Street Trash (1987)

Street Trash has a very thin plot which basically reads: If you drink this ultra cheap booze you'll totally melt away and die a colorful death. Of course this is made to be fun as hell and luckily it is. 

When a liquor store owner finds a case of "Viper" in his cellar, he decides to sell it to the local hobos at one dollar a bottle, unaware of its true properties. The drinks causes its consumers to melt, very messily. Two homeless lads find themselves up against the effects of the toxic brew, as well as going head to head with "Bronson" a Vietnam vet with sociopathic tendencies, and the owner of the junkyard they live in.

The setting, a heavily polluted New York City where it seems 90% of the locals are prostitutes, hobos or mentally disturbed, creates a nice vibe. The characters aren't any cleaner. Armed with fully unkempt hairstyles, rotten teeth, dirty clothes and a nasty skin they perfectly match the streetscape of dirty New York. 

The kills are simply amazing and are filled with over the top (paint)gore. One amazing melt scene after another in rapid succesion who still look amazing due to the great effects. Fortunately a somewhat tame middle of the film gets ended by an amazing last half an hour where the film goes completely crazy and where no one is spared. 

Street Trash is a film that due to the setting and characters breaths dirtyness and at the same time is so much fun due to the amazing gore effects. And lets be honest. Who can resist a movie with this dvd-cover (by ARROW Video). 

I Drink Your Blood (1970)

Watched I Drink Your Blood for the second time now and my opinion stays the same: bloody, insane fun.

A band of satanist hippies roll into a town and begin terrorizing the local folk. They rape a local girl and her grandpa goes after them. He fails and is given LSD. This bothers his grandson and he gets back at the hippies by feeding them meat pies infected with blood from a rabid dog. They turn into crazed lunatics and begin killing and/or infecting everything in their path.

So we are following a cult who's staying in an old out of business hotel. Apart from doing weir rituals they also irritate the locals by their aggressive behaviour. When his grandpa gets humiliated by the cult Pete decides to put blood of a rabid dog in the meat pie of the cult. slowly the last and little piece of good sense that the cult members had disapppears and they head out with with foam hanging out of their mouth looking for their victims. 

From this moment on the film, the soundeffects, the music, the actors and the gore go absolutely crazy. George Patterson (Picture on the right) definitely does the best job in acting like a bloodthirsty, deranged, axe wielding satan-hippie. The gore isn't great but still the film manages to create a filthy, grainy, disgusting atmosphere and feeling. 

I Drink Your Blood absolutely isn't a great film but if you have a fetish for 70's (horror) trash you'll probably like this one. ALERT, ALERT for all you animal lovers out there though. The film unfortunately does involve some animal cruelty (the slicing of the throat of a chicken being the most explicit one)

Slaughtered (2010)

Slaughtered is a fairly decent Australian made horror film which despite its low budget of only 100.000 Dollars doesn't feel too amateuristic on the visual, audio and acting part. Of course the acting isn't great but it isn't much worse than in any slasher for that matter. 

A masked killer hides in a pub in the middle of nowhere. Soon he starts killing off al the people inside the pub. The visitors and crew must find a way to stop this maniac.

The build-up takes a bit to long. For about half an hour we have to listen to some guys who run a pub. Luckily after 30 minutes the killer shows up to have some fun. His creepy looks make him an entertaining figure pretty quick and his scene's are pretty tensive. It's a shame his weapon (some kind of hacksaw) doesn't look really convincing as near the end of the film the thing has been used so much that it's completely bent and is just dangling on the handle. The plastic toy does create some bloody scene's though. The kills are pretty brutal with lots of blood although unfortunately not a lot of ''real'' gore (apart from one scene where the killer forces a girl to swallow glass, pretty impresive). 

The real bummer about Slaughtered is the complete absence of any logic. Normally that's not a thing I would complain about in a slasher film (especially one with a low budget) but in Slaughtered it's just too annoying. For example: After a while nearly everybody in the pub is aware that there is a killer inside because either they have seen him or they have seen the victims. And what do you do when there's a killer inside..!? That's right! You just tap some more beer and go on with entertaining your customers. Now I don't mind if a film has a simple plot or something like that but this was just dumb as hell. When you just saw you friend bleed to death I don't expect you to go on with your usual stuff. Epecially not when she was killed by a dude in the same pub as where you are right now. Another example.... There is a scene where a 17 year old guy wants to get some smokes. He isn't allowed though due to his age. Than he finds a killed body. Instead of mentioning it to someone he tries to steal the dead guy's ID so that he can buy the smokes. 

Slaughtered isn't a complete failure. It has some strong tensive scene's and there is enough blood. Unfortunately the lack of any logic is realy blocking a higher star-rate.

Monster in the Closet (1986)

Monster in the Closet is a remarkable low-budget horrorflick which starts of pretty damn bad but later turns out to be a very entertaining movie.

After several people and a dog are found dead in their closets a "mild-mannered" reporter, a college professor, her son and a befuddled professor band together to uncover the mystery but not without involving the U.S. Army and mass panic.

The first 10 minutes you are treated to some of the worst kills in cinema history. Multiple times you see some random chicks, dudes and blind guys go in a closet followed by some strange sounds and laundry flying all over the room. You don't get to see what's happened to the random guys and who did it to them (later it turns out to be some ugly-ass monter who did it). I was already sick of this movie by then.

Luckily after about 30 minutes the monster makes his full-screen entrance. It looks incredibly cheesy, fake but at the same time very cool. Unfortunately the killing stays a disappointing point in this film as there's no gore whatsoever. It is interesting though that a movie like Monster in the Closet manages to be so entertaining with this lack of gore. 

The whole movie leans on a guy in a rubber suit and that should say enough. It's pretty entertaining but that's it. Oh yeah, the absurd, almost King Kong kinda, ending is pretty remarkable to say the least. Between the lines it basically says the monster is gay (which makes the title ''Monster in the Closet'' pretty hilarious too)

Monster in the Closet is exactly what you think it is. Brainless entertainment featuring a dude in a rubber monster suit just trying to make a couple of bucks, stereo-type annoying characters (Hell even Einstein makes an appearence), a dumb love story and a whole lot of fun.

Slash (2002)

Despite the generally negative reviews and reactions I got interested in film due to the trailer and some stills. Unfortunately it turned out to be a missed opportunity that could have been much better.

While in a tour with his rock band Slash, the lead singer Mac is informed that his aunt died and his family is expecting him in their farm, where he spent his childhood, for the funeral. The group travels in their bus and meets the weird patriarch and Mac's father Jeremiah. The local Billy Bob tells about an old tradition called "harvest of blood" used to improve the harvest. Their bus has problems with the injector and they get stuck in the farm, while a serial killer chases each one of them to collect their blood.

It gets clear pretty early on in the film that Slash isn't a great film. The 5 maincharacters from the rockband are simply annoying as hell and don't even understand the definition of acting. They are so annoying and not funny that I wouldn't even care if they died in the first second of the film. Unfortunately it takes a pretty long time before that actually happens. The introduction of all the characters and the story takes way too long and is borring and uninteresting. Even the jokes, that normally keep some tempo in slashers, are painfully bad and irritating. 

Once in a while the killer turns up but even those scene's are mainly disappointing. That's because these scene's overall don't nearly last long enough and just when you start to feel some tension the scene cuts away to the same boring, stupid characters. And that's a shame because the killer does look really, really cool and his weapon of choice (A scythe) was pretty bad-ass too.

There are some precious moments where you feel some tension. One of 'em is the scene where some dudes are followed by a thresher in the middle of a corn field and the looks of the killer manages to create some creepyness. Still it's all a bit disappointing. Even the bodycount is a let down. It counts 5 dudes whom most didn't even have 5 seconds of screentime.

It's pretty painful to see a talentless guy like Neal Sundstrom (who didn't have much more luck with his earlier films Space Mutiny and Howling V: The Rebirth) waste all the potential that this film had. With a better director and a more interesting script (one that doesn't fail on all the jokes made by the teenagers) this could have been pretty cool.

Slash is a mixture between The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Jeepers Creepers. If you wanna see a lot of potential getting ruined by Sundstrom and his annoying cast than you should watch it. Don't get me wrong it's not one of the worst films out there but it's far from a great one.