Crawlspace (1986)

Or, as I like to imagine the killer in the movie hollering out, “Sit-on-my-face.”

That’s all he really wants…

…probably though, he just wants to kill his tenants. Which just happen to all be lady residents. And he just happens to have a crawlspace. But not the John Wayne Gacy-type crawlspace.

Gunther, played by Klaus Kinski, may have lips resembling Big Ang’s, but other than that, let’s face it, there’s nothing comical about him–he’s downright spooky.

So he goes a little Buffalo Bill on us…

I don’t know what it is with movies targeting the plot of “Nazi doctor gone wrong,” but I’ll take it.

Of course, everything goes a little crazy when, instead of deciding to Heil Hitler or even God, he decides to Heil himself.

 

 

Now, this crazed guy had a lot of torture gadgets set up. One, in particular, was a booby trap in the opening to his crawlspace.

The girl knows to check it. With her shoe. Really? Really. I consider myself a pretty smart person. But I would not have checked that crawlspace. What do you guys think? If you were in someone’s room and you come across the opening to a crawlspace and you’re about to hide–do you drop your shoe in to check if it’s booby trapped?

Another thing–this guy is pretty anal. Literally. Who sets up a trap that goes up your butt? …Mother fuckers, that’s who.

Not only that, but then he won’t even leave the formerly anal-ed guy in peace. He has to do this to him:

I love the boat’s flag, though. Nice touch, Gunther.

After he kills someone, Gunther has to do this weird little Russian Roulette routine.

I have no problem with that. What I have an issue with is Gunther’s little phrase every.single.godforsaken.time after he pulls the trigger, “So be it.”

Who are you? Kurt Vonnegut?

Lastly, Gunther, kill every lady tenant you have. I did not like any of them. The one who sings god-awful songs on her piano and cuts out holes in her bra for her nipples as she giggles? Did not care. The one who buys a bushel of candy? Did not care. The other ones I don’t even remember except for the very last one and I vaguely only liked her because she made a joke about vampires and wore boyfriend jeans. But dammit, you killed one of your rat friends, and that is just UNFORGIVABLE.

 

I am ashamed of you, Gunther.

I am not ashamed, however, to say I laughed at various points of this movie and that it was a cheesy good one. Not Muenster or Gouda but a nice Wal-Mart brand of Cheddar.

(By the way, if you’re looking for a killing other than the rat shown above, watch something else. We only see the aftermath. Frowny face.)

Some favorite quotes from reviewers on Netflix:

“I loved Kinski with tranny makeup in a Nazi uniform.”

“…the Cosby-ish sweaters were spot on”

Wishmaster 4

[Remember to click on pictures to enlarge them.]

No fancy title here today, folks. I’m worn out from wrapping presents and worrying about an impending apocalypse that never occurred. Currently in bed typing this up, but I wish I was soaking suds up like the funky character above. Totally feeling her vibes right now. I’ve had it with people. Of course, she has it much worse than me in the end, but that’s to be expected with any Wishmaster movie, right?

In case you’ve never seen any of the Wishmaster movies, I’ll go ahead and give you the gist: the Djinn, which is just a fancy way of saying “demon genie,” has to grant its owner three wishes in order to release the rest of its platoon of demons from the depths of…a Hell-ish in-between. The owner is always whatever unfortunate human happens to come across the Djinn’s ruby-like gem, which is what he is trapped in. Each wish the Djinn grants his owner comes true, but seems to go haywire…it’s all part of the Djinn’s master plan to show how corrupt demons really are or something like that, I guess.

I’m not sure what led me to watch the fourth Wishmaster. I haven’t seen any of these movies probably since the late ’90s, early 2000’s, but I guess it was probably that final Ruby Lager that did it while trying to pick a movie on Netflix.

In this little ditty, the Djinn’s owner is a Joanna Newsom doppelganger whose boyfriend is an over-the-top-self-pity-party-thrower after being in a motorcycle accident. Sure, I completely sympathized with him at first, but then I realized he was being a total asshole to his really hot girlfriend who was making every effort to keep them together while he sat at home and watched porn on the computer and complained about being a “fifth wheel”–OK, that was a pretty fucking funny joke. But then I also realized this was just a movie.

Anyhow, the doppelganger ends up becoming the Djinn’s owner. So what do you imagine will become one of her wishes since her boyfriend can’t walk? (By the way, here’s a side-by-side of the actress who plays Lisa, the owner, and her look-a-like, Joanna Newsom):

I bet you will never guess the third wish, however. It was a little weird. I don’t know what the writers were thinking. In fact, this entire movie must have been written by Macaque monkeys. I just know it. Or that Ikea monkey…

I’ll give you my absolute favorite line from the movie:

Poor Sam, the owner’s boyfriend, does gets a lot of crap, though. I mean, he ends up being able to walk again, and everyone gives him so much shit. For instance:

Look at his poor face. He is so distraught. And a little aggravated. Probably more aggravated than distraught. Even the Djinn begins to heckle the poor man:

“Dammit, Sam. I told you when we announced our engagement that God was clearly NOT invited to the party!”

Despite the cheesy writing, I couldn’t help myself, I liked the movie…because you’ll laugh at it. I mean, sure, the Djinn looks a little scary at first, but then you realize after a while that he’s wearing some sort of skirt. And then this happens: (click to see moving .gif)

The Wishmaster series in general is bound to have a lot of gore and nudity.

There wasn’t near as much in this one as I was expecting, but still enough gore at times to wet your willy.

Some of my favorite quotes:

fedor8 from IMDb states:

The budget was so low that they couldn’t afford Lisa fake nails that would avoid looking as if they’d fall off any minute.

One user from Netflix compares it to another cult classic:

Summary: Power Rangers + boobs. The Djinn pretty much looked like an evil villain from Power Rangers. No serious evil there. And, the boobies pretty much looked like…boobies

But my favorite quote comes from the honorable user cudaseeker-1:

Hell, the leading lady may have just as well wished for a steak dinner, a new pair of shoes and a weekend at Bernies for all that mattered to the story.

Because, really, who doesn’t want to usher around a rich, dead guy all weekend?

Cher-no-beer Diaries

There was no beer in this movie.

Cher didn’t make an appearance.

And no one wrote in any diary of any type.

…So I was a little disappointed. Quit doing this to me, movie titles!

Okay, so the real title is Chernobyl Diaries, and it’s based on–you guessed it–the nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine, the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

A bit of history: In 1986, before I was born, a safety test was performed one day (April 26th to be exact) which evidently went haywire due to an unnoticed heat build-up. Cue the big ass explosion outside your window at 1 o’clock in the morning and your wife rolling you awake asking, “Did a transformer blow again?” Nope–just Reactor #4.

The radioactive fallout would spread over thousands of square miles.

Pripyat, built for the workers of the Chernobyl plant, is the town actually focused on in Chernobyl Diaries. Because the town had to be completely abandoned, and abandoned quickly, lost remnants are of interest to tourists such as our six little characters who hire an EXTREME tour guide by the name of Uri, who happens to be an ex-Special Forces guy (he must be trustworthy, right?) to take them on a guide of Pripyat. They want a close-up of what the city has lost, but I have a feeling with Uri’s speech on how, “Earth has reclaimed its rightful home,” that something is not going to be just right with this tour, and I’m not talking about the EXTREME part of it.

I figured with Oren Peli, the producer of Paranormal Activity, things probably weren’t going to be that great. But I like watching bad horror movies almost as much as I love watching one that scares the shit out of me; Chernobyl Diaries, however, would not even be a good B-movie.

For one thing, it has Jesse McCartney as an actor.

He was shivering in pain and with cold in this frame, but I’d much rather assume he’s trying to tell the audience he’d rather be singing than pretending to act in this “horror” film. I mean, he has an invisible microphone and everything!

None of the other actors were big shots either, so I don’t even know how this movie got marketable. That’s not to say I don’t love a movie with unrecognizable actors–that makes a horror movie even more realistic, but none of the actors really…did anything. Probably because none of the writers gave the characters any redeeming qualities whatsoever. You didn’t care if any of them died.

I was rooting for camera girl to die right away because she took a picture of this shit and never told anyone:

In case you can’t tell, that’s a mutant person in one of the top windows. She clearly saw it and didn’t say anything! Are you kidding? I would’ve went Rambo right then and made a strategic plan on how to get our asses out and away from Cher-isn’t-here.

Secondly, that bitch did not know how to hold a camera. If I had a camera that expensive, I would not jolly-ass around with it. I was just waiting for it to slip out of her fingers at every moment. And the scene where they run across a shoddily-made bridge over a lake…splashing water all around, MUD, yet her camera is somehow kept on her person and left untouched? Movie logic. I drop my phones in toilets.

I won’t give everything away, even though it probably seems like it. I will say that the ending included a man wearing a golden necklace that he probably nicked off my dad in the ’80s.

Actually, that tells you nothing. So I will leave you with the trailer and a few of my favorite quotes from folks around Tumblr surrounding the film:

I think this movie was meant to be a psychological horror, focusing on the atmosphere but when they are pushing everything on you like someone trying make you eat something you don’t want to… it gets so annoying, no one seems to realise that scary isn’t scary when it’s as obvious as my throwing a brick at my ex’s head and shouting YAY! It just doesn’t grasp subtlety and the plot has more holes than my favourite cheese.

–http://indieruinedthismovie.tumblr.com/

Part of why I like it: this is how I will probably die.

–http://mysassywolf.tumblr.com/

The Wizzing Dead

Taken from the TV series “The Walking Dead,” someone on Tumblr managed to capture this critical moment on their laptop as the character, Lori, pees on a pregnancy test.

I wanted to give you guys a glimpse into what this blog would be about, and I thought this screenshot was a great entrance into my soon-to-be-your-world-of-subbed-horror.

You see, what’s going to happen is, I’m trying to watch as many horror movies as possible this year, so I figured, why not take a screenshot of every awkward subtitle I come across? …I do happen across quite a few. Dubbed recordings will also come into play (these are the English voice overs of foreign films).

I hope you guys come back every few days ready for a new hysterical screenshot, which will probably accompany a little analysis of the scene or the movie itself, or something else about the movie such as a question posed towards you folks!

And with that, I’m off to watch my film for my next post’s screenshot(s).
I’ll give you a hint as to what the film is. It stars Jesse McCartney…   D: