As kids who grew up with on TV, no cable, and a selection of recorded VHS tapes, my brother and I were given only a limited amount of movies to watch and as such “Tremors” was one of our favorite bad horror movies to put in before we went to sleep. It had monsters, laughs, no scares, and enough gore to whet our whistles, and even at a young age it was so joyously corny we had fun. “Tremors” is a monster movie that is all around about as high quality as “Night of the Lepus,” but with enough camp to keep it running as a nineties schlock spectacular with corny monsters, a cheesy ending, and a premise that granted it three equally corny sequels, and a short lived TV series.
Tag Archives: Monsters
Altitude (2010)
One of the elements I truly loved about “Altitude” is that director Kaare Andrews manages to convey a sense of isolation in the open skies. He constantly zooms back upon open spaces and landing strips mountain ranges, all of which are dwarfed when the people inside the small aircraft find themselves in the middle of a mysterious nowhere land in the sky being terrorized by unexplained phenomenon threatening to throw them in to oblivion. Andrews who has a past in comic books really knows how to express a sense of the EC Comics atmosphere where every scene is painted like a graphic novel, especially when the group of friends venture in to the blue sky to be confronted with a black cloud that brings them in to an endless abyss of lightning, darkness, and zero answers for survival.
Psycho Shark (2009)
At only a little over an hour long, “Psycho Shark” (or as it’s being called in some circles “Jaws in Japan”) is probably one of the zaniest most deliriously bad movies I’ve ever come across mainly for its wacky directing style. Not much in this movie makes sense and director Hijiri John is such a fan of holding takes, that some shots are awkward. Any competent director will cringe at his knack for shooting people only below the waist and at one point holds a shot in the sand for over a minute after his actresses have left the frame. But take my advice, wait a while, be patient because I guarantee you by the second half… absolutely nothing will have happened. Don’t get me wrong, I love movies about frolicking Japanese girls, but if it’s a horror movie only a little bit over an hour, then you have to have some sense of forward progression in plot and this has none of it.
Rogue (2007)
Personally I’m one who thought Greg McLean’s torture porn thriller “Wolf Creek” was one of the most bloated overrated and disgusting movies I’ve ever seen. For a guy whose seen stuff like “Cannibal Holocaust,” McLean’s picture left me feeling dirty and often times like I was enduring something extremely painful, and not intentionally. Whatever McLean had in mind for that piece of swill, he accomplished it apparently. “Rogue” doesn’t leave the Australian outback and this time focuses more on a claustrophobic setting involving stranded tourists on a creaky boat being stalked by a gigantic killer Crocodile.
Killer Cup 2: The Killer Cups Strike Back! (2004)
Oh god! They made a sequel! And it’s longer this time! A group of young people are going on a camping trip and have taken along the bare essentials like food, water, and styrofoam cups! The foreshadowing here is about as clunky as you’d expect with one of the characters making a point of declaring how big one of the cups are. Apparently it’s the master cup or chief general cup. In either case, what begins as a night of drinking and joking around (one of the campers even pretends to be bitten by the cup in a high-larious “gotcha” moment), soon all of the cups band together to strike back at the partiers and inflict carnage upon them.
Killer Cup (2002)
“Killer Cup” is about killer cups! What? You were expecting more? Alright fine! A.Normale’s short horror film entitled “Killer Cup” is pretty much a situation about what you see being what you get. Set to an obviously not copyrighted score by Rob Zombie, “Killer Cup” sets down at any school in the world where we view the plight of the Styrofoam cups used for tearing, smoker’s ashes, sunflower seeds and the like. Clearly, this is Michael Moore’s prologue to an upcoming environmental documentary right?
Halloweentown (1998)
Sure, this is a Halloween oriented film that isn’t scary, or creepy, or violent, or even remotely menacing and sure it’s a premise we’ve seen trotted out in “Sabrina The Teenage Witch,” “Twitches,” and “Buffy,” but deep down it’s a true Halloween movie and one you can watch be you a child or an adult looking for a good time, and I manage to come back to it every year because it’s such a fun time to be had for all.