I hope you’re not tired of the 3-D movies that Hollywood keeps rolling our way – because it isn’t going to stop any time soon. Word is that Ridley Scott plans to film the new Alien prequel in 3-D. Star Wars and Alien art-director Roger Christian has confirmed “Ridley’s doing the next Alien in 3D.” You can check out the rest of the article over at Shadowlocked.com.

this will scare you:

I’ve been getting a crash course in ’70s/’80s Italian horror movies lately thanks to my local dollar store (of all places), where some surprisingly cool titles have been turning up on their DVD rack. A few weeks ago I watched and commented on Dario Argento’s “Creepers” (aka “Phenomena”) and now I’ve also watched the infamous “City of the Walking Dead” (also known as “Nightmare City,” “Nightmare in the Contaminated City” and “Zombie 3,” and possibly a few other titles too, depending on where you are in the world!), which was on the same DVD. I’ve never been a huge fan of Zombie movies outside of the Romero canon, but that’s OK because “City of the Living Dead” (a Spanish/Italian co-production directed by trash movie legend Umberto Lenzi of “Cannibal Ferox” fame) technically isn’t a “zombie movie” anyway, despite its more than passing resemblance to Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” The creatures in this film are never referred to as “zombies.” They may have the rotten, scarred look of the Dead Who Walk and they do attack and kill humans, but these “walking dead” have more in common with vampires, as they drink their victims’ blood, rather than eating their flesh. Whatever you wanna call these critters, the movie in which they star is a complete and total Z-Grade hoot and a half. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film with such cheap effects, terrible acting, and nonsensical script and dialogue, yet I still had a crap load of fun watching it!! The film opens with a news report of a nuclear accident near an unnamed metropolitan area. A TV reporter (played by the incredibly wooden Hugo Stiglitz, a Mexican actor who apparently continues to have a long career in Spanish language TV and film, despite this film being on his resume) is sent to the airport to interview a scientist who is going to update the authorities on the situation. When the airplane lands, a horde of irradiated and irritable zombie-like creatures (with “makeup” that appears to be burnt oatmeal smeared all over their faces) bursts out of the plane, massacres everyone within reach with knives and axes and sucks the blood from them. Before you stop to ask “Wait a minute…since when do zombies use weapons? Are zombies intelligent enough to fly a plane?”, the movie is off and running and you never have a chance to think about it again. Stiglitz and his cameraman haul ass back to the TV station to broadcast a news flash, but are told that an information blackout has been ordered by the military in order to avoid panic. Shortly thereafter the horde of undead attack the TV station (in the midst of what appears to be a broadcast of a “Solid Gold” style disco-dance program) and make short work of the dancers on live television. This scene features some nice gratuitous boob shots and a laughably fake looking scene of a dancer’s nipple being carved right out of her chest by an attacker. Stiglitz battles the undead killers for a while then races to the hospital where his wife (Laura Trotter) works in hopes of getting them both out of the city alive.

The rest of the movie follows Stiglitz and Trotter as they try to find a safe haven from the creatures, mixed with random scenes of Undead attacking various background characters, and a group of military generals who stand around a tiny model of the city and spout a lot of goofball pseudo-scientific dialogue about containing the “contamination.” Especially funny is when they advise police and soldiers that the only way to kill the creatures is to “destroy the brain,” yet anytime you see a soldier open fire on one of’em, they shoot them everywhere except in the head, which of course then ends badly for the shooter. Way to follow orders there, guys. The dialogue is uniformly ridiculous throughout (you can tell it was written by people whose native language is not English), and the special effects waver from being occasionally competent to out-and-out cheap. We see lots of stabbings and throat slashings, a few head explosions, the aforementioned nipple chop, and an eyeball gouging (every Italian horror movie has to have at least one, I suppose) before the finale in an amusement park, where Stiglitz and Trotter battle hordes of the undead while trapped atop a roller coaster (!). I don’t want to violate the Spoiler Warning rules so I won’t even go into the absolutely ridiculous ending except to say it’s the most massive cop-out I’ve ever seen.

So okay, “City of the Walking Dead” was a completely ludicrous piece of Eurotrash grind house cinema. Fortunately it was also fast paced and had enough over-the-top action that it distracted me from the fact that the movie made little to no sense for much of its length. I gotta give Lenzi a little bit of credit for taking what could’ve been a total “Dawn of the Dead” bite and trying to inject something new into the formula, even if the end result is pretty half-assed. This is the kind of film that you watch with a couple of good friends who love bad movies over a case or two of cheap beer. Considering that I only paid a buck for the DVD, I got my money’s worth!

P.S. I absolutely love how the U.S. posters for this movie trumpet the fact that “MEL FERRER, STAR OF TV’s FALCON CREST” stars in it — I guess ol’ Mel must’ve lost a Super Bowl bet with someone and had to appear in this movie as punishment.

Brought to you by Keith Abt, the Dollar DVD Guy. He suffers through these movies so YOU don’t have to!

4.5 Headstones out of 5

Conan O’Brien certainly has gotten the shaft. His show will now be moved to the 12:05 slot, to accommodate Jay Leno’s show at 11:35. It’s not surprising to see this typical stupidity from companies like NBC.
Anyway….Check this poster out! Based upon the famous Esquire cover of Muhammad Ali, we have Conan being barraged with arrows. At closer inspection, you can see that the feathers on the arrows are NBC logos. Very clever.

The 18×24 silkscreen print is hand-numbered by designer Jon Smith. You can buy one of these bad boys at Nakatomi.
Yippee-ki-yay, motherfu@cker.

Jay Leno is not funny.

“A rather intriguing lot will be up for auction at Christie’s later this month. An 1872 skull ballot box from Yale University’s mysterious Skull and Bones society will be sold as part of Christie’s New York’s Important American Furniture, Folk Art, Silver & Chinese Export sale on January 22. The skull has a hinge on top and is surrounded by charred-looking crossbones one inscribed with the word Thor.” check out the rest of the article here.

Head on over to My Zombie Insurance and make sure you’re covered when the dead arrive at your back door.

I awoke early Christmas morning and quickly ran down to my crypt (where I put my blood-soaked Christmas tree). Under my tree was HAL’s gift, a box wrapped in black wrapping paper, resembling an obelisk. After opening said box, I was delighted to find my very own t-shirt based upon 2001: A Space Odyssey. Printed on the shirt are the instructions for the Zero Gravity Toilet.

In the Kubrick classic, one of the characters is seen studying a large list of instructions in order to use the toilet. When you gotta go, you gotta go and you don’t have time to stop and think about it. But in space, you have to be much more careful. You wouldn’t want to miss and have fecal matter floating around the cabin.

You can pick one of these cool t-shirts up at Tarfly.com

Thanks HAL!

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I was a teenager when “Creature” had a short run in theatres back in 1985. Even then I thought it looked like a low budget “Alien” ripoff, and though I loved a good sci-fi B-Movie back in those days (and still do) I never got around to seeing the film for one reason or another. Many years later, thanks to the magic of Public Domain, “Creature” turned up on the DVD rack in my local dollar store (on a double feature disc paired with Mark Hamill’s “Slipstream” no less), so I snagged a copy and sat down for some retro ’80s sci-fi cheese. Call me crazy, but I feel that the B-Movies from this era have more charm and character than any of the CGI-blasted so-called “B’s” that roll into our video stores on a regular basis nowadays, and “Creature” was no exception. It is definitely not original in the slightest but it was still a fun ride.

The plot is serviceable: a future archaeological team on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, finds a collection of preserved alien life forms in stasis tubes, some of them dating back 20,000 years. Of course, they accidentally break one of the tubes open and the occupant wakes up and has the explorers for lunch. Sometime later a search team is sent from Earth to find out what happened to the first squad, and when they come in for a landing on Titan they find a ship from a rival German corporation already in their planned landing zone. They hurry down to the surface, thinking that their competition has beaten them to the find, which results in their ship crashing and becoming damaged beyond repair. The astronauts explore the seemingly-deserted German ship and are attacked by the title Creature, who looks pretty much like you would expect a low budget ripoff of Giger’s “Alien” to look like… rubbery and toothy. (The creature is kept mostly in shadows for most of the film, doubtlessly to prevent the audience from seeing its threadbare construction in full lighting.) Eventually the lone “name” actor in “Creature’s” cast shows up in the form of Germany’s Klaus Kinski (who usually appears in higher-brow films than this) as the only survivor of the German ship’s crew. He explains that “We’ve found someone’s butterfly collection… but some of these butterflies are not so friendly,” then makes plans to help the American crew reclaim the German ship from its nasty stowaway so they can all return to Earth together. Needless to say, these plans go horribly wrong, so the Creature gets to chow on a few other cast members (and take over using their minds/bodies using parasitic little sucker-creatures attached to their heads) before the remaining survivors manage to mount a final assault and take the critter down.

“Creature” was obviously pretty low budget but despite that it has pretty decent sets and costumes, and a sense of humor that’s often missing from other flicks in this genre. The cast (made up mainly of character actors from television) do their jobs well enough, and the action scenes are better than I expected. I seem to remember this film being rated PG-13 when it was released back in the ’80s but I wonder if that is accurate because of the presence of a few “F-bombs,” some pretty decent gore on display (including a head explosion, a decapitation, and a guy’s face being peeled off of his skull) and some female boobies would’ve definitely called for an “R” in those days. “Creature” kept my interest throughout and is something I’d watch again. Worth a look even if you’re tired of the “Alien” saga and its endless retreads.

Brought to you by Keith Abt, the Dollar DVD Guy. He suffers through these movies so YOU don’t have to!

3 Headstones out of 5

Never in a galaxy far far away did I ever think this would exist. That’s right, it’s the Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. Perfect for those late night sleepovers when you’ve been battling the Empire all day long. The sleeping bag includes a tauntaun head pillow and a stylish blue lightsaber zipper. Even the inside is an exact replica of the guts and innards of a freshly sliced tauntaun. And if you plan on sharing the sleeping bag with friends, make sure you don’t turn it into a dutch oven. Hop in your snowspeeder and fly over to ThinkGeek and pick one up.