After about thirty minutes of filler and scenes from the past films from both franchises, the basic premise of “Gingerdead Man Vs. Evil Bong” becomes Evil Bong playing heroine while Gingerdead Man is the villain. The main character from Evil Bong has opened up a bong store, while the surviving character from “Gingerdead Man” has opened up a popular bakery down the street.
The best action movie released all year, “Bounty Killer,” finally comes to DVD and Blu-Ray, as director Henry Saine delivers action fans a pulpy apocalyptic thriller worthy of a large fan base. “Bounty Killer” is set in the future where corporations are now enemy number one and have laid waste to civilization with their greed. The government has sent a slew of skilled and crafty bounty killers to hunt down and take down corporate executives daring to run away with their corporation’s profits.
Director Darren Lynn Bousman’s “The Devil’s Carnival” is a movie that made me think I should probably give “Repo! The Genetic Opera” another chance. Since its release, “Repo!” has apparently become a road show in the vein of “Rocky Horror,” and “The Devil’s Carnival” seeks to carry that success further. I sought out Bousman’s hour long film anxiously on the internet, and after watching it on Netflix, I still can’t stop raving about it. It’s a dark, mature, often brilliant look at the age old tale of lost souls and the devil’s efforts to lure them in to his den of sins and eternal torment. Three souls on the verge of death enter in to hell’s carnival and are put to the test. Lucifer is the ring master of this wicked carnival, and with his trio of minions, tries to test the revolve of these lost individuals.
I remember the summer of 1993 fondly. It was the year I went to see the “Coneheads” movie and recall thinking back to the release of “Hocus Pocus” wondering why it wasn’t slated for an October release. Disney is usually smart with release dates, and “Hocus Pocus” ended up becoming one of the most revered holiday classics of all time. For Disney-philes, “Hocus Pocus” has enough menace to be considered a horror movie, but not so much where it’s impossible for the kids to watch. Twenty years later, “Hocus Pocus” is that classic horror film for kids that has yet to show its age at all, even when you consider adorable Thora Birch turned in to a gorgeous woman many years later. “Hocus Pocus” hearkens back to the most entertaining element of the Halloween season: the threat of witches.
It’s amazing how James Wan once went from the man who brought us movies about a maniac torturing people to one of the most horrifying ghost tales ever brought to the big screen. “The Conjuring” lives up to its hype as a slow boil and immensely scary supernatural tale about an average family terrorized by a vicious demonic entity that’s intent on ruining their foundation from the inside out.
I’m sure National Geographic would love viewers to believe that “American Blackout” is exactly what would happen during a week long black out in America, but while the film itself is an entertaining horror film, it’s played mostly for shock value. Truly, “American Blackout” is fact based, presenting facts about our current emergency preparedness in America, but the narrative plays it to extremes. In either case, “American Blackout” does offer the notion that we’re screwed if we ever had a national catastrophe. Even in 2003 when the entire North American grid went dark, the US Government didn’t change their system, and won’t invest time in fortifying the power grid for the sake of emergencies.
Director Jim Wynorski offers up a sometimes clever, but inferior follow up to the original Robert Englund film, that doesn’t really advance the narrative so much as it treads water. Rather than explore the themes of the apocalypse, and the eventual war of good and evil dictated by the hotline, we’re once again subjected to a tale about the hotline wreaking havoc.