DONKEY PUNCH (2008)

KIDS TODAY ARE SO DARN SERIOUS!

Call it The Real World: Death Yacht, I like that. That's about right too - a bunch of semi-hot spoiled British brats go out on a boat and frolic and make out and force you to activate your subtitles option just to make out what they're mumbling. Then something bad happens centered around the titular "donkey punch," a quick shot to the back of the head during anal sex for those of you who don't know (and God bless you), and suddenly the kids turn on each other, because, hey, that's what spoiled kids do. And if you thought Paris and Nicole had a falling out, you ain't seen nothing til you've seen Nigel and Ian and Emma going at it here. Comparisons to KNIFE IN THE WATER, DEAD CALM or, jeesus, any good movie are completely unjustified - this is basically THE RULES OF ATTRACTION crossed with BATTLE ROYALE if MTV filmed it. But hey, the cast is pretty and they get naked, so if you don't expect Sir John Gielgud and Kate Winslet to show up with an axe, you should have a good time for an hour and a half. If only the cast of Jersey Shore would start killing each other off like this...

SHE'S UP FOR A LITTLE DONKEY PUNCH OR TWO.

HAND IN GLOVE, THE SUN SHINES OUT OF OUR BEHINDS...

THE CRAWLERS (1990)

TROLL 2 fans, listen up! THE CRAWLERS was originally known as TROLL 3, and if you thought TROLL 2 had nothing to do with trolls, well, TROLL 3 has even less. At least TROLL 2 had goblins, or shitty goblin-like puppets. TROLL 3’s got roots and trees. Seriously. That’s what we’re up against here. It’s like M. Night Shamalyan’s THE HAPPENING only without Zooey Deschanel. Waitaminnit, that’s an improvement, right?

JUST CALM DOWN THERE, JUNIOR. NOBODY GETS NEKKID IN THE CRAWLERS.

Let’s be honest. THE CRAWLERS sucks. Hard. But so did TROLL 2, and that’s got something of a cult following now BECAUSE of its hard suckiness. So where’s the love for THE CRAWLERS? Well I, for one, bet it would get a lot more attention – and a DVD release – if it were actually called TROLL 3 to capitalize on the fans of 1 and 2. Or maybe they could market it as "THE HAPPENING without Zooey Deschanel.” Either way, you just KNOW this movie’s gonna be fun when its default internet synopsis goes like this:

“Evil nuclear power plant manager is dumping nuclear waste in a forest. People start getting killed. Drunken PhD in power plant starts tracking radiation in the forest. More people killed. Newspaper reporter and local boy and girl start investigating. Still more people killed. Townspeople try to remove nuclear waste. Yet more people killed. EPA cleans up the mess with bulldozers.”

Really? Is it THAT simple? No trolls, no goblins, no Nilbogs, and not even things that fucking crawl? And it’s all cleaned up by the EPA with bulldozers? How can you possibly fill 90 minutes with THAT? Well shit, if Dana Carvey can make a full-length film, then surely these kids can stretch out this air-thin plot for an hour and a half, right? Well now, let’s see how they did it…

It helps that the first death in the film doesn’t take place until 17 minutes in. Something slithers and, well, CRAWLS through the grass and somehow manages to knock out a girl by grabbing her ankles. Which, if you think about it, probably explains how Vern Troyer gets laid. Mind you, the movie never tells you how these tiny fuckers KILL, but in the movie all the trees started spinning around a lot, so maybe they make their victims so dizzy they pass out. They certainly don’t HARM their victims much, because after Victim 1 falls, she's seen being dragged away without so much as a scratch on her body. Dude, I got two words that would make this all a LOT easier. Form, and Chloro, and not necessarily in that order.

GRANNY JUST HAD TO GO AND FUCK WITH THE FAMILY TREE AGAIN.

Okay, so the IMDB spoiler synopsis has already clued you in as to who is behind these killings – tree roots – and why – evil nuclear power plant droppings are changing the trees into bloodthirsty killers craving human flesh. All that’s left for you is to, y'know, actually buy into this bullshit. In the meantime, you can enjoy the crack makeup department’s gore FX, and the kind of epic bad acting that made TROLL 2 such a hoot. There’s a great sheriff in THE CRAWLERS who’s REAL voice musta sucked so bad because EVERY one of his lines is overdubbed. And that includes such gems as “Ahhh, you kids, you get my GOAT!” Then there’s the evil power plant director himself, who seems to spend his entire day on the phone and, for some reason, can’t seem to stop bobbing up and down every time he delivers a line. I mean, this dude is a living, breathing bobblehead doll.

Thankfully, even plant roots know a shit actor when they see one, so they eventually go after the sheriff, who starts screaming like a schoolgirl when he’s attacked. And for all we know, they might BE the screams of a schoolgirl overdubbed on the audio track. Then we get a low-budget but still pretty damn effective FX shot of a root pushing THROUGH HIS FACE that’s one for the gore hounds. A grandmother gets killed a few minutes later (her screams are overdubbed too), and finally the forest ranger or somebody comes by in a helicopter. And what has to be one of the most outlandish scenes in the entire TROLL trilogy (and if you’ve seen 1 and 2, you KNOW that’s saying something), the plant roots actually ATTACK the helicopter and BRING THE FUCKING HELICOPTER DOWN! Great. Just what we needed. JAWS for the horticulture set.

THERE'S A FUCKING HALF MAN HALF TREE LYING ON THE LAB TABLE, AND THE DUDE IN THE BACK IS MORE INTERESTED IN FINDING PERCOCET IN THE MEDICINE CABINET!

Amazingly enough, the giant radioactive bloodthirsty flesh-craving girl-dragging granny-munching tree roots from Hell are brought to a rather anticlimactic demise when a trio of bulldozers suddenly appears on the scene and simply starts plowing down the forest. So yeah, the threat of complete and total human destruction via plant life is thwarted by a fucking road crew. As to exactly WHY Satan’s root farm is able to drag down a helicopter in flight but turns into Glee Club pansies at the sight of a John Deere remains as much a mystery as why any straight man would ever buy a She and Him CD.

Thankful that the roots have finally been vanquished and peace has been restored to the tiny town despite the death of the sheriff who never used his own voice, our heroine grabs a phone and starts making calls to boys she hasn’t been able to hang out with while all this radioactive plant murder stuff’s been going on. But while she’s chatting on the phone, her Christmas tree, on its own, suddenly begins to shake…

IS THAT A PLANT ROOT IN YOUR EYE OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME, HEH HEH? OH, IT IS A PLANT ROOT...

Sadly for the world, there wasn’t to be a CRAWLERS 2: AWAY IN A MANGLER or even a TROLL 4 for that matter. But then again, in keeping with the spirit of the series, it wouldn’t HAVE to be about trees. It could be about killer spatulas. Or radioactive adult diapers. Whatever, I’d still rent it because it would be a guaranteed good time. Unless Zooey Deschanel was in it. Thank God they haven’t gone THERE yet.

If you’ve seen TROLLS 1 and 2, you owe it to yourself to pick up THE CRAWLERS and fire up that old Hitachi VCR once more. Good crappy B-movie fun with some well-meaning gore, actors deemed too sucky to be in TROLL 2, and a tree taking down a fucking HELICOPTER forgodsake! For that alone, I give it three Kari’s.

FAST FORWARDING TO THE GOOD PARTS

00:17 – Herve Villechaize’s first kill! Death by ankle grab!

00:30 – What happens when you get killed by radioactive tree roots. You become a radioactive girl with skin like tree bark. In other words, Heidi Fleiss.

00:43 – More death by tree root. Or, in this case, overacting.

1:02 – The gore shot. Or what it would look like if a root tried to PUSH its way THROUGH your head. In other words, like Heidi Fleiss.

1:07 – The radioactive roots kill a helpless old grandmother. “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get out of this movie!”

1:22 – The old trite Hollywood cliché scene where a bunch of giant snakelike radioactive completely mobile tree roots grab hold of a helicopter and bring it crashing down to Earth. Really, how many TIMES do we have to see this?

HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981)

LET'S SEE...HOUSE...CHECK. CEMETERY...WELL, NOT SO MUCH.

When stupid people do stupid things and wind up dead because of it, I don't consider that horror. Is there a genre called "Satisfying Darwinism?" Because this film qualifies. This family is so dumb, they make the Palin family reunion look a Mensa convention. There's one scene where the dad tells his son to get away from the door so he can chop it down with an axe. He takes three big swings, lifts back the axe and suddenly finds there's blood on the end of it. So what does he do? Starts furiously chopping at the door even more! Gee, thanks, Dad!

SHE'S GOT A VERY SHARP SENSE OF HUMOR, THAT ONE.

Even by Fulci standards, this blows - nothing really even starts happening until after an hour (and it's 1:27 long so go figure). Even for gorehounds, there's a ton of red syrup but precious little grue. Even the title's wrong. One family tombstone does not a cemetery make. Look, if you want a really scary movie, rent something with Pauly Shore in it.

SUCKS WHEN THE MAKEUP DEPARTMENT RUNS OUT OF MONEY MID-FILM.

WAY SCARIER THAN ANY ZOMBIE.

GOT THERE LONG BEFORE TRUE BLOOD, THANK YOU.

CLASS REUNION MASSACRE (1978)

THE BOX MAKES IT LOOK BLOODY. AND SCARY. AND GORY.

ART DEPARTMENT - 1, VIEWERS - 0.

I never attended any of my own high school reunions. Partially because I moved out of the area as soon as they handed me that diploma, and partially because I had no friends. It’s a good thing I didn’t, too, because shit like this happens more often than you know. You go because you’re curious to find out if the head cheerleader turned out to be a corporate lawyer, a stripper or a mother of three (it was always the latter), but you end up being murdered by a puppet in the gymnasium. Don’t believe me? Watch Class Reunion Massacre.

Go on, just try to. I dare you. It’s a work of cinematic genius, I tell you. Remember how all those obnoxious film students in college couldn’t stop talking shit about that long continuous opening tracking shot in Touch of Evil? Well fuck them, because Class Reunion Massacre has an opening shot just as long. Okay, technically it doesn’t really “track” per se, it just kinda hangs. On a fucking river. Yeah, that’s right, it’s three fucking minutes of footage of a river. Good thing Mr. Welles didn’t live long enough to see it. “This is a lot of shit, you know that,” he’d say, wiping the dribble off his four chins with a Brillo pad. “It’s very unrewarding.”

Finally, after three minutes of Rio Dullo, we get a quote superimposed on the screen. “From out of the darkness, the hand of the redeemer shall appear to punish those who have lived in sin…” and yes, it ends with the ellipsis, as if they couldn’t afford the typesetting needed to finish it. Meanwhile, Keith Emerson’s retarded little brother diddles around on a synthesizer. Suddenly some Butch Patrick wannabe starts walking OUT of the river, and for the first time in five minutes we’ve got ACTION baby. Not much action, mind you, but at this point, we’ll take what we can get. Shit, this movie’s already less interesting than a REAL high school reunion, and that’s saying something.

TWO ELLIPSES BACK TO BACK! FUCK! ART DEPARTMENT - 1. PROOFREADING DEPARTMENT - MINUS 3.

Butchie walks out of the river, gets on a bus, and goes to some religious school where he’s a choir boy or something. As he changes into his choir boy uniform in the boys locker room – relax, girls, this ain’t Porky’s – his classmates start telling a joke about a sailor and a whore but we never get to hear the punch line because somewhere else someone’s just shot the pool boy. Are you following all this? Is it gonna be on the test?

Okay, good, now put all that in the back of your mind, because you’ll never need it again. Seriously. For the next 30 minutes, we follow a small group of alumni preparing for their reunion. Hence the title of the movie, finally. There’s the spoiled thespian, the serious scholar, there’s even a lesbian. Meanwhile, some unknown killer type is cutting all their photos from a yearbook and making clay masks of their faces. Hey, is this gonna be like that old Twilight Zone episode? Finally, the alums show up at the old school itself, and the strange janitor who answers the doors doesn’t seem to know there’s gonna be a reunion at all. Despite the MASSIVE FUCKING BANNER that says “Welcome Class of 1967” hanging over the entryway. And the HUGE FUCKING PARTY TABLE decked out in orange and red ribbons. Nope, sorry, didn’t get the email. Or however they communicated back then. Still, there are only six alums who show up for this reunion, and they have no idea who invited them. But that doesn’t seem to bother ‘em much, so they do what classmates who haven’t seen each other in 20 years should do. They start fucking. “Nothing changes,” one suave dude says and plants a wet one on some dumb blonde who was in his science class once. You think we were horny back then? Just wait’ll you see what 20 years and a life of staring at a river will do to a man.

AWW HELL YA, BABY! YA'LL KNOW WHAT'S ABOUT TO GO DOWN HERE, YO!

It ain’t long before things start getting all wonky, and I don’t mean sexual. The dumb blonde finds the first victim, a former janitor who’s been dead so long a family of maggots is making a new home in his neck. In a rare moment of horror film lucidity, they actually DO try to immediately leave, but in a not-so-rare moment of horror film cliché, all the windows and doors are suddenly barred shut and locked, obviously by someone who managed to do all that construction and welding work in a few short minutes without so much as a sound. Oh yeah, and now there’s some creepy guy outside dressed like the K-Mart Halloween Department version of Death harassing them through the fence with a big plastic sickle. Oh, the horror! Still, I’d take this over more footage of that fucking river.

Well, I think you can guess how the rest of this movie goes. Like Ten Little Indians only four short, each of our alums gets picked off one by one in clever ways. One girl gets killed in super slo-mo by a crazed hunter who looks like the bastard son of Brad Dourif and the bassist from Black Oak Arkansas. The former high school quarterback gets offed by a Bunsen burner and a remote controlled Howdy Doody puppet. And then there’s the killer himself, obviously a failed drama student whose put on a few pounds in those unkind post-graduation twenty years, who dresses like Bozo the Clown and acts like Nicolas Cage on a heroin binge. “The time has come to serve yourself!” he emotes while disposing of the class bimbo by drowning her in a sink, but not before giving us some completely unnecessary (but always welcome) wet T-shirt action. Seriously, though, this chick has GOT to be the single weakest girl ever killed in a horror film. Not only did she get killed by a clown, she got killed in a fucking SINK by an overweight, effeminate, OVERACTING clown. That’s just embarrassing.

Y’know, now that I think about it, if I ever start a rock band, I think I’m going to call it Death By Clown. It’s got a nice ring to it.

IT'S NOT THE CLOWN MAKEUP THAT'S SCARY. IT'S THAT MYSTERIOUS BLUE SPOT ON HIS CHIN. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?

More death ensue, some by remote-controlled puppets, and every time someone gets killed, Keith Emerson has an epileptic fit on the soundtrack. By the time this film ends, the opening quote is finished, and we finally understand why the kid came out of the river thanks to a strange, spiritual conclusion which tries hard to turn this brave little slasher into something far, far more meaningful. Does it succeed? Depends on what you’re looking for. There’s very little blood in Class Reunion Massacre, and not one tit despite two semi-hot and very ditzy blondes that should’ve given up the goods like immediately. The death traps themselves are pretty ingenious, though, in a bloodless Saw kinda way, and some are so ridiculous you swear the filmmakers were so hopped up on Night Train, they make Orson Welles look like a fucking teetotaler on the set of his frozen food commercials. “What is it you want, in the depths of your ignorance?” he’d shout to the overweight, overacting killer clown, before hissing in anger “You are such PESTS!” And any film that can piss off Citizen Kane is okay in my book. Two and a half Kari Wuhrers.

FAST FORWARDING TO THE GOOD PARTS –

00:38 – Ditzy blonde finds dead janitor whose neck is a housing project for maggots. Which means the killer struck last around, oh say, 1973?

00:42 – Death by radio-controlled Howdy Doody puppet with built in Bunsen burner! Memo to Jigsaw and your fancy schmancy Saw death contraptions: Let me know when you wanna play with the big boys.

WHEN THIS KILLS YOU, YOU TRULY SUCK.

00:51 – Why they tell high school quarterbacks to pay attention in science class. And why they tell film score composers not to listen to Emerson Lake and Palmer.

00:54 – Great, the killer in this film is Truman fucking Capote!

1:01 – Death by Clown.

1:12 – Death by Puppet.

1:18 - Death by Llama. Just kidding. Woulda been cool though.