For every Alfred Hitchcock, there is an Ed Wood. There are many talented directors working in the film industry today, but there are just as many infamously terrible directors churning out worthless trash on a regular basis. Uwe Boll, arguably the worst of the worst, has garnered a legion of haters since his earliest days in film making, and for many good reasons. “Doctor” Boll has no idea how tell a story visually, how to get good performances from actors, how to compose an interesting shot, or how to make a movie enjoyable in any way. After the cinematic train wreck that was House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, his second film to be released in American theaters, cemented the popular opinion of Boll as the king of schlock. The film opens with what is possibly the longest text crawl in movie history that flat out tells the audience this complicated back story about an ancient civilization and a dark world that they accidentally opened up and then some secret government agency or some crap. This thing seriously eats up the first minute and a half of run time and tells only the broadest bits of the back story in the most boring manner imaginable. This thing fails right out of the gate. The next part gives us a flash back about some kids in an orphanage that were experimented on by the evil Professor Hudgens. (Matthew Walker) One of these children escaped from Hudgens’ experiments and grew-up to become Christian Slater, or Edward Carnby as he calls himself. Carnby is a freelance paranormal investigator who spends most of his time hunting down ancient Abkani artifacts, the ones made by the civilization that decided it was a great idea to open a portal to a place they called the DARK WORLD!

Both Hudgens and Carnby are racing to collect all the little gold puzzle pieces that will reopen the portal, Hudgens so that he can ally himself with the dark world monsters, and Carnby so he can keep that portal closed. Carnby links up with his ex-girlfriend Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid) who is supposed to be a scientist of some kind, but for whatever reason, I just don’t buy Tara Reid as the scientist type. One of the dark monsters is released by a pirate (don’t ask) and tracks Carnby and Cedrac to the museum where she works to attack them. The monster is kind of a boney-looking dog that is sometimes invisible and sometimes not. While running from the CG dog creature, the agents of a secret government paranormal paramilitary group called 7-13 (not 7-11) storm the museum to shoot the monster a few times before it escapes. Commander Burke (Sephen Dorff) leads the team, and he is not happy to see Carnby at the scene. Carnby used to work for 7-13 after he escaped from the orphanage, but wait, Hudgens also work for 7-13 in an advisory capacity, and he works at the museum with Aline Cedrac. So why is it that none of these people know that Professor Hudgens is an evil douche bag that is putting dark world centipedes into people’s spines to turn them evil, and has been doing this for twenty years? The fact that this malformed story is supposedly based on a popular survival horror game that relied on quite, subtle atmosphere and legitimately scary situations makes the final product all the more disappointing.  This movie is so bad, so disgustingly bad on every level that it’s hard to express in words alone. Stay far, far away from this twisted mockery of a film, unless you have a few friends around, a ready supply of alcohol, and a high tolerance for pain.

I’m going to diversify things up a little here today and throw a lady monster in the mix. Darkness Falls is the story of a young boy Kyle who is terrorized by, of all things, the Tooth Fairy. This isn’t your grandma’s Tooth Fairy I’m talking about either, or the Tooth Fairy from that other horror movie The Tooth Fairy that came out in 2006. The undead creature haunting this picture is Matilda Dixon, and she wins the award for most complicated back story of any monster, ever. Matilda’s legend begins when she was a kindly old spinster woman in the town of Darkness Falls (sounds like a cheerful place) where she was loved by all the children for paying them money for there baby teeth that had fallen out. What she did with those teeth is anyone’s guess, but she was eventually caught in a house fire and her face was burned so badly that she hid her face behind a porcelain mask. On top of all that, she was blamed for the disappearance of two children and hanged by the towns people. As Matilda swung by her neck, she cursed the town that her spirit or corpse, or something would keep taking teeth, I guess. I’m actually not sure, the legend gets kind of confusing there, but the point is that she is now a ghostly monster that takes teeth, wears a mask, hates light, and will kill anyone that looks at her. So the story proper starts a century or so after all that stuff when young Kyle (Joshua Anderson) looses his last baby tooth. He accidentally sees the Tooth Fairy and runs to get his mother. Kyle’s mom tries to tell Kyle that he’s just imagining things at that his room is perfectly safe, but then she gets snatched up by Matilda and killed off screen.

Skipping ahead twelve years, we find grown-up Kyle (Chaney Kley) still traumatized from his almost being killed by a monster experience and on a heavy regiment of medication. Caitlin (Emma Caulfield) was Kyle’s childhood friend and calls him in regards to her younger brother Michael. (Lee Cormie) It would seem that Michael is suffering from night terrors, but Kyle realizes that Michael has gotten on the bad side of the Tooth Fairy as well. Kyle heads back to his old town of Darkness Falls to help Michael. He is eventually arrested by the local authorities under suspicion that he is insane and possibly killed his own mother all those years ago. This puts Kyle in a bit of a pickle and he struggles to convince everybody that the Tooth Fairy is coming to kill little Michael, and him.  Although the film did get a theatrical release, this is a direct-to-video quality movie at best that stars nobody you’ve ever heard of and has barely enough scares to keep a horror fan interested the whole way through. The effects are pretty good, but the story is just so banal and, worse yet, the lore about the killer just makes no sense. Where did Matilda find the supernatural powers to will a curse on a whole town? Do the collected baby teeth give her arcane powers? I don’t get it.

This film starts with a little educational text stating that the South China Sea hides deep chasms that have never been explored by man, and that numerous ships have mysteriously vanished in those areas of the ocean for decades. If only we could find a way to surrender this movie to the depths of the ocean for all eternity. If I had to pick only a few words to describe the plot of Deep Rising, those words would be derivative and over-written. One piece of the story starts on a small boat captained by John Finnegan (Treat Williams) who is not out crab fishing but shuttling a band of black ops mercenary types to some obscure point in the middle of the ocean. The mercenary group is led by Hanover (Wes Studi) and is composed of half a dozen or so soldiers too bland to be memorable, although I did see Jason Flemyng and that guy that played Kano in Mortal Kombat in the mix. The black ops team turns hostile on Finnegan’s crew when the ship’s wormy mechanic Joel (Kevin J. O’Conner) finds live torpedoes amongst the weapons. Another part of the plot involves the massive luxury cruise ship Argonautica (which is a titanically stupid name for a boat) and a foxy thief named Trillian (Famke Janssen). She tries to break into the Captain’s quarters to get at his safe, but is caught by the ship’s owner Simon Canton (Anthony Heald) and locked in the galley freezer. Someone on board the ship disables several vital systems including, of course, communications, then a large something attacks the cruise liner. All of the passengers start to stampede in an attempt to escape, and we are treated to a scene where a terrified woman is violently pulled down a toilet.

Finnegan damages his own boat by colliding with one of Argonautica’s speed boats, that was made entirely of C-4 judging by how it exploded. Plot A meets up with plot B as the damaged little boat find the disabled cruise ship in the middle of the stormy seas. Hanover’s commando unit deploys on board the Argonautica, taking Finnegan and Joel with them to gather engine parts. Hanover had intended to rob the wealthy passengers then sink the ship, but all of the passengers have disappeared, except for Trillian, whom they find locked safely away in the freezer. The team also locates Simon as well, who it turns out had disabled his own ship and hired Hanover and company to sink his multi-million dollar cruise ship so he could collect the insurance money. You see what I mean about this being over-written? We don’t need all this forced subterfuge and intrigue just to get all the characters stranded on a boat for a monster to attack. When the monster, a giant mollusk of some sort finally does show up, it makes short work of most of the remaining cast, usually picking them off one-by-one a la Alien or Predator, two much better movies that I wish I were watching instead. While the awful writing effectively torpedoes the good ship Deep Rising before it leaves port, some entertaining bits can still be salvaged from the wreckage. The cinematography employed here is consistently much better than this movie deserves, like an amazing part near the beginning that zooms in from a wide shot of the cruise ship and follows a man through a door to the ballroom. Famke Janssen’s and Kevin J. O’Conner’s performances are also enjoyable, even if O’Conner’s screaming gets a little grating near the end. The monster is an original idea as well, as it only appears as tentacles with gnarly teeth and hooks when first seen. It isn’t until the end of the film that we get to see the full and somewhat badly rendered giant demon-octopus-thing in all its glory.

Is it Full Moon Studios time again? Already? Yep. This is another film from the not-so-proud direct to DVD tradition. But I have to warn everybody, this one makes Subspecies look like an Oscar winner. While the box art shows Zarkorr the invader, a giant dragon-like monster that shoots lasers from his eyes and wrecks cities for kicks, we rarely ever get to see it in the film.  A giant monster wrecking stuff is not in and of itself a bad premise for a movie, but we soon move on to introduce this film’s worst element, the plot. Earth has been chosen by a collection of intelligent alien races, which we never actually see, to undergo a test. The aliens release a massive, planet crushing monster, Zarkorr, and contact one representative of the human race that they choose based on being the most average human specimen they can find. That average human is Tommy Ward (Rhys Pugh) a postal worker who likes to watch old cartoons that are probably in the public domain. The aliens pick a bizarre method of contacting Tommy using a mental projection that he sees as a tiny teenage girl. She tells Tommy that no weapon on Earth can harm Zarkorr and he must find a way to defeat the monster, or all life on the planet will be destroyed. Obviously, the alien conglomerate that devised this test is composed entirely of huge douche bags, as even if Tommy is manages to solve this test, Earth will have already suffered many casualties and millions of dollars in property damage.

Tommy, being the quintessential average-joe, has no idea how to fight or defeat this creature. On the local news, he sees an interview with Doctor Stephanie Martin (De’Prise Grossman) an expert in cryptozoology. How one can be an expert in an unofficial field largely considered to be pseudoscience is anybody’s guess. Tommy drives down to the T.V. station and tries to tell Dr. Martin about the monster being a test that the aliens told him he needs to defeat to save the world, and when she refuses to help him, Tommy kidnaps her at gun point. Tommy barricades himself in the women’s bathroom with the doctor, who still refuses to answer his questions, and the police show up to defuse the situation. When Tommy explains the alien test and how he must defeat Zarkorr, one of the officers, George (Mark Hamilton) actually believes his story makes perfect sense and turns his gun on the other officer to aid Tommy in his mission. As you can see, the writing for this film is a completely convoluted nightmare that writer Benjamin Carr probably hammered out in one drug-fueled weekend. The plot occupies this strange paradoxical state of being completely convoluted and hard to follow, but at the same time is so thin and contrived that it might as well not exist at all. The only thing the plot does is waste time between the scenes of Zarkorr trashing model cities, and while that is fun to see, it does not justify the 80 minutes you will throw away watching this thing.



In 1989, all the cool movies were taking place under water. The most famous of these films was James Cameron’s The Abyss, but there was also a gaggle of much less memorable films, like Leviathan, Endless Descent, The Rift, and one that bares several striking similarities to Cameron’s film called DeepStar Six. In this movie, directed by Sean S. Cunningham who is most famous for gracing the world with Friday the Thirteenth, a group of submarine-driving roughnecks are contracted by the Navy to construct an underwater silo capable of launching long-range nuclear missiles. The rag-tag group includes B-movie regular Matt McCoy as James, Miguel Ferrer as a guy named Snyder, (you just know he’s going to be a bastard with a name like Snyder) and a ferociously hot Nia Peeples as Dr. Scarpelli. This crew works on the ocean floor in a scientific research station named, surprise surprise, DeepStar Six. While a pair of engineers are bombing out an undersea cave to construct their missile silo, their submarine/bulldozer is sunk by some kind of creature that the audience doesn’t get to see quite yet. Scarpelli, the resident marine biologist, says that the rock formation that originally sealed off the cave is millions of years old, so whatever came out of the cave is just as old. After losing a mini-sub, a small satellite base, and about half their crew, the leader of the project Dr. Gelder (Marius Weyers) decides to evacuate the station. They can’t leave without first securing their nuclear armament, so Snyder, who I assume is part of the military team in spite of the fact that he is never given a rank, follows the computer instructions for securing the cache by DETONATING MULTIPLE 100 MEGATON NUCLEAR DEVICES!

Anyone with at least half of a working brain would assume that blowing-up a bunch of nuclear bombs would cause a violent and potentially deadly underwater shock wave, and that’s exactly what happens. The DeepStar station is shaken about in Star Trek fashion and the base’s own nuclear reactor is damaged and will soon explode itself. While the team tries to repair the decompression chamber, without which the survivors will not be able to escape their underwater prison, the million-year-old monster follows James in through a hatch and the ensuing fight begins to flood the base. The creature is only ever described as an ancient arthropod, but to be more specific, looks like a giant sea scorpion (eurypterid). Although the monster does have a unique and interesting design, it is an obvious puppet as we only ever get to see the front half of it poking out of the water. It is not very animated, and I would guess that the prop was quite fragile as we rarely see it interact with the actors in any convincingly forceful or violent manner. Despite its best efforts, this film is not really worth watching. It has a lot of boring dialogue scenes that are compounded by a truly terrible script. The sea scorpion barely ever appears and there are only three onscreen kills by the monster, and only one of them is memorable. That one being the bloody bitten-in-half death of James in a deep sea diving suit, and the shock value of that is spoiled by the poster artwork.  I recommend this one only if you’re patient and have some time to kill, or you really like prehistoric arthropods.

I almost feel kind of bad for giving a horrible review about a kids film. But I assure you, this film deserves it.

Alpha and Omega is an animated version of the classic love story that involves a boy and a girl from different social backgrounds, in similar fashion of Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story. This one has wolves. Kate is an Alpha wolf. Alpha’s are more serious and responsible. Humphrey is an Omega wolf. Omega’s tend to have fun more and try to keep peace. It is arranged for Kate and Garth (another Alpha) to be married, however, Humphrey has a bit of a crush on Kate. Garth is a pretty boy, but has a weak howl, and apparently wolves mate (when not in arranged marriages) when their howls are the same. Some party happens and all the wolves are there. When Kate and Humphrey are alone talking, they both get hit with tranquilizer darts and wake up in a national park in Idaho. A goose that plays golf and his duck caddy inform them that they were brought to the park to mate and produce offspring (standard plot for a children’s movie). Humphrey has no problem with this and is ready to get down. Kate however, does not like that, and within seconds is trying to find away back to Canada. Thusly, Humphrey follows this plan, realizing that he will not be doing it wolf style anytime soon.

This film is unbelievably bad. The script was filled with bad jokes, things that I think were supposed to be jokes but weren’t and just amazingly bad dialogue in general. The trip home consisted of about 2 incidents of “danger” in which their crusade may have been put in jeopardy. I have more adventure walking to the store. The animation was not very impressive. I saw it in 3D and it did nothing to enhance the viewing. I found Larry Miller’s (he played the goose) French Canadian accent to be quite irritating and inconsistent. Justin Long’s (Humphrey) voice just kept transporting me to his other films. The runtime is 88 minutes which while makes it seem like the film was hastily thrown together, did make the unpleasantness rather short. It’s use of a basic story that has been told time and time again made the film rather predictable, and as soon as the main conflict is revealed, you will know how it ends.

There are many films that a child and adult would both enjoy. I would hate to think that the film makers just assumed that because it was a children’s movie, they could just bang out an animated picture without originality or redeeming qualities. I mean, adults are the ones driving the kids to the theaters and buying the tickets.

True, a kid will not dissect a picture in this fashion. However, my almost 4 year old asked twice, while watching this, if the movie was over yet.  Just saying.

Dave Parker, the writer/director of The Dead Hate the Living! said that he wanted to make the most un-Full Moon movie that he could. Full Moon Entertainment has brought us such delights as Puppet Master, Killjoy and was a distributor of Gingerbread Man 2: Passion of the Crust. What Parker meant was, he wanted to make a film without small creatures and make a film that felt as much like a real movie as he could make it. I assume he meant “real” literally, as he also said he purposely made the film referential of the low budget genre. Believe me, the film is full of references.

We have a group of young filmmakers shooting a zombie picture. Through some forced exposition we learn that this is the director, David Poe’s first movie. His best friend Paul is the effects guy, and his two sisters are actresses (although Nina Poe’s part was secretly given to Shelly Poe, because everyone hates Nina). The film location is an abandoned hospital, which, again through an awkward bit of dialogue, we learn they do not have permission to be there and it is illegal to film there. For reasons that normally would not necessitate a group of people to split up, they do. One group finds a room with a tv and and a video camera with a tape in it. The video shows a man talking directly to the camera before getting mauled by zombies. As plot formula would dictate they just assume it is part of the movie that they are making. Eventually they all come across a giant coffin. A dead guy (the one from the video) falls out. What happens next, I have dubbed, “The Weekend at Bernie’s Moment.” Someone suggests calling the cops, but David manages to convince everyone (except Shelly) not to. He claims that if they use the body, everyone will rush to see the movie with a real dead person (and I guess, also not call cops). I will assume the scene in which a re-write was done to include the coffin that they just found was cut from the real movie, as they immediately have lines and a plot that revolve around it. While shooting the scene the accidentally reanimate the dead guy and open some kind of portal to the world of the dead, thus trapping everyone in sort of in between land where time stands still. The dead guy was Dr. Eibon. His wife died from cancer and while trying to bring her back he created a bunch of zombies. They killed him (the scene from the video). Now that he is undead, he sends his undead henchmen to kill everyone so that he may continue his project. Everyone splits up and tries to survive, David and Paul using the director and special effects mastery to employ a few tricks. And the zombie film within a zombie film wanders off into the night.

The acting was terrible. The computer generated fire was almost insulting. The dialogue was outrageously bad. All of this paled in comparison to the almost checklist like insertion of horror movie references in nearly every scene. Allow me to share some of the more obvious ones:

Nothing telegraphs an explosion better than the line, “Are those fuel tanks?”

Meat Market 2 takes place some time after the events of the first film. We see Argenta kill Shahrokh after he turns into a zombie. She, one of the vampires, and a random one eyed Asian wander around foraging for food and supplies. They find another survivor and at her suggestion follow her. She tells them that she heard a radio broadcast about a place to go for food and shower, etc. and was on the way there herself. Naturally, they ignore all sense of skepticism and follow her only to be tricked. The survivor is really a Lieutenant for a military concentration camp or cult or some such nonsense, and surprise; the three of them are the newest addition to the camp. The camp is run by the Reconstruction Commerce Association of North America. Their goal is to rebuild society. They execute undesirables, perform experiments on some prisoners if acceptable for that sort of thing, and the healthy, attractive, and ethnically appropriate ones are put through orientation and processing to become part of “society.” How coincidental; 3 leads, 3 parts of the camp. As you might imagine, each one goes some place different. The camp is run by a white guy named Bill (first names for  everyone, it’s a people friendly cult) who wears a white button down shirt, a black tie and is a powerful public speaker. The Association, as it’s called, has its own symbol and tapestries that display this symbol all over the walls, to illustrate how much like another “cult” that had “camps” it is.

Much of the same from the first film happening here. Not a bad (albeit familiar) story, and considering the films budget, executed fairly well. The director seems to have access to a lot of buildings.  More atrocious acting. More sex with clothes on. Again, the zombies actually look pretty decent. I assume most of the budget went to the zombies.

There was a lot more focus on the story in this installment. The zombie action kind of serves as the bread of the film, mainly confined to the beginning and end. I had no issue with this choice, but it would have worked a lot better if the actors could act. In fact, this probably would be completely watchable with a bigger budget (mainly because the vampire’s laser gun died before she had a chance to use it). I could have dealt without yet another zombie movie reference. An Officer Romero is called over a loudspeaker. Yeah, I get it. You watch zombie films. You don’t have to spell it out, the deja vu is enough. I also probably would have been fine without the inclusion of a doctor fucking the eye socket of a skull. Didn’t really push the plot along, and I just assume every one that works at the camp is insane, so the skull fucking is not needed for character development either. At first, there seemed to be a lot of punk and or emo zombies about, what with the green and purple hair that a lot of them had. However, the main doctor, the chef and some others were pierced, so I made the assumption that the actors just did not want to change their appearances for the film, including the ones playing zombies. There also was a zombie that was wearing a shirt that said “straight edged Vegan” while eating someone. Damn scenesters. The ending leaves this film as clearly a middle of a larger story, as it concludes the “chapter,” but leaves plenty of room for the continuing adventures of Argenta and the vampire. I did like how at the very end, there was a black and white scene between the doctor from the first movie and the doctor from this one, prior to the zombie apocalypse giving a bit of story.

I have to categorize this as crap, mainly because when you combine horrible acting with a video camera, it rarely ends well. Brian Clement, the writer/director, clearly has a vision and is talented, and perhaps with better resources, he could produce some fine work.

As bad as this movie was, I kept telling myself, “At least it’s better than Flesh Freaks.” That was until the lesbian, laser toting vampires showed up.

Before raping my eyes, Meat Market sounded like a decent Zombie picture. There are bizarre attacks on humans that are thought to be animal attacks. Two former employees of a security agency figure out that they are not animal attacks, but zombies, and as it turns out, the company they used to work for is responsible. Not half bad, right? Well, I am angry at all who were involved with this.

Now, in this movie’s defense, there were some positives. The zombie make up was actually pretty decent for a film this low budget. If you can watch it long enough, you can find some fairly nice shots and scene transitions. In what I thought was a very clever touch (and I must have misunderstood this), I thought that this was going to be a sort of “A Modest Proposal” scenario, which would have explained the title of the film. At one point a zombie attacks a homeless person, and there is an interview with someone who states that he thinks that the attackers (I don’t recall if at this point the public still thinks it is animals or knows it zombies; the execution of the story line was rather convoluted) are doing the city a service by killing the homeless. In a pamphlet written by Johnathan Swift called (paraphrasingly) “A  Modest Proposal,” Swift suggested satirically that the children of Ireland’s poor families living in squalor should be sold into a meat market at the age of one. They would be fattened up and fed to rich land owners and this would help eliminate overpopulation, unemployment, etc. The prospect of Meat Market perhaps doing something similar excited me very much. That actually makes good (albeit evil) justification for the security company making these creatures. In addition to that: biting social satire! I was then ready to overlook the $2000 budget and sub-par acting to absorb this message! Then the lesbian vampires walked in.

By the way, that whole “A Modest Proposal” theory? Wrong. Never mentioned again. Well, it might have been, but the audio is such crap at some points I could not hear what people were saying. Like Flesh Freaks, Meat Market’s main competition in the worst film in the universe contest, this was shot with a video camera. I liked it in Market, though, because it worked a little better. The zombies were more like Romero zombies and thus more realistic (ha), so it sort of had that documentary look most of the time. Other times, however, it still had the, shitty low budget look. The acting most definitely was horrible. We have the whole man-woman thing going on, but the two leads suck so bad there is no chemistry. And naming the woman Argenta? Are you serious? In a shitty zombie movie, you are actually going to name a character Argenta? Nice job changing the last letter, no one will notice that at all. The male lead is named Shahrokh, which is a bird in Iranian mythology. I can’t find any really significance in naming your character that, with the possible exception that Rokh saved Sinbad in some gay story I never read (which therefore disqualifies me from calling it gay).

While the zombies looked good, the rest of the visual effects were a mixed bag. Most of the bite wounds looked good and as long at the blood was not splattering, that looked fine as well. But when brains were blown against the wall, that looked horrible. I outright laughed out loud when I saw a zombie eating a turkey leg, but then realized he was gnawing at a victim’s limb. The audio effects were kind of crap as well. When a zombie would bite someone, the foley artist clearly bit an apple.

There are 3 sex scenes in this movie. In the first one, the characters are clothed.

Now for the two most atrocious things that occurred  in this picture. The first one was that this was filmed in the city where there were a lot of regular people who were not a part of the production. However, the zombies only attacked the actors, so the zombie apocalypse looked a little bit like an unsuccessful high school party; not a lot of  participants.  It actually was funny because there was looting, but no chaos, so the looting looked unnecessary. I mean, they could have just walked in and paid for it. One could use the “A Modest Proposal” theory to say that the public was fine with the zombies eating the homeless and they just didn’t care, but they didn’t just eat the homeless.  The second major problem with this film is the 3 vampires. I don’t understand this one bit. For one, they have LASER GUNS. I don’t even have a clever remark, just why do they have lasers? They were also sex maniacs and apparently lesbian and/or bi sexual. One vampire has sex with a man, then one of the other vampires, so I assume the inclusion of these characters were an excuse for nudity. The man the vampire has sex with has a wound that he claims came from barbed wire, which is clearly a lie. So the vampire has sex with him and he turns in to a zombie. However, she doesn’t. So I guess since the vampires are already undead, they are immune to zombie attack. And if you do dare to watch this thing pay attention to the explanation of how people became zombies. Dumbest shit ever.

Also, there is a Mexican wrestler in this. His lines were dubbed for some reason.

Trash, yes. I think, however, compared to Flesh Freaks, this filmmaker made better use of his resources and limitations. There are two more of these films, and although this one is painful, I am curious to see if the series gets better.

***THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. NOT FOR CRITTERS 3, BUT FOR FEAST III.***

Have you seen Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest film, Inception? If not, what the hell are you waiting for, but if so, I invite you to check out his first film (if you have not already), Critters 3. Not because it is good, but so you can suffer the same pain I have.

The only thing Critters 3 has to do with the first two films, is that there are Critters, and a bit of back story given by Charlie, who was made Sheriff of Grover’s Bend in Critters 2. This film does not take place in Grover’s Bend, however. Clifford, his son Johnny and teen daughter Annie are travelling home when they get a flat tire and pull into a rest stop. Johnny is chasing his Frisbee when he runs in to an older kid named Josh (DiCaprio). While in the woods, Charlie jumps out and gives the aforementioned back story to remind us all that we are in a Critters sequel. He in fact, is hunting the remaining Critters. As formula dictates, the kids think he is a loon and dismiss his story as insane rambling. As they are leaving the rest stop, we get the impression that Josh’s step dad is an ass, and we see that there are Krite eggs under Clifford’s truck. As movie fate would have it, Clifford and his kids live in a run down apartment, and the landlord is Josh’s  step father. So guess what? Krites invade the apartment complex and Annie and Josh become fast friends. Also, some other unfunny, not scary, boring crap with other people happens.

There are a lot of similarities between this and Feast III. Both movies have characters that have nothing to do with the plot and do not push story along. Critters 3 introduces us to Marsha. She has a few lines, helps a little bit, but ultimately gets hung upside down out the window for most of her screen time. Both films draw attention to creatures’ asses. In Feast III we watch a demon crap out the head of Honey Pie. In Critters 3, the Crites eat a bunch of chili and the obligatory flatulence commences. Both films are useless pieces of shit.  I wonder if the Feast series used the Critters series as an example to follow. There really isn’t anything good about this installment. It is a complete mess, much like a Krite egg after it gets broken. The acting is horrible, the directing sucks. Leo is good, I guess, but everyone else is really bad. It wasn’t funny, and what little elements of horror this franchise began with are all gone. This film was released in 1991, and looking at Leo’s costume and haircut reminded me of a simpler time of surfing and grunge music. And speaking of music, the score was at such a low volume, I didn’t even hear it until near the end of the film. As if to infuriate me further, when the movie was “over,” I was forced in to watching the film halfway through the credits, so that I could watch the set up for the fourth installment. Interestingly enough, the end of Feast III actually mentions a possible fourth film in that series.

Why let the similarities end there? Avoid this at all costs, too.