MONSTER MOVIE WORLD: FILM REVIEWS

I usually effuse about topics and things on the MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD blog because I normally enjoy the things I write about. In this column, I admittedly will gnash my teeth, snarl, and say nasty things about the films that are covered here. Why, you ask? Because I think they deserve it. Once in a while, I may have something good to say, but I promise you, in THE CRITIC’S CRYPT, I have sharpened my scrivener’s pen nib a little pointier than usual. I think you will find that I eschew the self-indulgence usually found at the nexus of the critic’s ego and go straight to ripping out the heart of the matter. 

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE II (FULL SEQUENCE) [2011] - This movie is not your typical tale of a “descent into hell”. Instead, we are tossed into the middle the mess right from the beginning. Martin is a parking garage attendant who lives at home with his overbearing, bitchy mother, who finds no harm in blaming her son for his father being in prison. Never mind that the father is in the slammer for abusing the poor child when he was younger.

In a morbid turn of life imitating, ahem, art, Martin seems to have found escape from his miserable existence by fixating on the first Human Centipede film. Not only that, he is obsessed with it to the point where he decides to make his fantasy a reality. He starts collecting specimens for his own human centipede experiment and soon has more than enough to top the original Dr. Heiter’s total of three. Doubly unfortunate for the victims, however, is that unlike his predecessor, Martin is not a surgeon. Not even close. Instead, he relies on tools from the kitchen cupboard to perform his “attachments”. The rest is grisly, over-the-top gore and bloodletting.  Just to see if I could do it, I ate my lunch (and kept it down) during the last part of the film. Blechhh!

Shot in black and white (except for some reason, one scene with spot coloring added to flying poop) and more than proving blood looks darker that way, this second offering from hate art director Tom Six should appeal to all interested in satisfying their unhealthy cravings for depravity.  HUMAN CENTIPEDE II (FULL SEQUENCE) is not only low-brow, it’s downright beetle-brow. This gratuitous, self-indulgent, and extremely perverse movie should be rated “X” for “X-crement”. 

PIG HUNT [2008] – “Death Walks on All Fours”. That’s the message that’s etched, scrawled and otherwise displayed in a section of the Northern California wilderness country outside the highly hip and tolerant city of San Francisco. A group of guys (and one girl) head out on a hunting trip to bag “The Ripper”, a legendary 3,000-plus pound boar that supposedly has been running loose on one the guys’ uncle’s property for years. Admittedly, when we do get to see The Ripper, it is one big, ugly, mutha. Getting to this point, however, is clichéd and predictable.

A cool soundtrack, the smokin’ hot TinaHuang, good location photography and a weird subplot with a hippie commune and pot farm still doesn’t save PIG HUNT from being more than just a minor entry in the Hillbilly Horror genre. For all its predictable thrills and jump scares, PIG HUNT remains a bit boar-ing. 

SHROOMS [2007] – Could have easily been titled, “Kids on Shrooms Doing Stupid Things to Get Them Killed”. What starts out as a pretty entertaining story about a group of college kids who camp out in the woods and then get killed off one by one (have you heard that one before?), quickly decomposes into the stinky corpse of illogical, inane dreck.

Three-and-a-half couples travel to Ireland to meet up with Tara’s (the half-a-couple) boyfriend who has promised to take them to a place to camp out and eat the Faerie Isle’s famous “magic mushrooms”. They could have gone anywhere on the island but instead drive out to a remote park inhabited by a couple of what can only be described as Irish hillbillies, and whose grounds include an old, abandoned building that once housed a group of religious zealots. Seems like said religious nuts got ahold of some of the poisonous magic mushrooms (the ones with the black nipples on them – God, I hope there wasn’t an intentional metaphor there!) and went crazy and killed each other. That is, all except for a “Black Brother” and a “Looney Twin” who prowl the park along with said hillbillies.

After the kids trade the obligatory cruel and irreverent jibes, they set up camp and partake of the tit-ular ‘shrooms (remember, the black-nippled ones?) that they gathered during the day. After coming on to the Faerie fungi they all head off in their own spaced-out direction, high and doing things like conversing with cows and seeing into the future. Soon they are being hunted down by the aforementioned surviving religious nuts. The girls manage to find each other, but end up doing nothing to save themselves except for wallowing in mud, ruining their hair, and screaming. The script forces everybody to do such stupid things that one ends end up rooting for the killers as I have in so many of these types of films.

All in all, SHROOMS is one bad trip, man -- especially for the viewer.

Well, that about wraps it up like so much smelly fish for this round of rancid reviews. See ya' next time, monster lovers!