HubrisWeen 2018, Day 5: Evil of Dracula (1974)

One of the challenges of HubrisWeen is that if you choose to do a series of films, you aren't always able to do them in the correct order. Today's film is a casualty of that, as I knew I wanted to talk about "The Bloodthirsty Trilogy" this year, and today's film is the third film of that trilogy. The upside is that the trilogy does not have any shared continuity, so you can start at any point without missing anything.

For those unfamiliar, "The Bloodthirsty Trilogy" are three vampire films released by Toho Studios in the early 1970s: The Vampire Doll, Lake of Dracula, and today's film, Evil of Dracula. They were fairly obscure in the West for many years--I had never even heard of them until I read about them in Stuart Galbraith's The Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo in the late 1990s.

Thankfully Arrow Video put out an excellent Blu-ray release of them earlier this year and I was finally able to see what happens when Japanese filmmakers put their unique spin on the Hammer vampire formula. Naturally, the result is fairly bizarre.

It's worth pointing out that today's film is easily the closest to what a Western viewer would consider a "traditional" vampire film, and even it is bonkers.

I joked to my wife that a better title for this film would be "Dracula's School for Girls," since we open with Professor Shiraki (Toshio Kurosawa) arriving in a rural village to accept a teaching position at a private school for girls. He is met at the train station by the rather off-putting Professor Yoshi (Katsuhiko Sasaki, best known as the inventor of Jet Jaguar in Godzilla vs. Megalon), who drives him to the school.

Along the way, they pass a wrecked car and Yoshi far too calmly tells Shiraki that the car was struck by a drunk truck driver just a few days ago, killing the current principal's wife. Shiraki is in for an even bigger shock when he meets the Principal (Shin Kishida, best known as the "Scandal Hunter" Interpol Agent in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla and he is sort of reprising his role as "Dracula" from Lake of Dracula), because not only does the man seems very casual about his wife's death, but his first action after offering Shiraki some brandy is to tell the teacher that he was actually brought to the school to replace the Principal.

Principal Dracula (he is never actually named that I noticed, so I will just call him Dracula) claims his health is fading after the death of his wife and he needs to hand over the position to someone as soon as he can. Shiraki, naturally, thinks it is highly irregular to be offered such a position when he hasn't even proven himself as a teacher there, but Dracula assures Shiraki that staying at the school for the remainder of the school year will give him a chance to get acclimated and take over from the acting principal, Hosoya (Kazuya Oguri).

Oddly, Shiraki never seems to ask why Dracula didn't just have Hosoya take over, but maybe the acting principal's advanced age is supposed to make him seem like an unlikely replacement.

Dracula also mentions during their conversation that his wife's body is currently being kept in the basement, in observance of a peculiar local custom where a body is not interred or embalmed on the off chance that the deceased may return to life. Shiraki takes that awfully in stride in the moment, but that evening he is woken from a fitful sleep by someone singing--and he finds a young woman in a diaphanous blue nightgown (Yaskuo Agawa) standing by a window.

That's weird enough, but when she turns to him he sees that she is bleeding from two pinpricks on her bare breast. And then the Principal's dead wife (Mika Katsuragi) appears, sprouts fangs, and floats across the hall towards the horrified Shiraki. He manages to knock himself out in his attempt to get away--and since he comes to in his bed with the sun streaming in the window, he chalks it up to being a very vivid dream. I mean, sure, the girl in the blue nightgown was an odd detail, but he'd seen a painting of the deceased wife earlier.

I mean, who among us hasn't had this dream immediately upon entering a creepy house?

Still, things get weirder from there. Shiraki doesn't seem at all shocked that the three students he meets the next morning are inappropriately flirtatious with him. However, he is awfully dismissive (and more than a little victim-blamey) of Kyoko (Keiko Aramaki), Yukiko (Mio Ota), and Mariko (Kumi Saijo) when they point out that Professor Yoshi is always creepily staring at them. Even Shiraki can't ignore that Yoshi responding to his greeting by quoting poetry in a weirdly reverbed voice is odd, though. He's more troubled by the girls' mention of a friend who went missing, named Keiko--especially when they mention that she usually wore a blue nightgown.

Shiraki also makes a faux pas when he goes into the basement to view the dead wife's casket and actually opens it. Frankly, this seems disrespectful enough that I'm a little on Principal Dracula's side when he angrily appears to confront Shiraki and tells him that he is committing sacrilege against the dead. Of course, Shiraki apologizes and leaves--which means he had his back to the casket when the wife opened her eyes and bared her fangs...

This is just how my wife asks me for coffee when she wakes up.

Shiraki is perhaps a little too happy to make the acquaintance of the more seemingly normal Dr. Shimomura (Kunie Tanaka) that evening. However, Shimomura is his own brand of peculiar. For one thing, he lives in the local village and has used that as an opportunity to catalog the area's prolific legends and superstitions. He's also shockingly casual about the fact that not only is he aware of Keiko going missing, but that the school loses at least two or three students every year.

Shimomura blames this on the fact that the school and its quaint surroundings become too dull for the girls after a while, but naturally the locals blame demons and even vampires. Shiraki isn't totally convinced that Shimomura's "logical" explanation adds up, and he becomes even more skeptical when he goes digging and finds a picture of Keiko. Sure enough, he saw her in his "dream" despite having had no way of knowing her face beforehand.

Unfortunately for the students at the school, Shiraki isn't sure what to do with this information yet. So when Kyoko goes wandering the halls looking for him that evening, she pricks her foot on a white rose in the hallway--and then she is startled by Principal Dracula. Before she knows what to do, he has bared his fangs and sunk them into her breast.

Naturally, she is not feeling well the next day and collapses during Shiraki's lecture on Rorschach's inkblot test, after seeing one makes her hallucinate. When Shiraki accompanies his students to Shimomura's office, he notices two familiar punctures on her chest. Shiraki later confides what he saw to Shimomura, and the doctor begins to let him in on the town's folklore.

And it will prove to be some wild stuff, dating back hundreds of years to when a European sailor survived his shipwreck near the village only to be tormented by the villagers for being a Christian. He fled into the desert, renounced his God, and then drank his own blood--turning himself into a vampire. A vampire that then attacked a young farm girl and turned her into a vampire, too.

Yet another reason to never trust white Christians: they're always turning into vampires!

And that was merely the beginning of a legacy of evil that even Shimomura has not grasped the nature of. Shiraki better put the pieces together soon, however. All the girls have gone home for holiday except for the ill Kyoko and her loyal friends, Yukiko and Mariko, who stayed to help nurse her back to health. Not only are they all very vulnerable now, but Shiraki has not fully grasped that he is in grave danger as well.

After all, the Principal was very sincere in his offer to have Shiraki take over his position. However, he just left out the fact that Shiraki wouldn't actually survive the transfer of power...

For some reason, vampires really suck at strangling people in this film.

A lot of the plot beats of Evil of Dracula will feel fairly similar to anyone who has seen enough Hammer vampire films., which is not actually a bad thing. However, when this film deviates from expectations it does so with gusto. I've seen a lot of vampire movies, but I can't recall any others about a pair of vampires that keep themselves hidden in plain sight by removing the faces of their victims and assuming their identities.

The film is not horribly gory, but it does not shy away from the bloody and gruesome aspects of that process, either. I particularly like the use of shadows to indicate a raven is picking at the skinned face of one victim.

While I'm obviously spoiling some of the aspects of the film, I am also cutting my synopsis very short because I think the twists and turns deserve to be experienced first hand. This is just a delightful film, plain and simple. It's full of atmosphere and set-pieces that keep the viewer just slightly off-balance from frame one. I'd even say that the score by Riichiro Manabe, of Godzilla vs. Hedorah infamy, adds to this. It's just as surreal as his Godzilla scores, but it fits the material much better.

There's also something to be said for the fact that the movie manages to remain interesting even when we're spending most of it several steps ahead of the hero and waiting for him to catch up. After all, despite some of its outrageous reveals, this is still a very traditional vampire film in many ways and I would say that that works in its favor. After all, sometimes it's nice to appreciate that a movie is not trying to "outsmart" you and just wants to tell an old-fashioned horror story.

Of the trilogy, it's hard to say that this is the absolute best--you'll have to wait and see which one that honor should go to--but it is my favorite. I highly recommend this one. Plus, if you're a Godzilla fan, you'll love seeing some familiar faces and hearing familiar Toho Studios sound effects being used in a horror movie setting!

This has concluded Day 5 of HubrisWeen 2018! To see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for E, click the banner above!

HubrisWeen 2018, Day 4: Demonoid: Messenger of Death (1980)

I'm going to level with you, dear readers: I chose to review this flick at least partially because it has one of the most bitchin' posters I have ever seen. I mean, just look at that amazing work of art that ought to be adoring the side of a van! You just know that there is no way the movie within can have anything at all to do with it!

However, I also chose this film because I have been aware of its basic plot every since I read Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Monsters. Mr. Rovin did not think much of this film, but somehow its premise stuck with me and I knew that some day I would have to see it for myself. Finding out that it had gotten a Blu-ray release was wonderful news, even if I did not get my hands on it until this year.

Unfortunately for my poor wife, she was along for the ride when I gleefully popped Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray into the player.

We begin in the past, though it won't be until later in the film that we find out for sure that this is supposed to have been 300 years earlier. All we know at this point is that there are a bunch of people running around inside a cave in hooded robes that look suspiciously like Klan robes. Some have torches and a few have axes and swords, but one of the figures is clearly not with the others--as every time they encounter the rest of the group, this rogue figure backhands the others with their left hand.

That mysterious figure's hood soon slips off to reveal a blonde woman underneath. Because this film is very efficient in its exploitative elements, her robe is also quickly torn open to reveal her bare breasts as the other hooded figures manage to force her up against a wall and lock her left hand in a shackle hanging there. (Just don't expect any nudity after this point,: this all you're getting, bub) The man with the axe then moves forward--and chops her chained hand off at the wrist.

I'm not sure what's more hilarious: the severed hang dangling in the cuff, or the woman collapsing in a heap with a left arm that is suddenly close to a foot longer to accommodate the bleeding stump prop.

The other figures then take the hand and carefully lock it into a hand-shaped silver coffin. Frankly, it looks like the kind of a muffin pan you'd buy to make Halloween treats. Because the filmmakers have seen The Exorcist, this is immediately followed by a seemingly unrelated shot of a devil statue with a missing left hand and a sword held aloft in its right hand. This time the statue also starts billowing smoke from the base and shoots lightning from the sword. I say this time, because "subliminal" shots of this statue will be flashing at us throughout the entire film.

On the other hand, this means that poster isn't quite as dishonest as it seems.

In the present of 1980, we join Jennifer Baines (Samantha Eggar) as she arrives in Guanajato, Mexico to help her husband, Mark Baines (Roy Jenson) to oversee the silver mine they have apparently purchased and re-opened. As usual, opening a closed silver mine will prove to be a terrible idea.

The first issue arises when Jennifer decides to surprise her husband by walking into the mine--in heels, but with a hard hat so that she manages to look sensible and moronic. She also manages to cause a minor cave-in when she brushes a wall, and this results in her screaming when a skeleton falls on her.

After briefly comforting his wife, Mark is ecstatic to find that the dead man has a bag of silver, which proves there is still something to be found in the mine. The foreman points out that the guy who found it is dead, and then the other miners freak out because the skeleton is missing its left hand. When Mark and Jennifer follow up this incident by visiting a museum full of local mummies (!), Jennifer notices many of them are missing their left hands, too.

Here the foreman, who joined them on this little trip, reveals that there is a local legend about the hand of the devil. It is connected to evil rites that were conducted in the mine, hence the local miners' reluctance to dig too deep in said mine.

Well, the next day Jennifer reveals her grand plan to Mark. She is going to go with him into the deepest part of the mine and when she comes back out safely, the miners will be so humiliated that a woman was brave enough to do that that they will agree to keep working.

I'm all for exploiting toxic masculinity and all, but that doesn't sound like a slam dunk to me.

Indeed, we'll soon see it isn't. For in the deepest part of the mine, Mark manages to fall into a sand trap. Hilariously, you can see the actor deliberately getting himself more stuck because he is trying to find the opening in the (bouncing) cover beneath that sand that will allow him to sink and get his legs through it. Luckily for him, the sand leads to a hidden chamber full of cobwebs. After Jennifer joins him, they realize that this chamber must have belonged to a Satanic cult--what with the demon statues, fancy daggers, and infant mummies on an altar.

However, when Mark finds the hand coffin in a sort of display case, he decides that this is what the miners were all afraid of and that by bringing it back out he will alleviate their fears. That turns out to not be the case at all, and seeing their boss waving it around just leads the miners to straight GTFO.

Mark decides to sulk that evening, musing on how he feels like a gambler who blew all his savings in Vegas and then blew his brains out. Believe it or not, this is clumsy foreshadowing. Jennifer tries to cheer him up with champagne, but when she goes to bed, Mark drunkenly decides to open the hand coffin. Naturally, there is nothing inside but dust--but once he goes to bed, too, that dust reforms into a severed hand through the magic of dissolves.

The hand makes its presence known by climbing up Jennifer's leg like a nightmare spider. Her scream wakes up Mark, who grabs the hand with his--which turns out to be the worst possible move, as it suddenly turns into ash again and Mark begins acting strangely. It's not immediately clear to anyone not familiar with the central conceit, but the hand has just possessed him.

Look, for being 300 years old, he sure is handsome.

Jennifer is a bit distressed when Mark abruptly gets fed up with her attempts to make sure he's okay and then just leaves. However, she still takes it a bit too much in stride, since she just casually goes to look for him at the mine the next morning.

Once there, the horrified foreman tells her that her husband has forced the miners all into the mine. Unfortunately, when she sees her husband readying a dynamite plunger it's too late for her to do anything but scream at him to stop before he pushes it down. The mine blows up, killing all the miners inside. Some other explosions go off above ground, which the small dog wandering into the shot behind Jennifer and the foreman was not prepared for.

Naturally, it's an incredibly jarring tone shift to cut from the aftermath of that explosion to--the exterior of a casino in Las Vegas. However, it turns out that when you're possessed by an ancient demonic hand, your first move after murdering dozens of miners is to hit the craps table to use your infernal luck to win lots of money.

You'd think the Mexican  authorities would have been after Mark for mass murder, but it turns out that he has been cleaning out the casinos under his actual name. I say that because we see he has made the front page of the paper for his winnings (!) and Jennifer is easily able to find the hotel he has been staying at. Sure, the clerk is dismissive because lots of women have been claiming to be Mrs. Baines, but she still has zero trouble getting his room information.

Sadly for Jennifer, there is to be no happy reunion. For Mark has caught the eye of a criminal who wants to learn how Mark is surely cheating the system, and he uses his attractive partner to lure Mark out to the parking lot so they can knock him out and take him to a shack in the desert to torture it out of him. So Mark wakes up with his hands tied to a table and a goon threatening to cut his hands off if Mark doesn't share his secrets.

That is a bad idea. Mark hulks out of his restraints and kills both of his captors--and even Mark seems horrified when he kills the seductress by crushing her face with his left hand. Unfortunately for Mark, the hand has apparently gotten all it wants out of him because it manages to douse him in gasoline and set him on fire. The neat part of this--and something that stuck with me when I first read about the film--is that the hand escapes being burned with the rest of him by burying itself in the sand.

Now, even in 1980 there surely should have been dental records to accurately identify Mark's burnt corpse (or fingerprints, given the unharmed left hand). Apparently that is not the case, however, since Jennifer learns from the local police that his body has been identified as someone else and shipped to Los Angeles for burial.

This brings Jennifer to Father Cunningham (Stuart Whitman), who belongs to the church where Mark is buried. Cunningham is our resident conflicted priest with an Irish accent that randomly fades in and out. When Jennifer tells him she believes her husband was possessed by a demonic left hand--and she has brought the hand coffin along with her--you can imagine that even Cunningham is doubtful of her story. When she advises she wants her husband dug up, he points out that there are a lot of steps involved in that process and generally "demonic possession" is not a legally accepted justification for disturbing as grave.

Still, he is willing to at least show her the currently unmarked grave that evening. Hilariously, they just miss Mark's charred corpse exploding out of its grave, and they somehow mange to avoid encountering the stumbling zombie on their way. Jennifer realizes the grave was disturbed from within, but Cunningham chalks it up to sickos playing jokes and calls the police.

Sgt. Leo Matson (Lew Saunders) is the one who answers the call, and it seems that he and Cunningham know each other. While Cunningham and Jennifer discuss her story further, Matson goes to investigate the grave site--which leaves his patrol car unguarded. Mark's corpse crawls over and proceeds to slam the driver's side door on his left wrist until finally his hand is severed and lands perfectly on the driver's seat. Matson hears the racket and comes to investigate, but when he opens his door to get to his radio the hand leaps at him.

Somehow Matson manages to fire off a shot, which brings Jennifer and Cunningham running in time to see Matson speeding off in his patrol car. Jennifer spots her husband's corpse by the side of the road and notes that his hand is now missing.

The film eats up some running time when Cunningham goes to see Matson at the gym they both belong to, in order to find out what happened last night. This leads eventually to them boxing each other, complete with several slow-motion shots of Matson using his left hand to punch Cunningham. However, the film never gives any indication that these seemingly significant hits have harmed Cunningham even in the slightest. Finally, Cunningham's cross necklace slips out of his sweatshirt and Matson just casually leaves the ring at the sight of it.

However, it's now time for the film to get bonkers for a little while. Matson arrests Jennifer under plainly false pretenses as she is leaving Cunningham's church--but he takes her to a plastic surgery clinic. This is apparently not a very busy clinic, because Matson barges in on the doctor making out with his nurse beneath a huge copy of "The Creation of Adam" in their waiting room. Sidearm drawn, Matson tells the surprised surgeon that he will either cut off Matson's left hand or Matson will kill him.

Matson handcuffs Jennifer to a chair in the operating room as the surgeon prepares to cut his hand off with some kind of saw that he says will cauterize as it cuts. Matson explains to Jennifer that he is doing the will of evil, and it wants her as its next host. He then refuses any anesthesia as the surgeon begins slicing into his wrist--which leads to the actor revealing his limits, as his "pained" reaction looks like he is enjoying the amputation instead.

This just adds to the odd feeling that Matson and Jennifer just interrupted a sexy nurse porn scene before it could get dirty.

Luckily, by this time Cunningham has realized that Jennifer never made it back to her hotel and has reached out to the police. Well, it will be lucky for Jennifer, anyway, since everyone else in the clinic will not be so lucky. Matson gleefully presents the severed hand to Jennifer on a tray, but when the nurse realizes it is moving she screams and tries to run for the door--so the hand leaps onto the gurney where Matson left his gun and shoots her!

"Do you have a moment? I could really use a hand over here."

Matson then decides to wrestle with his own hand. However, it latches onto his face and--in one of the film's more effective gore sequences, although it is very brief--the surgeon trying to remove it just ends up taking part of Matson's face with it. The hand then possesses the surgeon, but Cunningham and the police have seen Matson's cruiser parked outside. The surgeon flees when Cunningham walks into the operating room. I guess because he's scared of the priest but I honestly could not tell you.

Thus follows an actually entertaining car chase, in that it wrecks several random cars who have to dodge the surgeon's car and the police chasing him. The chase ends at a train yard, where the surgeon grabs onto a train car--and then brains himself on something next to the track. I don't know if that part was intentional, but it's definitely deliberate when the surgeon sticks his left hand under the train wheels. The freed hand then, hilariously, grabs hold of the train undercarriage and makes its getaway.

Jennifer's reaction to this development is...bizarre. First, she tells Cunningham that the hand will inevitably come to her in order to possess her because she owns the mine it came from and is thus just as responsible for its freedom as her husband. This is a pretty huge leap in logic, but okay. Second, she seems incredibly blase about whether or not it finds her--and indeed she suddenly talks about belief in a higher power in a very agnostic way, despite earlier telling Cunningham that if he believes in God he must believe in the Devil.

Well, naturally the hand shows up in her hotel room that evening--including a shot of it crawling on the hideous carpet--and she is saved only by Cunningham arriving then. Let me tell you, for someone who still wasn't fully convinced of Jennifer's story, he really takes the sight a severed hand crawling towards him with clear intent in stride. Unfortunately, when they make their escape in his car, the hand leaps from her hotel room window and lands on his car's trunk to hitch a ride.

This begins the film's endgame, of course, but it sure takes its time. For one thing, when Cunningham and Jennifer go inside the church, the camera slowly pans all over the exterior. This doesn't build the suspense it is supposed to, but rather feels like the cameraman forgot where the hand was supposed to be.

Poor Jennifer was in a nightgown when Cunningham rescued her, so he offers her some of his clothes. This means that she will spend the rest of the film in trousers and suspenders, which will especially delight any bisexual women and lesbians who watch this.

Brings a whole other meaning to the old "something for the ladies" joke.

The hand sneaks into the basement and somehow cuts the phone lines and the power. I am left to picture it doing this by pinching wires between its thumb and forefinger and trying to saw through them with its fingernails. As Cunningham and Jennifer wander through the church's sanctuary in the dark and start lighting candles, the film seems to completely lose track of its own spatial setup--as I would swear they were both in the same large room, but then it seems like they are in totally separate rooms.

For some reason, the church has a bearded mannequin in monk's robes in the sanctuary. To my utter delight, Cunningham finds the mannequin's left hand on the floor--because the demonic hand has taken up a hiding spot pretending to be the mannequin's hand! Sadly this bit of hilarity is over far too quickly as it attacks Cunningham. The priest, as you would expect, risks his own soul to try and save Jennifer and makes the hand possess him.

This is a terrible idea, of course, because that just makes him a vessel for the hand so it can hunt Jennifer down. Jennifer desperately hides herself in the room where Cunningham makes stained glass because he is a priest with a hobby, apparently. Luckily, the demonic force controlling Cunningham is not the brightest. First it punches through a stained glass window on rollers just so it can menace Jennifer, and then it sees nothing odd about how she willingly hands Cunningham a chisel before she lays her head on his left palm to accept her death.

Yeah, it was a trick. Jennifer dodges at the last second and Cunningham stabs through his own wrist, trapping the evil hand. He has Jennifer hand him a blowtorch and then he burns his own hand to ash. Cunningham then rather calmly quotes the passage that I had to Google in order to confirm is Matthew 5:30, about cutting your own hand off if it offends thee.

Of course, this is a horror movie from the 1980s so you know we can't leave it there. Since the hand destroyed the coffin before it ambushed Jennifer in her hotel room, Cunningham and Jennifer decide the best course of action is to dump the ashes in the ocean.

Look, stop objecting to the obvious idiocy of this plan, they can't hear you.

Indeed, we get a truly hilarious and drawn out stinger ending, which generates way more questions than it answers. Jennifer is at home when there is a knock at the door and a deliveryman nearly grabs her with his left hand because she opened the spy hole as he was knocking on it. She signs for the hand-sized package and then notices that water and seaweed have been tracked all through her house. Inside the package is more seaweed and then a black candle in a weird glass holder.

And then the hand appears in her sink! It leaps up, grabs her by the hair, and after a lengthy struggle it slams her face-first through her glass coffee table. The End!

Seriously, though, I cannot stop trying to imagine how the hand managed to mail her the package on its way back from the ocean. I am very, very sad we were robbed of seeing how that went down because it would have been the best part of the movie.

This demon does not give up. You really gotta hand it to him.

The effects in this film are a mixed bag. As a bit of an artist myself, I can attest that hands are one of the hardest parts of the human body to replicate. It isn't shocking that many of the fake hands in this film look less convincing that the actual mannequin hand that the demon hand replaces. However, there are a pleasantly surprising number of genuinely effective set pieces with the crawling appendage. To be fair, most seem to have been done using real hands sticking through hidden holes in the set, but that doesn't make it less impressive.

The rest of the gore, when it happens, is mostly just fake blood. However, the charred corpse of Mark is a pretty decent bit of makeup work.

The acting (and dubbing, such as in the Mexico scenes) ranges from competent to "random person who was near the set that day." Everyone in the plastic surgeon's office sequence, aside from Samantha Eggar, is a prime example of the latter.

So it's not shocking that the general consensus on this film is not positive. It only runs around 78 minutes in the cut I watched, but there are long stretches where very little of interest happens and its attempts to generate suspense usually just drag long past the point where they should have ended. The plot also makes very little sense, as it often feels like we missed a scene somewhere that included some kind of explanation.

To be fair, the film has a longer cut called Macabra, and Vinegar Syndrome did include that on this Blu-ray. However, knowing that that version excises a lot of the exploitation elements made it not terribly appealing--so I honestly can't say if the missing scenes offer any clarification at all. Personally, I doubt it.

So taken just on the basis of the Demonoid cut of this film, it's safe to say this film is not very good. My wife ended up watching this with me and outright hated it, but naturally just because a film is no damn good doesn't mean that I'm going to hate it. This film was exactly what I expected it to be, which means that it was a bad movie that I found very entertaining.

Unfortunately, that isn't a recommendation because there are definitely points where it drags way more than a film with such a loony premise has any right to.

When this flick moves it is a thing of stumbling beauty. It is both unashamed of being a movie about a killer hand that possesses people and also utterly unsure of what to do with this concept. This results in a serious film that tends to be funnier than most of the intentional jokes in Idle Hands, which clearly owes almost as much to this film as it does to Evil Dead 2. And it does have a couple of genuinely unique kills and sequences that I wish belonged to a better movie so they could be more likely to be appreciated.

Like many of the films I review, Demonoid is best watched by a group and riffed. Even my wife enjoyed parts of it in that spirit. Watch it alone, however, and you're likely to find the dull parts insufferable.

This has concluded Day 4 of HubrisWeen 2018! To see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for D, click the banner above!

HubrisWeen 2018, Day 3: Crocodile (2000)

If you have been following my reviews for a while now or read them in alphabetical order, you may recall that I once tried to get a copy of Crocodile from my local library, only to end up with a copy of this film. I already recounted the running gag the incident spawned in that review so I won't do so here, but it felt somehow fitting that I should one day choose to review this film to somehow complete the cycle.

Also because I will give any terrible killer crocodile movie at least one chance. The trouble with my willingness to give them all a chance, of course, is that very few of them deserve those chances.

Our film today starts off with an ominous warning of what we are in for when the production company logo appears.

Oh, God damn it.

Now, Nu Image is apparently still around in at least some capacity, but their big heyday--as least as far as I was ever aware of them--was when they cranked out a bunch of killer animal films in the early aughts. The most notorious of these was the Shark Attack series, but I first became aware of them when I picked up a Fangoria issue promoting today's film along with two other Nu Image films, Octopus and Spiders, that were set to all debut on a cable channel.

It may have been the Sci-Fi Channel, but my memory does not extend that far back and this film doesn't really deserve the effort to research it.

At any rate, I was charmed by the film's prop crocodile--to the point that I later gave the film's sequel, Crocodile 2: Death Swamp a chance that I quickly regretted, but that's a story for another time. However, for whatever reason I never actually saw this film until I caught part of it on TV many, many years later. I was not impressed, but was willing to give it another chance to see if maybe it was better than I gave it credit for.

I think you can guess that I found out that this film was just as big a piece of shit as I recalled.

The most astonishing thing about Crocodile is that this film was directed by Tobe Hooper, but nothing about it suggests it was directed by someone who had actually been in the film industry for almost 30 years by that point. At the very least, you'd think he could have set up a cast of characters that we might care about. Instead, however, we get a bunch of asshole college kids on a boating trip that I can't be arsed to keep straight.

The only ones that truly matter are Brady (Mark McLachlan), Claire (Caitlin Martin), Duncan (Chris Solari), and Sunny (Summer Knight). Brady and Claire are together, but she doesn't know that Brady had a fling with Sunny. Duncan does know this, but he is an irredeemable asshole and he tricked Sunny into coming along by telling her that Brady actually likes her. Duncan really just seems to think that the truth will out and he can then swoop in and bang Claire or Sunny.

Then again, he also seems to hit on Annabelle (Julie Mintz) despite her boyfriend Kit (D.W. Reiser) being also along for the ride. Of course, Kit will later do a body shot off of Sunny right in front of Annabelle with no objection from her, so I have no idea precisely what the relationship dynamics of this group are.

Also, Annabelle brought her little yap dog, Princess, along. The less said about that, the better.

At any rate, the group's first action upon arriving at Lake Sobek (yes, really, but the film actually addresses this later), is to annoy the local lawman, Sheriff Bowman (Harrison Young). This is the last time Bowman will be relevant to the film for a while, aside from cruising the lake in a helicopter that changes wildly from shot to shot.

Our plot doesn't actually begin until Kit, the local boy of the group, decides to tell them the legend of Flat Dog. Not too shockingly, the story is clearly a reference to Tobe Hooper's earlier film, Eaten Alive: a crazy man in the 1900s built a hotel--now reduced to a matte painting--where the main draw was a huge crocodile he imported from Africa, named Flat Dog. Said crazed hotel owner even believed the crocodile to be an incarnation of Sobek the Egyptian crocodile god. Naturally, something went wrong and the hotel was destroyed and Flat Dog escaped to haunt the lake ever since.

Now, even Kit doesn't truly believe the story, but we are about to see that it is very true. Two redneck stereotypes, complaining about endangered species ruining their livelihoods, happen upon a nest full of huge eggs and immediately begin smashing them in anger while mocking the bird they think laid them.

Several issues immediately present themselves. One, crocodiles do not just lay their eggs in an exposed nest where they would be instantly visible to any predator--they either bury them in a hole or cover them with vegetation. Two, these eggs are slightly smaller than footballs. Even putting aside the fact they look more like dinosaur eggs than crocodile eggs, how stupid would these two rednecks have to be to think that they were bird eggs?

Well, as you would expect Flat Dog devours one of the rednecks for his insolence, while the other makes it to his car before she does the same to him. She then pushes the empty car into the lake, because I guess you don't get to be a 30-foot croc that's been hidden in a populated lake for 96 years without knowing how to cover up a crime scene.

She may be missing her front teeth, but her wits have never been sharper!

We'll get lots of good looks at the animatronic crocodile in this film, and I will say that it is beautifully sculpted and looks amazingly convincing. I would even say it's better than Stan Winston's work in Lake Placid in just that regard. However, the film naturally calls upon this thing to move and it's not so good at that part. It is fine in some shots, but then in others it does things like have the jaw open from the top, which is the greatest way to make your prop crocodile look fake as hell.

It's also really clear that it's basically just a prop head being rolled around. There is a fairly decent "swimming" prop, as well, but the mobile head is the one that gets the biggest workout.

And then there's the CGI version of the crocodile, which is exactly as awful as you would expect and is also given way more screentime than is even remotely justifiable.

"That's coming along well. When do we see the finished effect? ... Hello?"

At any rate, this film oddly decided it needed a reason for its crocodile to start killing its main characters, so naturally they also find Flat Dog's nest. You'd think the fact that they are easy prey and they are in its territory would be reason enough. Even this film's sequel felt that was reason enough for the croc there to go after the cast.

Then again, I recently saw a clickbait headline where someone felt it necessary to explain why the Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park eats Nedry. So apparently, "carnivores like meat and humans are made of meat" is too vague for some people.

Now, because the movie would be over, Flat Dog proceeds to behave completely unlike any crocodile mother ever and even unlike her own behavior a couple of scenes ago. Instead of immediately lunging out of the water to chase the idiots away or trying to eat them, she just watches from the water as they smash her remaining eggs, shove them down their pants, and then finally take one back to their camp.

Unbeknownst to Claire, one of the idiots even stuffs the egg into her backpack. Of course, he'll get his soon enough. That night, everyone goes to bed in a bad mood because a drunk Sunny reveals that she had a fling with Brady. The egg prankster is the last one aboard the boat after everyone else has already passed out, and Flat Dog chooses just then to smash the dock to eat him--which sets the boat adrift.

So the bad mood continues in the morning as the boat runs aground and now they have to get unstuck and figure out where they've drifted off to. Brady wanders off by himself, angry that Claire wants to leave now--but Sunny finds him and tries to seduce him again by taking her bra off and wading into the lake in front of him. She is definitely succeeding until Flat Dog looms out of the water and bellows at the two instead of just eating either of them.

Brady and Sunny try to run back to the boat as Flat Dog swims along beside them. Sadly, Flat Dog completely fails to eat Duncan on his floatie, but she does destroy the boat and eats the other third wheel when he tries to take an axe to a croc fight. She even taunts the others with his body, just to rub it in.

"Hey, did you folks lose this?"

Bowman, for his part, finds the sunken car and the nest of smashed eggs. He decides that this means the local alligator farm has lost a gator. However, the farm's owner, Shurkin (Terrence Evans), belongs to a line of men who have been trying to catch or kill Flat Dog for decades--and he has not only seen her himself, but believes she ate his father. So he is very eager to help the sheriff, after delivering some utter bullshit about how to tell crocodile and alligator eggs apart.

It does feature an adorable alligator puppet, though.

Meanwhile it turns out that Shurkin's underling, Lester (Adam Gierasch), has been secretly feeding Flat Dog chickens. He does so again and begs her to eat his boss, but the growling POV cam representing her in this pointless bit quickly decides to eat Lester first.

Night falls and our insipid heroes are not doing very well at all, having wandered aimlessly into the woods. And then Princess the dog helpfully leads them right into an ambush by walking right onto Flat Dog's head. Everyone scatters and blindly stumbles about like idiots, until Sunny manages to get her foot caught in a fallen branch. Claire and Flat Dog find Sunny about the same time and, to Claire's credit, she does at least seem to be trying to figure out how to help Sunny before she ends up just watching the other woman being swallowed whole.

And at the risk of attracting more traffic to my site from creepy vore fans, I have to point out that we watch as Sunny is swallowed headfirst by the crocodile. I would give the benefit of the doubt here, but I can't shake that icky feeling that this was shot the way it was for titillation more than horror. It doesn't help that we see her bare feet disappearing last--so add the creepy foot fetishists to the list of people who would probably enjoy this film.

Terrible Claw Reviews: Now with more kinkshaming!

The group manage to find an unattended store, where they call the sheriff's office and try to grab some supplies. Unfortunately, Flat Dog pulls a Kool-Aid Man and then proceeds to swallow Annabelle headfirst as well.

Yeah, someone on this production was fulfilling their fetish.

Brady finds a gun, but discovers that bullets simply bounce off of Flat Dog with sparks. (That is not how crocodile skin works!) Duncan gets his leg mauled, but sadly he is not killed. Poor Kit, however, gets blown up while trying to hotwire a truck when Flat Dog starts a gasoline fire. The upshot is that the explosion drives Flat Dog away.

Well, it's an upshot for the characters--it means we have to listen to them whining and bickering as Brady and Claire push Duncan through the woods in a wheelbarrow the next morning. However, Shurkin and Bowman are out looking for the teens. They already found the remains of one of their friends and know that Flat Dog is out to kill, not to eat.

Never mind that all we've seen her do is eat.

The remaining teens are found by Bowman and Shurkin, only for them to immediately run afoul of Flat Dog. Shurkin gets himself knocked overboard and eaten, Flat Dog then shows off by leaping over the boat, and then she eats Bowman as he tries to start the outboard motor back up again. This last part manages to feature the film's worst CGI, which is saying something, and then it causes CGI flames to engulf part of the boat.

Brady, Claire, and Duncan make it to shore and Brady decides they have no choice but to try and kill the bulletproof crocodile with pointed sticks or she will never stop following them. No, I'm not kidding. While digging in Claire's backpack for the Swiss Army knife to sharpen sticks with, he finds the egg--and this genius decides they need to use it as bait.

Shockingly, this plans goes awry almost immediately. Brady almost gets himself eaten, but is saved by the timely intervention of both Princess (!) and Duncan. Princess nimbly avoids the crocodile's jaws, while Duncan leaps on her head--and manages to get himself flipped into the air and swallowed whole. Alas, the film has spent a lot of time showing us that Duncan has doused himself in bug spray, so this causes Flat Dog to vomit him back up.

Sadly, he is somehow still alive after this, but you can understand Flat Dog not wanting that moron in her stomach.

In an amusing sign that this film took influence from Lake Placid, Claire offers the egg to Flat Dog--whereupon it hatches into a pretty decent puppet hatchling. The egg even looks leathery as it breaks out! The awful CGI baby then leaps into its awful CGI mother's jaws and they return to the lake in peace. The End.

Well, until the authorities find credible evidence of a dangerous, invasive animal living in the lake and eliminate them both. Still, Flat Dog was the only sympathetic character, so it's fitting she should get a happy ending.

I feel you, Flat Dog.

There are aspects to this film I admittedly enjoy, but this is a terrible film. In many ways, you can already see all the hallmarks of the Syfy Channel Original Movies that would follow in its footsteps.

For one thing, this is a bad film, but it's the kind of bad you get when everyone involved does the bare minimum. It's never bad in a way that feels like it comes from genuine incompetence. The directing is bland, the music makes zero impression, and the writing is bad. The actors range from competent to unremarkable, but since all the human characters are utterly insufferable, it doesn't really matter.

Well, okay, I do feel bad for poor Sunny. The film shows us very clearly that she is being jerked around by both Duncan and Brady--yet she's the one who has to die for the sin of being the Other Woman.

So, yes, just like the other Crocodile, Crocodile does suck. Unfortunately, it never reaches the glorious heights of incompetence that that film brought us. This film does lack any on-screen animal cruelty, however, so I suppose that gives it the slightest edge over it--but only in that regard.

It's a shame, too, because I really do dig that prop crocodile in spite of its faults. Unfortunately, it never did get a movie worthy of it because Crocodile 2: Death Swamp is also a piece of crap.

I guess I'll have to revisit that one again, too, one of these days. Why? Because I never do learn.

This has concluded Day 3 of HubrisWeen 2018! To see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for C, click the banner above!

HubrisWeen 2018, Day 2: The Black Scorpion (1957)

For both very good reasons and very, very silly reasons, we humans are terrified of arthropods--specifically insects and spiders. We are so terrified of them that we cannot help imagining how deadly they would be if they were bigger than us, even though we know physiology and physics prevent this from happening.

Well, on dry land, anyway, but that's a whole other discussion.

Of course, aside from being terrifying, giant scorpions are just plain awesome. It's no wonder then that when Them! and other giant arthropod films like Tarantula proved to be big hits, somebody in Hollywood was going to realize that giant scorpions would be a perfect way to cash in on the trend. Even better, that somebody tapped the man who brought King Kong to life, Willis O'Brien, to do the stop-motion creature effects for their killer scorpion flick.

Now, if you're wondering, based on the poster above--which Warner Archive used a variation of for their recent Blu-ray--what the hell a giant fanged frog has to do with scorpions, well, you're in for a treat.

You see, even in a film with stop-motion creatures, filmmakers usually liked to have a non-animated prop for close-ups. Unfortunately, they didn't usually seem to bother making sure that whomever made that prop coordinated with the animators to make sure that the monsters matched. And so, this film was blessed (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) with a googly-eyed frog-faced scorpion puppet that drools.

Not a real scorpion, but an amazing simulation!

It's utterly ridiculous, but naturally I kind of love it.

Now, any film about scorpions that are big enough to consider humans viable prey is going to need to explain where those scorpions came from. The Black Scorpion decides to break with the major trend of the day, as its scorpions are not regular scorpions made big by radiation. No, indeed, these monsters are a prehistoric variety released from eons-long hibernation by the eruption of a volcano in Mexico.

The eruption of a new volcano, that is, created after severe earthquakes. Mexican geologist Dr. Arturo Ramos (Carlos Rivas) is sent to study this phenomenon, accompanied by American geologist Dr. Hank Scott (Richard Denning, best known as the reckless businessman in The Creature From The Black Lagoon). As they drive their jeep through the wrecked countryside they hear a strange roar (along with the unmistakable sound effects of the ants from Them!) and then come upon a wrecked house.

The house doesn't appear to have been wrecked in the earthquakes and next to it is a police car that has been smashed. The radio still works, however, which is good--not only do the two scientists find a baby alone in his crib, but they also find the dead body of the police officer. The dead man looks terrified and he has emptied the entire clip of his sidearm at something.

When the two get to town, they find that this is not an isolated incident. Cattle and people have gone missing or been found dead and the villagers believe a legendary demon bull is on the loose. Somewhat more helpfully, a local doctor has discovered both that the cop was killed by some kind of venom injected into the base of his neck, and that whatever killed him left footprints that yield a sizable plaster cast. He's sent the venom to be tested by an expert that both Hank and Ramos are familiar with, so they know an answer will be coming soon enough.

During their originally planned surveys of the area, Hank gets to meet-cute with Teresa Alvarez (Mara Corday, a B-movie legend in her own right) when he and Ramos come to her aid when she falls off her horse. Teresa is the owner of the nearby Miraflores (or, "Look! Flowers!") Ranch, and she has been struggling with how these strange incidents are scaring away her cowhands.

Of course, the answer to what is going on comes a little quicker than our heroes would probably like. When they all get to Miraflores, Teresa introduces them to a young boy in her care named Juanito (Mario Navarro), who will be exactly as irritating as you are already imagining. Ramos reveals that he found a chunk of obsidian while they were rescuing Teresa and reveals that it has a scorpion inside it. Much more astounding than that, however, is that when Ramos cracks the obsidian open the scorpion is freed and is still alive. And it's squeaking like a bat, to show it is "prehistoric," I guess.

"I can clone an entire park full of scorpions! Just scorpions!"

This is, of course, patently ridiculous. Even the movie itself points out that obsidian is made from cooled lava. That scorpion would have been burnt to ash, not locked in suspended animation.

Just then, however, the phone rings because the telephone repairmen are calling the ranch to test the lines they just repaired. Which means Teresa and Hank are still on the line when a giant scorpion appears and attacks the repairmen. The last guy, who was on the pole, gets it worst of all since he is crushed in the scorpion's claws until he is coughing up blood and then gets stung.

Hank and Ramos are preparing to head to where the men were in order to investigate, but another giant scorpion makes its appearance at the ranch and saves them the trouble. Guns don't even tickle it and soon everyone is fleeing the ranch, while the village is terrorized by another scorpion. Of course, because the money for this movie's effects gradually ran out we get the first clear impact of that here: the scorpion that menaces the village is just a black silhouette that was matted into the frame with the intention of being replaced by the actual animation later.

Well, now that everyone is well aware of what has been plaguing the countryside lately, the military brings in Dr. Velasco (Carlos Muzquiz) to consult, since he was the doctor who examined the venom and footprint--as well as being an expert on entomology. Velasco believes the best bet is to gas the cavern that they believe is the scorpions' nest during the day, but he needs to know if the cavern is too big to be gassed, so Hank and Ramos volunteer to go down and investigate.

Teresa is not pleased with this idea, but when one of her ranch hands manages to fall into the fissure she understandably wants them to find out if he is alive or not. Unsurprisingly, he will not be alive when they finally get down to the bottomless pit filled with killer arachnids--he doesn't even leave a body behind!

Hank and Ramos find a few surprises in the cave, none of which are terribly welcome. First, the cave is home to over strange beasts--like a thirty-foot worm with tentacles, which soon becomes scorpion chow. Second, there is a scorpion in the cave that dwarfs all the other scorpions and even kills and eats the smaller ones when they displease it. Third, Juanito hitched a ride in their lift and they need to rescue him from a trapdoor spider-crab-potato bug.

(Fun fact, the weird spider and the worm are Willis O'Brien getting to finally use some of the monster models from the infamous unused "spider sequence" from the original King Kong.)

I gotta say, the worm holds its own in this fight--even if it still loses.

The upside is that they now know of a weakness that the scorpions have, since they watch the big one kill another by flipping it over and stinging it in the soft underside of its throat. Unforunately, after their lift is wrecked by a scorpion they no longer have the gas to use against the monsters and barely get out alive. The military opts for Plan B, which is just to dynamite the fissure closed and hope for the best.

Yep, that always works.

Sure enough, the scorpions find another way out and wreck a passenger train. It's a genuinely unsettling sequence as we watch the beasts go into a feeding frenzy over the hapless passengers. I suppose the good news is that the frenzy gets so extreme that the big scorpion kills off all the smaller ones in quick succession. The bad news is that now there is a huge, hungry, and pissed-off scorpion headed right for Mexico City...

"No, please, I'm sorry I made fun of you for drooling!"

As a monster movie, The Black Scorpion is fairly standard stuff. Aside from being set in Mexico, there isn't a lot to differentiate this one from similar 1950s monster fare. And the budget clearly hampers it in many ways, since the special effects range from great to obviously rushed.

However, I think that the choice of monsters more than makes up for any shortcomings of budget and story. Even with the goofy puppet scorpions for close-ups, these are incredibly vivid monsters. O'Brien and his team do an amazing job imbuing these largely faceless creatures with life and personality.

The way that the final monster is defeated is also satisfyingly novel, even if it does involve a random character managing to electrocute himself in a moment that I'm still not sure if we were supposed to find funny or not. Of course, I'm always happy when the way a monster is defeated is more complicated than just "blow it up."

Of course, this film has bigger flaws than just its budget. Its attempt to build mystery and suspense early on ends up dragging instead. Not nearly enough to make the film boring, but this film is called The Black Scorpion, so it doesn't really help to play it coy for so long. Then again, that does make one even more grateful when the scorpions show up--and admittedly the film keeps a great pace going from there on in.

This film is far from a classic of the period like its obvious inspiration, Them!--but it is definitely a lot of fun. And the Blu-ray from Warner Archives has some amazing extras if you are a stop-motion monster fan like I am. I highly recommend giving it a look, if you are so inclined.

This has concluded Day 2 of HubrisWeen 2018! To see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for B, click the banner above!

HubrisWeen 2018, Day 1: Another WolfCop (2017)

Low expectations are a hell of a thing, which is the simplest explanation for why I found myself inexplicably enjoying Another WolfCop far more than any other reviewer I've encountered thus far.

Regular readers, and people who can follow links easily, will know that I did not care for the original WolfCop because I felt it squandered its potential in far too many ways. Yet, I admit that I had just enough fondness for it as a concept that I was willing to give its sequel a chance. Especially when I saw the brilliant poster for the film that parodied the infamous poster to Cobra.

When the buzz I heard was that this film was not as good as the original and seemed to be trying too hard to be a Troma film, well, that definitely put a hopeless feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Even so, I wasn't all that shocked that I actually enjoyed this film much more than the first. Make no mistake, this is not what I would call a good movie. However, this is the kind of movie that somehow speaks to me personally. Quite possibly because this film is determined to throw as much at the screen as it can, even if nothing quite sticks.

At the very least this time the film actually delivers on the killer lizard monsters the first film cruelly teased me with and then failed to provide. Well, sort of.

It's been a year since the incidents in the first film, and the town of Woodhaven has been undergoing some changes for the seemingly better because a mysterious benefactor has bought the disused local Darkstar brewery from interim Mayor Bubba Rich (Kevin Smith, in a bit of a glorified cameo). From frame one we know that the millionaire motivational speaker, Sydney Swallows (Yannick Bisson, and yes that is really the character's name), is actually a Shapeshifter pushing his own sinister agenda: with the help of a few mad scientists and his badass queer-coded henchwoman, Number 2 (Kris "The Raven" Blackwell), naturally.

That agenda involves one of those light-up spinning toys you'd find at a dollar store--and producing a beer called "Chicken Milk Stout" that has the tagline, "Slam a cold cock!" Hey, you better quit your groaning now or this is going to be a long one.

Our titular lycan lawman, which is literally a joke the movie makes, has also been busy. In fact, when we catch up to Lou Garou he is in full WolfCop mode (Leo Fafard, again) as he gorily massacres a van full of hired goons transporting a box with a Shapeshifter symbol on it. Crashing a van full of dismembered bodies into the parking lot of the police station doesn't help Chief Tina (Amy Matysio, again) in her efforts to convince the public that WolfCop is an urban legend.

For some reason, this effort extends to her two new deputies, Daisy (Devery Jacobs) and Expendable Guy. It's really a silly plot cul-de-sac, because not only does everyone know WolfCop is a real thing--even an idiot like Mayor Bubba has seemingly figured out that Lou and WolfCop are the same person!

No, he is not wearing pants. Yes, you will see his werewolf penis in the film, whether you like it or not.

At any rate, the mysterious box turns out to contain Willie Higgins (Jonathan Cherry, again), whom we last saw getting shot dead by Tina. Well, it turns out that this is the real Willie, who was replaced by a Shapeshifter after being rectally probed by lizard aliens. Again, this is the level of the jokes, people. Of course, Willie wasn't left totally normal after his experience and he quickly finds himself dealing with a reptilian, penis-shaped clone of himself bursting out of his stomach and playing the part of his loud-mouthed Id.

Oddly, he reveals this to Tina but not his friend who he now knows is a werewolf.

Swallows, meanwhile, takes some time away from promoting the upcoming hockey game at his brewery to have his pet mad scientists build a robot assassin. Said robot is then sent to massacre a strip club named Club Phoque. Sadly, unlike Liquor Donuts, this joke name does not indicate it is a combination strip club and Pho restaurant--which is such an incredibly obvious missed joke that it's truly inexcusable.

Why does Swallows need this robot to kill a bunch of people in the strip club for his plan to succeed? Don't look at me, I'm just watching this.

When Daisy and the other deputy arrive on the scene, they found nothing but body parts. Daisy goes to call for backup and the expendable guy encounters the robot. He escapes harm at first because it can tell he has been drinking Chicken Milk, but the robot kills him after he shoots it. WolfCop shows up to help Tina confront the robot, but the robot proves too strong even for WolfCop and invulnerable to bullets. Luckily, after he gets beaten to a pulp by the robot, Tina saves him from certain death by taking it out with a Molotov cocktail.

Now, Swallows and his crew recover the robot not long after and have video footage of it beating the crap out of their most powerful foe. So you'd think they would want to either restore this robot or make more just like it, right? Apparently, Swallows did not become rich by making sound strategic decisions because we will never see a single hint of the robot ever again.

Oh, sure, they'll make you think they built an entire hockey team of killer robots later, but they all turn out to just be very human goons.

I mean, who wants to see a werewolf fight a robot except for EVERYONE EVER?

Luckily for our heroes, Willie has a sister in the nearby town of Regina who is weird into occult stuff, too. Kat (Serena Miller) is more than eager to help Lou. It turns out the best way to heal a werewolf is to have him snort powdered moon rocks like cocaine.

Oh, and then Kat reveals herself to be a werecat and has incredibly graphic sex with human Lou. Remember how there was a weird werewolf and human sex scene in the first film that seemed like it was just there to fulfill someone's very specific fetish? This is not like that, since it is actually clearly played for laughs--and it seems tailored to disgust even the most ardent furry.

Willie, for his part, has the misfortune of turning on a commercial for Chicken Milk while attempting to drown out the sounds of his sister and Lou banging. The result is that his miniature clone turns into a turkey-sized lizard monster and tears its way out of him. Lou and human Kat have to kill it, since Willie can't bring himself to.

Naturally, this is what Swallows had planned all along--he is trying to replenish the population of Shapeshifters since Lou has so effectively reduced their numbers.

As Tina and Daisy sneak into the brewery to learn what Swallows is up to, Mayor Bubba visits Swallows and makes the mistake of enjoying a Chicken Milk in his presence. Swallows activates the dollar store toy and we are treated to the sight of Kevin Smith fighting a lizard puppet that bursts out of his gut. For some reason, Bubba does not survive the birthing process like Willie does.

Swallows is planning to do this to the entire town at the upcoming hockey game, naturally, so it's up to our heroes to keep that from happening. Naturally, they aren't going to succeed because they're mostly incompetents. However, their failure is surprising on two counts.

Ah, the old "good cop, wolf cop."

First, it turns out that having a reptilian clone pop out of your stomach is not fatal unless it successfully climbs out of you. At one point Willie shoots the lizard baby climbing out of one victim and the guy seems to be immediately fine right after. Hell, the film never really addresses what happens to the clones they fail to kill or stop before they shut down the machine--it's a little like how The Amazing Spider-Man showed us The Lizard turning lots of people into lizard monsters and then just...forgot all about it.

Second, despite massacring an entire hockey team and all of his goons, the heroes don't even catch Swallows! If that's the way they set him up to be the villain in an upcoming part three, it is lazy and awful.

At a run-time of 79 minutes, I suppose it is to be expected that a few plot threads and things would just be utterly dropped or forgotten about. That's especially true of a film that throws so much random crap at the wall, like this one, but it still just comes across as a sloppy mess.

It's entirely possible, then, that the fact I enjoyed this one more than the first is merely due to incredibly low expectations. However, there are definitely glimmers of cleverness and fun that are more wisely spaced out than in the first film. Sometimes that is enough.

Of course, that's all well and good, but if a film is only enjoyable because it is better than its awful predecessor then that film is probably not very good, now is it? With a film like this, how successful it is depends a lot on how rewatchable it is.

When I considered watching this film a second time for this review, I realized that I absolutely did not want to. This film is fun enough but it is not worth more than one viewing.

If you hated WolfCop then you're not likely to get much out of this one. However, if you just simply need to see Kevin Smith headbutt a lizard man puppet sticking out of his stomach, this is the movie for you.

This has concluded Day 1 of HubrisWeen 2018! To see what the other Celluloid Zeroes chose for A, click the banner above!

Look out! Here it comes!

That's right, I'm not dead and I haven't forgotten about this blog! For it would take a lot to keep me away from:

That's right: 26 days, 26 letters, and 26 movies!

You'll see giant monsters, roving severed limbs, goofy fishmen, hungry fishes both big and flying, vampires, alligators with fins glued on, and even--a Disney Channel musical!

It all starts on this Saturday, October 6th, and you better believe I'm freaking out to keep my deadlines!

And, as usual, I'm not alone!

We have the power--of bad movies!

Join us, if you dare!