The nineties were filled with superheroes created by lab accidents or green ooze, and Toxie was one of the better ones. You figure turning one of the most gruesome cult movies of all time in to a PG rated cartoon would be disastrous, but “Toxic Crusaders” actually works well. It’s a fun and funny take on the original source material that embraces all the madness and absurdity of the Troma movie series, and I find it to be a great little companion piece to the original film.
“The Gallows” watches like a really bad “Fear Street” novel. If it were written by RL Stine at gun point. It’s beyond me that “The Gallows” managed to achieve a wide North American theatrical release with a pretty good ad campaign all around. Meanwhile, “It Follows,” a brilliant horror offering, had to rely on word of mouth. Beneath the hype “The Gallows” is a brutally boring and unscary attempt to cash in on the found footage fad that reaches the scares you’d find in a normal young adult novel. And I am being kind, since even young adult novels can often achieve some semblance of suspense and tension when they want to. “The Gallows” however is a forgettable and downright stupid effort that lacks in brains, common sense, and general creativity.
Maurice Devereaux’s “Slashers” is that satire that is right up there with “Dawn of the Dead” and “Battle Royale” in how is explores an element of our society that warrants a poking. “Slashers” is an often absurd commentary on the extremes our society is willing to go for entertainment, and how television continues evolving to new extremes to whet the appetites of a society gradually warped by violence. First and foremost, “Slashers” is a horror slasher comedy, but it has a good time mocking the reality show trend of the early aughts. “Slashers” is set in a universe where Japan has produced its highest rated game show of all time. Said game show is called “Slashers” where a group of people volunteer to run through an obstacle course and be hunted down by knife wielding maniacs that brutally murder them on air.
Gloria, a single mom with a simple life, meets Michel and they go out for dinner during which he begins a con on her. After a one-night stand, she lends him money to help keep his business afloat. Little does she know, he spends it at a bar as she goes looking for him. She finds him and convinces him to keep her around. Together, they con women out of their money by seducing them as a brother and sister duo. Gloria’s jealous soon rears its ugly head and turns to violence and murder. The two then continue their romance and their evolution towards total chaos.
Even as a kid who pretty much watched anything that was on TV, I fondly remember watching “Ticks” when I was ten, and couldn’t get over how delightfully bad it was. Today, it’s still bad, but more in the so bad its good arena. It pretty much is a monster movie centered on giant ticks that act a lot like the face huggers from “Aliens.” In fact “Ticks” really is “Attack of the Facehuggers,” except these face huggers suck on human blood and don’t really have a queen of their very own. They do however spend the majority of their time chasing around Seth Green and Alfonso Ribiero, so you can’t call it a waste of time. Plus, anything featuring the gorgeous Rosalind Allen is worth a watch.
It’s unusual that a sequel to a horror film would suddenly switch formats to an anthology, but horror anthologies are all the rage these days. What were once reserved for horror heavyweights like Romero, Savini, and Zemeckis, are now platforms for rising up and comers of the indie film world. I’m glad that these movies are allowing indie filmmakers to show off their short films, as there is a treasure trove of short horror films out there that almost never get seen by a wide audience. Thankfully you don’t have to see the first film to enjoy the sequel, since it basically bears no connections to the original narrative. This time, it’s an anthology of short horror segments with the recurring theme of ghosts and demons.
Justine joins Alejandro’s social activists group after seeing that they had real results at her university getting janitors health coverage. Soon she finds herself going to the Amazon forest in Peru to save a small village from being destroyed by a company wanting the natural gas found under the area they occupy. The group goes to Peru, does their thing, and then heads back home. However, they do not make it home as their plane crashes in the Amazon. A part of the group dies in the crash in various horrible ways. As the survivors escape the wreckage, the villagers they came to save attack them killing a few more and taking the six last survivors with them. It quickly becomes clear that the captives are meant to be breakfast, lunch, and dinner as the first member is dispatched gruesomely and cooked.