Evil Dead 2

     Although a sequel, this movie seems more like a remake. The first movie (The Evil Dead) was made to be scary and came out rather humorous. Sam Raimi decided to redo the movie, this time trying to make it funny but ultimately came out much scarier. It's basically the same story as the first movie, only done in a much more professional way. Widely successful, it employed better special effects, stranger characters, and a jazzed-up version of the original story about finding the Necronomicon: Book of the Dead and releasing demons that can possess human flesh. 

      Anyway, the story goes like this. Ash and his girlfriend vacation in a small cabin deep in the woods. Ash finds a tape recorder in the cellar, plays the demon resurrection chants, and soon the trees attack and kill his girlfriend Linda. She becomes possessed, he chops her head off with a shovel and buries her. He soon becomes possessed himself, but the rising sun saves him from being possessed for too long as the demons are forced back into the woods by the sunlight. He makes for the bridge, but suspiciously the bridge has been mangled, making an escape out of there impossible. The sun soon sets as Ash tries to make it back to the cabin. 

      We learn that the incantations recited on the tape recorder were made by an archaeologist and his wife. Their daughter is also an archaeologist and has the missing pages of the Necronomicon needed to dispel the evil. Linda soon pops out of her grave and proceeds to torture Ash, so he takes her to the tool shed and gives her the ol' slice and dice with a chainsaw. 

      Now that Linda is out of the way, his own hand becomes possessed and keeps attacking him. He cuts it off puts it in a trash can and sets some books on it so the hand can't get out. Ironically, one of the books he uses is the Ernest Hemingway novel "A Farewell to Arms". 

      Meanwhile, the daughter shows up at the bridge and is met by a hillbilly couple that demands money to show the daughter a trail to the cabin. Still at the cabin, Ash starts losing his mind when all the furniture starts laughing at him, including a demented deer head on the wall (this scene alone is worth watching this movie.) The daughter and the hillbilly couple make it to the cabin and by the looks of it (blood everywhere and a bloody chainsaw in the corner) it appears that Ash has killed her parents, so they throw him down into the fruit cellar. 

      As the daughter listens to the tape recorder, the professor states that his wife had become possessed and he has buried her in the earthen floor of the cellar. Henrietta (the mom) pops up and goes for Ash. He is rescued just in time by the people upstairs. Hillbilly's wife Bobbi Jo freaks and runs into the woods... a VERY bad move. She gets attacked by the trees and dragged through the forest and eventually smushed into a tree. 

      Buford Butthead (Bobbi Jo's hubby) grabs the missing pages and throws them down in the cellar and demands that the others help him look in the woods for his stupid wife. When he's attacked, the others high tail it back to the cabin. Thankfully, he gets too close to the cellar door and Henrietta gets a hold of him and chows down. 

      The missing pages are crucial in dispelling the evil, therefore Ash and Annie (the professor's daughter) must get into the cellar but not before having to kill Henrietta. She mutates into some long-necked monster. Ash uses his chainsaw to sever her head and arms in order to get into the basement. The pages are retrieved from the cellar and evidently, there are three passages that must be recited. One to make the evil appear in the flesh, one to open a rift in time and space, and one to force the evil into the rift. Unfortunately, Annie is killed by Ash's severed hand and only gets to recite the first two passages. 

      The evil appears and is forced into the rift, unfortunately, there is no way to close the rift, so Ash and a few other things (like his car) are sucked into the rift and end up in another dimension. The place he ends up looks very medieval and he's greeted by knights with swords drawn. Some evil bat creature swoops down from the sky. Ash instinctively shoots it down (he's a pro at this by now). The knights are amazed and hail him as a new king. Ash is not amused by this, but it sets the stage for the third movie titled "Army of Darkness" where Ash must fight a war against the "Deadites". 

      Frankly, I found Evil Dead Part 3, better known as "Army of Darkness" to be a terrible movie that can only be enjoyed if you're REALLY into "Three Stooges" type of humor. Stick with Evil Dead 2, it's by far the best out of the whole trilogy. A remake of the original was made in 2013, which bypassed all the humor and went straight for the gore and terror.  Not a bad remake actually, I've definitely seen worse.  A sequel to the remake came out about ten years later that takes place in an apartment complex, completely breaking from the cabin in the woods theme present in all the previous Evil Dead movies.

The Worm Eaters

     Umgar is a strange little German guy who loves his pet worms. He plays with them, builds them little houses, and seems to be able to communicate with them. Umgar also runs a camping site by a lake. The townspeople (the Mayor mostly) want Umgars' land so that they can dry the lake and build condos, so he hides the deed to the property in the worms' playhouse. 

      Soon some German cutie named Heidi comes along and tries to woo Umgar, despite his eccentricities, because she believes that he has money (which he doesn't). She sees that he has a worm fascination and even keeps some of his worms in the kitchen cooking pots, which she discovers and runs away screaming, only to return a few minutes later a calm collected woman who actually agrees to a spaghetti dinner with Umgar which is filled with worms (like we didn't see that coming). After eating these worms that Umgar has collected, a strange red tide has now filled the lake (the red tide is never explained) Heidi then turns into a half-woman/half-worm creature. 

      Some bitchy wife gets some worms in her room/tent service and soon Heidi has company. Apparently, during the red tide, some worms developed into half men/half worms. By the way, the bottom worm half of these dorks is so obviously fake. They look like people with their legs bound up in trash bags. Anyway, these worm men threaten to take Heidi and the bitchy wife, Umgar still wants them as pets and promises to have three other worm women for them so that they can breed and live happily in the lake. 

     Umgar tricks some young people that have been griping that there are no hot dogs at his camp sight into eating some worm-infested hot dogs. They had squirmy worms all over them, so if these dumb dudes are that blind and stupid, I say they deserve to be turned into mutant worms. 

      The worm men come back to collect their worm women. A funny turn of irony is when the worm men catch Umgar with a worm-baited fishing hook and reel him in from his bed to the beach. Before going into the lake, the worm women get Umgar back by making him eat some of his own worms. Soon he changes to a worm man and is trying desperately to get to the lake before he fries in the sun like so many other worms before him. While crossing the road, a truck runs over him and he gets smushed, the end. 

      This was a very comical movie because it's just so way out there. Though I think the main purpose for making this movie is so that they could have lots of gross close-ups of people eating and slurping on live worms. Chewing them up and letting their green slimy guts run down the sides of their mouths. It's quite obvious that they are actually eating real worms too. Not for everyone, but perfect for Cultarama fans.

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things!

     Alan is an obnoxious theater director who brings his acting troupe to a remote island to engage in some black magic tomfoolery. Actually, he's quite a dickhead with a terrible and often macabre sense of humor and delights in cheap pranks. Including rigging the cemetery with live people in graves to scare the shit out of his acting troupe, a truly fun guy to hang with. 

      He convinces the group that they're really gonna dig up a dead body in order to achieve a new level of acting skill ( y'know, for the hell of it). These fake corpses leap out of graves scaring the young actors to test their reactions. Eventually, we learn that to have a fake grave with an actor in it, you have to remove the original resident, in this case, a corpse named Orville. 

      The actors often try to outdo their teacher (impossible because this dude is a walking carnival) and act out a demon resurrection chant that the teacher tried to scare everyone with. Not having the ability to be outdone, he decides to make his relationship with Orville a rather close and disturbing one. He declares him as his new best friend and takes him back to the cabin that these people are staying in. He even stoops to the point of having a mock wedding where he actually marries Orville and even shares a bed for the night. 

      Then suddenly (for no real apparent reason) the dead actually start to rise from their graves. I guess they didn't find his pranks any more amusing than his troupe did. It soon becomes a "Night of the Living Dead" situation with a bunch of weird actors trapped in a cabin surrounded by zombies. They try to get away but are not successful. And as for Alan the demented theater director, he is finally given his comeuppance when Orville comes back to life and eats him. I guess he didn't appreciate being used as a party prop. 

      This campy classic is about an hour's worth of humor with bad jokes and great one-liners and the remaining 30 minutes is your typical zombie horror. Made in 1972, it has some of the grooviest wardrobes I've ever seen. A strange side note that I noticed during the credits, all but two of the actors in the movie used their real names for the characters they played.

Dead Alive

     I'll say it upfront, this movie is very gross and gory, even though it's much more humorous than horrifying. As far as the gore is concerned, this movie actually boasts that it has more blood used than any other movie (this is actually measured by estimating the gallon per second per scene). In fact, the last scene in the movie reportedly used over 7,000 gallons of blood for the final 5-minutes of the movie.  

     Anyway, the movie starts off a little slow but picks up momentum quickly. Some kind of rat bat creature from deep in New Zealand is caught and put in a zoo. Meanwhile, our main character Lionel is dealing with a very weird and domineering mother and a young girl named Paquita that has fallen in love with him. Lionel and Paquita go to the zoo on a date and of course, the mother comes along and hides behind bushes and does other random creepy shit, just to spy on her rather innocent son. Mom gets too close to the rat bat cage and gets bitten by it. Mom starts to undergo many gross and disturbing changes. Her ear falls off, her flesh is falling away and she has big pus-splattering sores all over her body. Hoping to nurse Mom back to health, Lionel keeps her at home where things really start going wrong. 

      Paquita comes over with her dog and the dog runs upstairs where the mom is. Mom grabs the dog, disembowels it, and shoves the rest down her throat. Paquita exclaims with shock and hilarity "Your mom ate my dog!" and Lionel points to the dog's guts all over the place and replies "Well, not all of it".  

     Later that evening Mom seems to die and come back as some sort of evolving zombie. By evolving, I mean she gets bigger and grosser throughout the movie. After actually dying she starts infecting people left and right, turning everyone that comes into contact with her into a bloodthirsty zombie. Out of nowhere, a ninja priest comes to save the day but instead accidentally impales himself on a pointy gravestone.  

     Being the ever-faithful son, Lionel keeps his mom at home, along with a few other victims she's infected, mostly to contain them and to keep mom company. Unbeknownst to Lionel, two of the zombies get their groove on, and about an hour later a zombie baby is born. He may be an infant, but he can kill like a pro. 

      A money-hungry uncle shows up claiming to be the rightful owner of Lionel's mother's (his sister's) property now that she's dead (little does he know). The uncle blackmails Lionel for the house and five minutes afterward has a party to celebrate his new wealth. With this precarious new situation, Lionel and Paquita decide it's time to kill all the zombies by injecting them with poison (why they thought poison would work when bullets and fire didn't, is anyone's guess). So they shoot them all up with this poison and bury them. Unfortunately, the poison they chose was some kind of animal stimulant, that creates super zombies bursting from their fresh graves, ready for some chow. They run rampant, killing everyone at the uncle's party thus turning them all into bloodthirsty zombies. 

      Paquita gets bitten and faces becoming a zombie (fortunately for her, the guy that bit her had dentures!). After killing everyone at the party with a lawnmower, Lionel now has to face his "mother" who is now a HUGE monster with big saggy tits, claws, fangs, and old lady jewelry. Lionel stands up to his mom for the first time in his life. She eats him and he manages to kill her by lawnmowing his way out of her stomach. 

      Shockingly, this disgusting movie is brought to you by none other than the multi-Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson. Most people don't know that growing up in New Zealand, he made one really gory movie after another. This was his zombie flick, Bad Taste was his alien flick, and Meet the Feebles was his porno-puppet flick. All of which can be found here on Cultarama!

Party Monster

     There are three versions of this story, all of which are amazing. The book, the documentary, and the movie.  In the early '90s when the club kid craze was at its peak, a complete freakazoid named Michael Alig (the crowned prince of all club kids) committed murder, and even though he bragged about the killing, everyone thought that was just Michael being Michael, a well-known drug user who would lie and swindle Jesus Christ if he thought it could get some drugs from him. 

      James St. James (self-proclaimed original club kid) was a close friend and sometimes roommate with Michael Alig and was therefore present for most of the inside story. In fact, it was James St. James that started this ball rolling. He wrote a wonderful book called "Disco Bloodbath, a Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland". It's a must-read. 

      Anyway, they made a documentary on the whole affair, including footage from all the key players in this bizarre story. Before his downfall, Michael Alig was a huge success as a party promoter, mostly for a club in New York called "The Limelight" run by infamous club owner Peter Gatien, who ended up going down with Michael Alig due to the obvious and abundant drug use at the club. Drugs truly did flow freely and the weirder you were, the cooler you were considered to be. It was a nonstop psychedelic world of color that was very intriguing and fun and even spawned a celebrity or two (RuPaul was a club kid). They also made the talk show circuit for a while, appearing on shows like "Geraldo" and "Sally Jesse Raphael". Alig's favorite tactic was throwing impromptu surprise parties held in any place from small McDonald's restaurants to subway stations. He made the news all the time and was a strong personality in the hippest of scenes. Eventually, the more drugs that Michael took, the grimmer his party themes became though. My favorite is the "Blood Feast Party" featuring every gruesome sight imaginable. 

      Alig and his friend Freeze were all strung out one day when Mr. Pissed Off Drug Dealer Angel Melendez shows up and demands money which of course they don't have. A fight erupts, and Angel is hit on the noggin with a hammer, dragged to the bathtub by Alig and Freeze, injected with Drano, and smothered with a pillow. Michael dismembers Angels' body and stuffs it in a large TV box and uses it for a coffee table. They also feel the need to hastily paint most of the walls red to hide the blood spatter and blame a mysterious stench on screwed-up plumbing. Eventually, the smell becomes overwhelming so Michael and Freeze dump the box with the body into the river. The body is found and put into a freezer with a misidentification of the race (he was listed as Asian, and Angel was Hispanic) making Angel's disappearance just a mere rumor for quite some time.  Most people just suspected that since he was a drug dealer he had just been arrested, solving the mystery of his absence at the club. It was only when Angels' brother decided to do his best to find him that the murder was actually solved. If it weren't for Michael Alig bragging about it, he probably would have gotten away with it. When Michael Alig told his stories of killing Angel, everyone thought it was a joke because Michael joked incessantly and was a notorious liar. 

      Rumors started to circulate that Michael was not kidding when he bragged about killing Angel and certain people close to the situation started to come forward with their stories to save their own asses. Eventually, it all caught up with him, and he and Freeze were convicted of first-degree murder. A big-budget movie has just been made that is basically the documentary verbatim minus the documentary narration, feel, and interviews with the real people involved. Macauley Culkin plays Michael Alig with stark precision. Seth Green plays James St. James. Marilyn Manson and Chloe Sevigny also have notable parts in the movie. It's a colorful flick with a fantastic soundtrack which is somewhat nostalgic for those of us who watched the club kids on TV and wanted more than anything to be like them. It really is a fabulous but true tale about murder in Clubland.

Demons 2

     This is one of the very few sequels that carries a cult status all on its own. Most sequels are completely abysmal and are only in existence because the original was a success and producers know that if the original made money, so will the sequel, by name alone (Exorcist II, It's Alive II, Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, etc). I personally prefer this movie to its predecessor due to the improvement in special effects, the storyline is a bit quirkier and it has much more memorable characters. 

      Like the first movie, this one also has an impressive soundtrack including artists like The Smiths, The Cult, Art of Noise, Peter Murphy, and Dead Can Dance. Instead of a movie theater, this sequel takes place in a huge apartment building. Some spoiled bitchy brat named Sally is having a birthday party but spends most of the time locked in her bedroom griping about how she hates her dress, hates her hair, hates her party, etc. 

      Meanwhile, a documentary on demons is on television. While ignoring her guests, Sally watches this documentary and a demon actually comes through the TV (a la Videodrome) and possesses Sally. Finally emerging from her room, she turns all demonic and attacks her guests who one by one, become infected by the scratches from her newly formed claws, and turn into demons themselves. A big zit of some kind erupts from Sally's forehead, leaking an acidic slime that eats through layer after layer of the building, infecting everything from kids to dogs. 

      The demon kid is especially funny (or scary, depending on your level of dementia), especially when a gremlin-like creature bursts from his stomach like the "chest-burster" from the movie "Alien" and attacks a pregnant woman (who is, by the way, starting to have contractions, so she's in like the worst mood imaginable to deal with some demon/gremlin bullshit. Needless to say, she won that fight). 

      As countless demons run amuck in this massive skyscraper, this guy and his very pregnant wife are trying desperately to survive this gruesome encounter and find a way out of this nightmare. They shimmy down the building to a lower roof and find themselves in a TV studio. So with lights and monitors watching, she pops out a kid on national television (bet that got some great ratings). A blind, half-dead, but still possessed Sally manages to stumble her way into the TV studio as well. Collapsing in front of a TV camera, Sally can now spread evil through the TV like the demon that possessed her in the first place had done. The husband smashes all the TV monitors, thus saving the day. Husband, wife (who casually walks out like she delivers a child every day or something), and newborn infant walk out the front door and into the morning sun. 

      And there you have it, a movie that doesn't know whether it's trying to be comedy or horror. But it doesn't really matter, it's still a great movie! Keep an eye out for writer/director Dario Argento's daughter Asia. She's the pretty young girl that asks her dad to let her continue to watch the demon documentary. If you wanna know what she looks like as an adult, you can find her in George Romero's fourth zombie flick "Land of the Dead".

Demons

     This horrific masterpiece comes from a couple of the greatest masterminds of Italian horror cinema, Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava. Argento has been repeatedly labeled as the Italian George Romero, which is a huge compliment as far as I'm concerned, yet he retains his own unique and prestigious status among Italian horror. 

      

     The movie opens with a strange man with a sort of "futuristic phantom of the opera" kind of mask, handing out free movie tickets, evidently for the opening of a new movie theater. As the customers arrive, they notice that this movie theater is a little odd, but assume it's just a promotion for the movie.  

     In the auditorium there's a mask hanging from a statue, a woman tries it on and accidentally scratches herself on the cheek. Meanwhile, people are watching the movie, which seems to be a story about the excavation of a cemetery that supposedly houses demons of some kind. People start to notice similarities between the film and reality. There's a man in the movie who jokingly tries on a "demon mask", and scratches his cheek with it, much like what happened to the woman in the auditorium.  After scratching himself with the mask he starts to become a demon. The woman in the audience notices that her scratch is starting to fester and eventually explodes in a burst of pus, deforming her face. Her friend eventually goes to the bathroom to see what's taking so long and upon finding her, she is now drooling green slime and has big red eyes, her friend then freaks out and runs, but not before being scratched by her demonic friends' long claws. Within minutes, her friend begins to transform into a demon too. 

      Since merely being scratched by a demon can turn you into one, the masses of demons grow incredibly fast. The remaining humans find that despite all their efforts to get out, all the entrances have been bricked up and that they are walled into the theater by forces yet unknown. 

      A gang of coke-snorting punks running from the police find a backway into the theater hoping to ditch a stolen car and hide from the cops and ultimately become demons themselves (no big loss, but they did make for some creepy-looking demons). 

      Out of nowhere, a helicopter falls through the roof. The last two unpossessed humans crawl inside and manage to figure out how to make the blades turn, resulting in the mass decapitation of dozens of demons. You'd think real demons wouldn't be so susceptible to such human mortal coils, but I guess not.  

     Anyway, after getting a few dozen demons off their back, they use the hole in the roof to escape, but not without having to kill another demon along the way (the man wearing the futuristic-looking mask from the beginning of the movie). The happy couple have escaped the demon-infested movie theater only to find that the "demon plague" has already overrun most of the town. 

      They hitch a ride with a well-armed family that's headed out of town to start a new life and all seems well until the girl starts to grow claws and fangs. A kid in the front seat turns around and blows her away with some kind of M-16 rifle. The ending credits just show the shock on the guy's face as he sees his girlfriend lying dead on the road. Not really a happy ending, but a satisfactory one. 

      Great Italian flick (the dubbed voices are actually decipherable). Non-typically, this movie actually spawned a pretty good sequel too, one that we'll discuss soon. A side note worth mentioning is that this movie has a very surprisingly cool American soundtrack, featuring artists like Billy Idol, Motley Crue, Rick Springfield, and Go West. This is usually extremely uncommon with foreign-made films.