oddly see him rocking the fuck out to "Bye Bye Love" by The Newton Brothers on the way there. It's somehow one of the most surreal moments in this utterly misguided film.

At the house, Elliot just walks in and is suddenly greeted by Widow Redmon (Faye freaking Dunaway!) at the top of the stairs, wielding a flashlight. This was the moment that literally had my poor fiancee rolling on the floor laughing because the visual and how she ominously greets Elliot is so absurd. But it gets even better than that because, in order to explain what Elliot has to do, the widow has a flashback of her younger self (Keelin Woodell) coming home to find her husband has gone "All work and no play" on the interior of their house with the "Don't think it, don't say it" refrain. I particularly like how he made sure to use white paint on the dark couch so his scrawling would show up.

"Um, it was like this when I got home?"

Ultimately, her younger self watches Larry take the shotgun and leave the house to go on his killing spree. The widow tells Elliot that her husband was a hero who spared her from knowing the name of the evil entity, and then she hands Elliot a revolver and tells him to kill everyone he told and then himself. That's, uh, great advice there, Widow Redmon.

However, Elliot has the lightbulb moment that all they need to do is realize that the Bye Bye Man's visions are not real and they'll break the power he has over them. Widow Redmon walks over to stoke the fireplace as she wonders aloud how Elliot could realize this when her late husband was too dumb to--and then she immediately catches fire. Elliot, however, tells himself that it's all in his head and, even more hilariously, we immediately see that he is actually looking at a very confused Widow Redmon.

Elliot rushes home with this information, unaware that currently Sasha is hallucinating that John is Elliot and John is hallucinating that Sasha is a zombie Kim. Naturally, Sasha is walking after John because she can't figure out why he's running away from her. You can already see where this is going.

Elliot, for his part, manages to drive right through a hallucination of John--but hilariously gloats at how he tricked the Bye Bye Man so he has his eyes off the road long enough to actually run over Mrs. Watkins. I mean, to be fair, she was inexplicably walking over to his house with a knife in order to kill him the way she had killed her husband and daughter. Still, that one's on you, Elliot.

Elliot gets home in time to find John stabbing Sasha with a pair of scissors and immediately forgets his whole game plan to beat the hallucinations. Thus, after a scuffle, he shoots John dead. Only, whoops, the person going stabby with the scissors was actually Sasha. So now Sasha is dead and John is dying. The Bye Bye Man appears then with his CGI hellhound in order to gloat, mainly by poking Elliot in the forehead in time to the doorbell downstairs ringing.

And I have to take an aside to point out that the film went to the trouble of hiring Doug Jones to play its titular monster only to put him in a hoodie and a cheap-looking monster mask and just have him stand around.

"Excuse me, I think I'm lost: is this the audition for Six Flags Fright Fest?"

Well, the doorbell thing--which keeps happening and keeps getting funnier--is because Virgil has inexplicably shown up with Alice to visit Elliot. Naturally, showing up at the house after Elliot has just killed his girlfriend and the lamp he earlier tossed on the bed is starting a fire, is poor timing. Alice has to pee so Virgil tells her to go outside while he tries to talk Elliot into letting them in. Instead, Elliot almost tells his brother the name of the freaking unspeakable monster ("I don't understand, Elliot, 'Bye Bye What'?") before shooting himself in the head.

Virgil takes Alice away, hilariously telling her that the fire consuming the house can't hurt Elliot any more. They drive away after the fire trucks and ambulance arrive, at which time Alice reveals she found the two coins that Elliot left for her in the endtable--along with some weird writing. In the film's one truly clever bit, when her dad asks what the writing said, she responds with, "Daddy, you know I can't read in the dark!"

However, the film decides to go for the stinger ending anyway, by having Shaw arrive at the scene and stop the paramedics from loading John into the ambulance so she can hear what he is trying to say to her...

"Hurry pup, let's try to ride the rails to a better movie!"

A mere synopsis cannot do credit to how amazingly terrible this movie is. Sure, even a quick rundown of the film's events can give you a basic idea of how many terrible choices it makes, but that can't prepare you for the fact that this is a movie that cannot even pull off Sudden Loud Noises!!! effectively.

This is a film that deals with having your sense of reality warped, something that freaks my fiancee out like nobody's business, and she was never once unnerved by it.

One thing you may have noticed is that I barely mention the Bye Bye Man's appearances at all. This is because, aside from a few glimpses here and there for failed shock value, he only makes a handful of appearances. Additionally, the film makes the mistake of never explaining anything about him. All we know about the fiend is that he dresses like a hobo, he has a CGI monster dog companion that sometimes nibbles at corpses, and that he likes trains.

Now, it is true that many a film has made the opposite mistake of explaining too much about its menace and ruining what made it scary in the first place. However, this is firmly in the opposite camp. I had to Google the short story this film was inspired by, "The Bridge to Body Island" by Robert Damon Schneck, to discover that the Bye Bye Man is supposed to be the ghost of a serial killer who rode the rails to find his victims--and the dog is Gloomsinger, who was sewn together from the parts of his victims and needs to be repaired from time to time with fresh body parts. (Hence the nibbling)

Just knowing that much I can see why the short story was considered hugely effective and why someone would want to base a movie on it. However, I cannot fathom why the filmmakers decided to keep so little of those elements in their film. Then again, I cannot understand anything about this film!

What this film definitely has in common with The Room and Birdemic is that, after watching it, you are left to wonder if it was created by aliens or robots who were trying to recreate human behavior based on brief observation. There is not a single dialogue scene that sounds like an actual person would say it, not a single performance that rings true, and most of the plot developments comes across like each page of the script was being written by someone who wasn't allowed to see the pages before theirs.

It also looks so incredibly cheap, with production values that look slightly better than a mid-range SyFy Channel Original movie. The CGI Gloomsinger is actually a decent effect, but again The Bye Bye Man looks like a make-up artist had to come up with a last-minute Halloween costume and only had 30 minutes to throw it together. There's also a lot of hilarious attempts to remind us that the film is set in Wisconsin, despite having been filmed in Ohio. I mean, all college kids keep a huge, glowing sign of the state they're living in--not the college or city, mind you--in their living rooms, right?

I cannot fathom how this movie got made, was reviewed by studio executives, and then still released into theaters for people to watch. However, I can understand why it actually made a healthy profit, because surely word of mouth got out that this film was an utter trainwreck.

In short, I am saying that you, dear reader, should watch this movie immediately. This deserves to be a cult classic of sheer ineptitude. Have friends over and enjoy a merry evening of mocking this flick as mercilessly as you can, or just letting its sublime awfulness wash over you.

Although I am now dreading the inevitable direct-to-video sequel that will just simply be bad, instead of amazingly terrible. Though it can't possibly look worse.

Welcome to Day Two of Hubri5Ween 2017, the fifth year of this nonsense! Click the banner above to see what everyone else did for B!