Body Double - Brian De Palma - 1984

★★★-Body Double. An old favorite from 1984, a real banner year for trash films, aka my brand. Love a neo-noir. I was a Brian De Palma super fan, but fear I've outgrown him. Didn't quite like it as much as I did as a younger person. Last saw it around 20 years ago. 

Gist is one Jake Scully (played by Bill Maher lookalike Craig Wasson) is an out-of-work actor who is going through a rough patch in his life after catching his girlfriend cheating on him. However, things turn around when he moves into a new apartment sublet by a new actor buddy (played by Gregg Henry whose still around, most notably playing Peter Quill's [aka Star-Lord] grandfather in the Guardians of the Galaxy flicks) and becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman (played by Deborah Shelton, whom I've not seen in anything else) who does nightly sexy dancing from the window of her nearby home. While creeping on her, he sees another uglier creep and grows concerned, eventually witnessing the woman's murder. Which is all to say that main creep dude becomes entangled in a web of deceit and danger as he investigates the murder and attempts to protect the woman he has been spying on. You know, typical thriller stuff. Along the way, he meets a pornographic actress named Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) who helps him in his investigation after figuring out she was involved. 

The flick is known for its stylish direction, suspenseful plot, and references to other films, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo. It was apparently controversial at the time of its release due to its explicit content which involves the porn industry, however, the peeping stuff is more unsettling these days.

Overall, Body Double is a tense and visually stunning thriller that showcases De Palma's distinctive style and flair for suspense. However, the plot is ludicrous and features extra sleaze. The last 20 minutes are comically outrageous. It's not nearly as great as I remembered. 

Quick shoutout to Barbara Crampton. She's one of my faves. You might remember from various Stuart Gordon movies like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Castlefreak. Also the Ti West movie You're Next. 

This is her big screen debut. She's naked for the entirety of her performance. Also, Dennis Franz from NYPD Blue plays a bit part. He's an asshole B-movie director. 

Castle Freak - Stuart Gordon - 1995

★★ - Real bummer of a movie. Son dies and daughter is blinded when Jeffrey Combs’s character gets hammered and crashes with them in the car. He then inherits a castle, which he hopes will reignite his and Barbara Crampton’s sex life. But, alas, the castle comes with a freak. 

Metaphor horror. Freak’s dick is cut off. Jeffrey Combs, who moves into the castle with the freak, isn’t having sex (until he brings home a prostitute that the freak kills). They're lives are parallel. JK. This movie is just nuts. 

Really not fun scene towards the end when the naked, penisless freak gets rapey with the blind girl who looks to be a child. I don't want to see that shit. Not my favorite.

Superhost is the worst movie of all time

Superhost. “This episode is the most special episode yet! Be sure to like and subscribe as we hunt down your favorite host, Teddy. First impressions of this place are not good. There is blood EVERYWHERE and I found a dead body in the basement. Absolutely zero stars.” That shit is pretty funny. This movie though, uuuugggghhhhh. Not my cup of tea. Though it has a 92% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomato. So what do I know? Judge for yourself if you have access to Shudder. 

Gist is that a couple of influencers with a travel vlog do what they do whilst stressing about their dwindling follower count. They decide to start creating content focused around their "superhost," Rebecca, who is out of her fucking mind and really wants a great review. Everything as far as plot goes hinges on them having shit cell service. But they have good enough WiFi to upload videos. Okay.

Directed by one Brandon Christensen who also did the movies Z and Still/Born. The movie stars Sara Canning (Claire) and Osric Chau (Teddy) as the sloggers, and Gracie Gillam as the psycho Rebecca. Gillam, who also goes by Gracie Phipps it appears, looks and carries herself like a girl I boned back in the day. The girl I knew wasn't nearly as insane, to my knowledge. But this fucked with me for some reason. 

Anyway, the always lovely and talented Barbara Crampton shows up in the flick too for what I assume was a half-day of filming. MVP is sort of a toss-up between Chau and Gillam who are both more than serviceable if over-the-top.   

Acting is solid all around. The crazy chick is believably insane, the female lead is a major buzzkill, and the Asian guy is a huge bitch. They are all super good in these roles.   

Glad I don’t have to care a lot about my number of followers is all I’ve got to say. Looks way stressful and fucking terrible, being an influencer who depends on that shit. Legit sad. 

I had a cousin who was a YouTube influencer who was like this, and I thought it was pretty pathetic. But what do I know with my sub-300 Instagram followers? I like using YouTube and blogging and posting photos and such, obviously, but I do it more for me and my friends and don’t have to worry about making a living at it, with all my high-level marketable skills and all (I kid [sort of]). 

Also, this lady, not marriage material. Yeah, she cute, but fucking with someone else’s livelihood for followers and likes is low as fuck. Now the host did end up being crazy, but that is beside the point. The chick he wants to marry, we see, has a track record of this. I just can’t get over how little I respect this dude’s character. Think about what you want out of life and a partner, dipshit. He can barely even go downstairs to check out strange noises and shit. This dude needs to learn how to be a fucking man. Of course she doesn’t really say yes by the way. As you can guess, the rest of their video is bound to be stellar.   

A lot of bad horror movie decisions. Idiot logic like going back to the house instead of the car because the killer might be waiting on them even though the house is monitored by surveillance cameras and locked via codes she provides. They had so many opportunities to run when they were able-bodied, but the dude, as been established, is a bitch. Also, there is a security system they could have set off to get the police there but they didn’t. I guess if the killer had remote access or something, but, again, no cell reception. They waited too long though and she was able to turn it off with a fob. Could have hit the panic button, but these two don’t want to live. I feel like this is on-brand for them though and they get got because of it. Fucking noobs.  

Chopping Mall is the worst movie of all time

Chopping Mall. Let's send these fuckers a Rambo-gram. It is bad. Also, it is very bad. Not a single chop was made in this film. Was pretty sure they came up with the name of the movie, which is amazing, and then built a film around it. That, however, was not the case. Laser Mall or Fire-Extinguisher Throwing Robots Mall doesn't have the same ring to it. But yeah, worst movie of all time.

Gist of the movie is a shopping mall installs a trio of robots to police the mall at night, killing anyone that isn't an employee that is there over night. But them shits malfunction and then just kill anyone in the mall. Alright to kill anyone breaks in in this universe. Killing employees of the mall that are there to bone in a furniture store, that shit is fucked up and wrong though. Instead of smoking cigarettes and drinking, though, post-coital activities for these kids includes shooting at robots trying to kill them and dying. The robots malfunction after the building gets struck by the infamous blue lightning, ever present in the 1980s, which gets featured a lot in electrocution scenes in this flick.

Directed by one Jim Wynorski, a guy out of the Roger Corman school of film making, has over 150 titles to his name. Kelli Maroney, who plays the part of Alison, and Tony O'Dell, as Ferdy, are the survivors who are notably the only pair of "teens" that don't get it on. O'Dell is one of the Cobra Kai punks in The Karate Kid and is also in the YouTube spinoff Cobra Kai. You may recognize Maroney from Fast Times at Ridgemont High or as one of the leads in dope 80s horror flick Night of the Comet which I'm going to have to rewatch. Director Wynorski claims to have cast her because he wanted to date her. That is one way to do it, I guess. Get a Dick Miller cameo. He was the guy that knew what gremlins were in the movie Gremlins. There are a couple attractive ladies in the film who have a little bit of gratuitous nudity but the only one I recognized was Barbara Crampton who is horror royalty in my book. She was the lead chick in Re-Animator and Castle Freak and more recently was in You're Next. She is great and very beautiful but was pretty annoying in this flick. She completely gets herself killed in a grossly unnecessary way. Her and the other girls are on their way out of the mall via the air duct but she keeps saying shit like, "my boyfriend needs me, I have to go help him!" She tries and immediately gets herself killed although the dudes have the situation sort of in hand at that point.

There is this raging asshole who is boning the mall owner's daughter who I thought was funny as a character. This was the guy with the mullet played by one John Terlesky. Oh he is over-the-top unlikable and offensive. You don't mind when he gets killed after going out to get the lady he just boned smokes out of an old fashioned cigarette machine. He has a super solid one-liner to the robots when they ask for his badge which is what I think set them off to rampage. When he shows them his badge he tells it "Klaatu barada nikto" which was the phrase used to stop Gort, the robot in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, from destroying the world. It was also the line that Bruce Campbell flubs when he picks up the Book of the Dead in Army of Darkness which I am sure is also a reference to the Cold War-era film. This guy's girl's death is pretty solid, too. She gets shot with a laser and her head explodes. Always solid.

With a brief 77 minute run time, I still felt they could have tightened this movie up. Not a great sign. Also, nothing with the killer robots really makes sense. Deploying killer robots to work security at the mall, what could happen, am I right? Pity, that this movie isn't more watchable with a cast that includes Crampton and Maroney. Maroney, I guess, wins the movie though there really aren't what you would call winners here. She also has the worst camel toe I have ever seen in khakis of all things. It is fucking crazy. Googling that I see there was a How Did This Get Made? where this phenomenon in the movie was discussed. Will need to give that a whirl.

Re-Animator is the greatest film of all time

Re-Animator. Remember seeing bits of it as a very small child but didn't know what it was for close to a decade. Remember the headless guy wearing a fake plastic head (why wouldn't he just put his real head back on if he was going to go through all the trouble?) and the scene where the body puts the head between the chick's legs to commit a sex crime. This highly disturbed me but I remembered it though had no idea what the name of the movie was. That was until 1999 when American Beauty came out and sex offender Kevin Spacey talks about that scene with another character. "Oh yeah, that's the name of that movie," I thought. Years went by before I finally watched it all the way through. That came in 2007 when I was in grad school living with a bunch of weird kids in a home like the one the two main characters share in the flick. Only it was the international house, no idea how I ended up there, and there were like eight of us. And no one was banging the Dean's daughter, at least in our house, to my knowledge. But I related to these adult students out there doing their research while on financial aid and all that. Special Edition of the movie had just been released. Bought it on a whim with money I didn't have. Needed to see that shit. Came with a glowing highlighter that looked like a syringe. Came in handy as I was in grad school and all. Humble brag. But I an awful student. Complain-a-brag. Although it disturbed me even more as an adult with that sex crime and all. But overall it was weirder and better than I expected. In fact, greatest film of all time.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Perfectly mixing humor and horror, the only thing more effective than Re-Animator's gory scares are its dry, deadpan jokes.

Pros: Totally groundbreaking in terms of gore. Jeffrey Combs is over-the-top and makes the film with his odd hilarity. Barbara Crampton is a pretty lady (unfortunately, bad sexual things happen to her). The zombies and kills are pretty solid. As are the performances. Started the whole HP Lovecraft renaissance (I don't know enough about him to say this for sure but I'm pretty sure he was an antisemite and without him we wouldn't have Scientology so maybe not such a good thing... But Cthulhu!).

Cons: Some disturbing sexual stuff. Also some animal violence.

Here's the gist... Medical student Herbert West, played expertly by Jeffrey Combs, creates a serum that reanimates dead brain tissue. His roommate, one Dan Cain played by Bruce Abbott, and his roommate's girlfriend, the daughter of the Dean, Megan played by the lovely Barbara Crampton, eventually discover that West has killed and is experimenting on Cain's dead cat, bringing it back to life. Impressed, Cain goes to the Dean with the research which gets his student loan revoked and West kicked out of school resulting in them sneaking into the morgue to bring a corpse back to life. Once the corpse kills the Dean, their medical professor, Dr. Carl Hill played by David Gale, who is jealous of West and Cain , West for his invention and Cain because he wants to bone Crampton, tries to steal the serum which gets him killed. For some reason West decides to bring Hill back which results in him immediately attacking West and creating his own undead army, resulting in some wild ass shit.

Directed by Stuart Gordon who did go on to do some other shit, most notably Castle Freak, he hasn't directed a film in over a decade, which is fucking bananas. Regardless, "creator of Re-Animator" will surely be on his tombstone, which sure as shit is nothing to be ashamed of. Loosely based on the 1922 Lovecraft novelette Herbert West–Reanimator, it was originally supposed to a theatrical stage production which all the actors rehearsed for, knowing their roles extremely well that totally shows through in their various performances, but was revised as a television pilot before getting retooled into a feature film at the last minute.

Some shit I'm not about in this movie is that cat that is dead in the fridge is a real dead cat. Way too much for my sensitive ass. I'm hopeful it died naturally and what have you. But still. No like. I love little kitties, especially my Richard Parker. West, who did the killing, is just like "what are you doing in my room" when they catch him. They are all "what the fuck, bro, you killed my cat" but don't really flip out like they should, sort of buying his story about her getting her head stuck in a jar and suffocating. I'd probably be throwing him out of the house forcibly if I were in said situation. 

Several candidates for the best line. One comes when Hill is going on about how humans are "dead" after the brain has been depleted of oxygen for 11 minutes or whatever and West is getting all pissed, which would be weird. As Hill goes on, West keeps snapping pencils, pissing Hill off and breaking his concentration every time he does it. Finally, raging, screams out, "Mr. West, I suggest you get yourself a pen!" Or when West finally kills Hill and tells Cain "I had to kill him." Cain: "He's dead?" West: "Not anymore." But my fave is when the disembodied head of Hill is talking shit to West about how he is going to win the Nobel Prize by stealing West's invention. West has two killer lines here. They are: "Who is going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow." Burn.

Best kill, for me, is not only the most gruesome, it's also the most satisfying. It's the one at the endish when the Dean, a crazed reanimated corpse himself, smashes Hill's head with his bare hands, ripping it apart at the eye sockets, and then throws it against the wall for good measure. The one with Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s real stunt double, the beast they turn in the morgue played by one Peter Kent, is also pretty solid. After he kills the Dean, Combs takes one of those surgery buzz saw things and puts it through his chest.

Sorry

Best scene is not the most memorable. Most memorable you know before I even mention it. It's the one where Hill's decapitated head goes down on a screaming Crampton. It's a hard scene to watch. First, the Dean, her father, now undead, plops her onto a gurney and removes her clothing so that that could happen. Then it does and she is fucking screaming as he licks his way down from her breasts to her vagina before it finally stops. It is fucked. If you listen to the audio commentary for the movie everyone--the one I listened to featured stars Abbott, Combs, Crampton, Robert Sampson who plays the Dean, and producer Brian Yuzna. In it Sampson said that Gale "felt spiritually bereft" after the scene and expressed how awful the whole thing made him feel. His wife, however, didn't think he felt bad enough according to Yuzna who said "after the first screening she split on him" and never came home after seeing the film. That, IMO, though, is not the best scene. That would be when West, Cain, and Megan think they have the upper hand on Hill and are about to put an end to his out of control murder spree and what not when Hill reveals that he has reanimated all the corpses in the morgue and lobotomized them to better control their minds. All hell breaks loose here. Shit gets cray with gore and chaos everywhere. Easily my favorite scene in the movie. And though it is something you know is going to happen, it still comes as sort of a surprise with the way they set it up. Spoiler. But I shan't give away how it concludes which you can probably figure out.

Combs is the obvious choice for MVP though Gale gives him a run for his money. Also Crampton, like Combs, has some real horror chops and is great in this, but she is no Combs. Honestly, I think everyone is great in this as Abbott is pretty much perfect too. But it is Combs that delivers all the great one-liners and is so fucking believably weird and neurotic. Perfect creep, this guy, and has been used as such in every film he's been in ever since. Just saw him do his dog and pony show in the show Stan Against Evil which I highly recommend. It's a show about these a retired New Hampshire sheriff, played by John C. McGinley who was Dr. Cox on Scrubs, who teams up with his replacement, a lovely actress I've never seen before named Janet Varney, to battle evil in their tiny New England town. Made me love it even more that they bring in people like Combs and other guest stars from cult horror flicks. Love that guy. Also, this movie.