Tag Archives: Comedy

Straight-to-DVD Corner with Tonn Slingdog: Wonderfully Sloppy Seconds

For amazingly inappropriate horror-comedy magic look no further than Feast II: Sloppy Seconds.  It’s got everything: lesbian biker chicks, monster cum facials, midget tossing, baby killing, and most importantly guys in silly rubber monster suits running around and growling.  Feast I thought was kind of fun, a bouncy little movie that took joy in turning certain horror genre conventions on their ears, but the sequel feels more…unshackled, as if director John Gulager was held back by all those famous Project Greenlight people.  This one is pure, unadulterated shock value, and for someone as desensitized to horror nonsense as I to be jumping up and down in his living room and cheering after experiencing the disbelief of seeing the lengths this picture will go to offend is to say this just may be the best thing of its kind since Peter Jackson’s masterpiece Dead Alive.  If you like this kind of thing and you disagree, then you are a stupid poop-face.

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Straight-to-DVD Corner with Tonn Slingdog: We Have a Winner!

Breaking my streak of unwatchable DTV horror, I discovered a movie called Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, a kind of anti-Buffy movie.  Jack Brooks is the world’s worst plumber with a massive anger management problem, and he’s played with giddy, aggravated energy by the likeable Trevor Matthews. His family was killed by a monster, and he’s never gotten past his inability to have done anything about it.  His science teacher (most of the movie takes place in a high school, although it seems to be a night class–all the students dress like they are still in high school, circa 1986, but they are all clearly too old to actually be in high school) asks him to fix a plumbing problem at his creepy new house, and Jack unwittingly unleashes a possessed black heart of evil which possesses the science teacher, slowly turning him into a monster not-so-gently reminiscent of the Chet monster of Weird Science. 

Continue reading Straight-to-DVD Corner with Tonn Slingdog: We Have a Winner!

Straight-to-DVD Corner with Todd: Botched…Again!

I’m sort of surprised at how much luck I’m having with straight-to-video horror DVD’s lately.  Generally, I’ve got to wade through four or five awful ones before I get to a decent one, but lately the ratio has been much better.  The Cottage, a British horror-comedy starring Andy Serkis, is a tightly constructed and hilarious take on the slasher genre.  I suppose it was Shaun of the Dead that ushered in a new wave of British horror-comedy, and while that was the only one to get a theatrical release Stateside, the rest of ’em are nothing to scoff at (check out the corporate retreat slasher comedy Severance as well, you’re guaranteed a good time if horror-comedy is your thing.) 

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Straight-to-DVD Corner with Todd: Zombie Sequel Exception

As I believe I mentioned on one of the last Straight-to-DVD Corner posts, the straight-to-video sequels of theatrical releases (such as The Butterfly Effect 2, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer) are never as much fun as the franchises from which they were born (and I realize that the originals of the sequels I just listed were not particularly fantastic, but all were fun for what they were.  So leave me alone about it.  Seriously.  Get off my back.)  But I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if I didn’t find an exception to my little rule (not that I’m saying anything bad about monkeys, I would consider myself lucky to be the uncle of any sort of primate, except maybe the baboon because those guys seem particularly dangerous.)

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Straight-to-DVD Corner with Todd: Too Good For DVD

When it comes to shit that gets dumped on video, most of the time you can see why.  If it’s action, you’ve got your Seagal movies, Snipes movies, Van Damme movies, and those odd Jason Statham movies that come out in between his theatrical releases.  All are junk.  (The Seagal movies are a great source of guilty pleasure because each one is a greater trainwreck than the last one…trainwrecks beyond imagination.)  And then you’ve got your thrillers with Morgan Freeman or Christian Slater or even Gene Hackman these days.  It’s always clear why they are not in the theater, usually because their plot lines are indecipherable and the movies are just plain boring (even more so than the boring shit they actually do release in the theater) or, you know, it’s because they star Christian Slater.  As far as I can tell, the only genre that provides little gems in the straight-to-video market is the horror genre.  It’s tricky to navigate, of course, because there are also more unwatchable DIY movies in the horror genre than any other. 

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