Shock Festival

Shock Festival is a 3 disc set tribute to the golden age of Grindhouse cinema.

Disc One’s first feature is a fan made phony trailer marathon from mainly B movie filmmakers including David Hartman (Spiderman, Bubba-Ho Tep), Richard Griffin (Feeding the Masses), Dave Neabore (Dog Eat Dog), and Michael Gingold (Managing editor of Fangoria Magazine). The second feature comes in the form of an Exploitation trailer marathon. Over 40 trailers including such classics as Cornbread, Earl and Me, Flesh Gordon, and Venom to name a few!

Disc Two serves up an offering of buckets of blood, and creature features in an ultimate horror marathon. Another 40+ trailers including Deep Red, God Told Me To, and Black Belly of the Tarantula. If that’s not enough to fill your brain pans there’s also a T.V. spot marathon of vintage re-mastered trailers, and a poster gallery. Lastly just when you thought you were safe,  another 10 trailer marathon brought to you by the most notorious exploitation distributor of the 1970′s, Independent International!

Disc Three puts the icing on this bloody exhaustive cake with Radio Shock Festival which includes over 300 radio spots to fill your DIE-Pod! All this and even more as the set is packaged with a book of how this wonderful DVD came to be, as well as a mini poster that’s good enough to frame!

Brimming with heroes, villains, monsters, aliens, mutants, cops, porn stars, etc. It’s all over the map, from the B movie underground, to the Hollywood hills, and beyond.It’s seven hours of blood, nudity, monsters, and makeup effects! 

Shock Festival is a great set, there is so much on display it’s hard to remember everything on one watch alone. By owning shock festival you have enough content to have multiple movie nights with friends.  The set has everything, the only thing you need to provide is alcohol, and friends to have an unforgettable experience in Grindhouse trash cinema.

This set is absolutely amazing! You can tell the love of trash cinema was the driving force behind the project. It gave me everything I was looking for, and maybe even a little more. I’ll let the classy words of one Stephen Romano close off this review “Watch my DVD or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

Read full post »

Black Candles

A couple travels to England for a funeral. While staying with her sister-in-law, the woman soon finds her husband seduced by a satanic cult living in the house. Let the bestial black mass / blood orgy begin!!!

We get to know the characters a little too well, and let’s just say I’ve now seen enough 70’s bush to last me a lifetime. The movie is filled with bizarre, wacky characters in all forms of  undress and I enjoyed how seriously it played out. It’s bad soft core porn with a shot of depravity, how can’t you love the players in that game?

As far as gore is concerned I figure bestial, black mass, blood orgy was a pretty good description by itself.  When they did stop having sex long enough to spill blood though, it didn’t disappoint.

While not a masterpiece, Black Candles serves it’s purpose: to disgust normal people (and slightly entertain us weirdos). It’s quite funny, but the filmmakers purpose was grindhouse sexploitation and unfortunately they don’t stray for long before returning to the symphony of testicle slaps.

Read full post »

"DEAR GOD NO!"

"Dear God No!" is the amalgamation of 3 different exploitation themes; biker flick, monster movie, and 1970's stag film. A biker gang known as the Impalers are going on a rampage, killing all witnesses and generally pissing people off including their own chapter. The leader of the chapter warns the group that if they continue killing every person they come across drawing unwanted attention they will be the number one targets of the entire gang. Now on the run from what's left of the gang, the impalers look for a wealthy house they can creepy crawl Manson style. Unfortunately for the Impalers the house they invade is home to a scientist with a Sasquatch fetish.

I really want to start off by saying that at it's rotten core "DEAR GOD NO!" is a really enjoyable movie, but there's plenty of things that for me personally tried my patience and that is where the film suffered greatly. The opening sequence kind of set that tone, as this long drawn out music piece blared over the dialogue leaving anything the gang said in the first 5-8 minutes entirely up to my lip reading skills which aren't very goddamn good. Of course that was all followed up by the bikers riding towards the camera for what felt like an eternity while the music finished off. In another scene some strippers danced around with the camera zooming in on their tits from different angles until this view of tits became torture (it takes a special kind of talent to make beautiful naked women boring to look at.) Remember on Simpson's when Milhouse, while watching the Poochie episode of Itchy and Scratchy cried out in frustration "Awwww when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?" I really wish every filmmaker out there would keep poor Milhouse's pathetic tone in the back of their heads before subjecting us to the same thoughts. Well, I think I've made my point about the flaws of this film so now onto the fun stuff!

When it comes to these cheesy throwback fanboy exploitation films there are certain beats you need them to hit. For starters the music needs to put you right in the era they intend to mimic. While as I stated above sometimes there was a little too much thought taken to the importance of the music, when used in proper moderation the score was perfect in every way. They need nudity, most of the time the nudity was welcome and again in proper moderation it was awesome. Over the top disgusting characters, I didn't always buy the performances that needed selling and there was certainly some lulls that could have used a punch, but overall some awesome dialogue and good bad acting throughout pretty much kept me grinning the entire time. And lastly great practical effects to fancy up the whole thing! Not all kills were on screen but the ones that were looked fantastic, great squatch effects too! Dear God No is good not great, but it is definitely good. If you've seen the trailer this movie looks like the best discovery you've ever made, so be warned don't go in expecting Manborg, Father's Day, Hobo with a Shotgun or any others that sit at a mighty throne on their own.

Read full post »