Andy Gapin

Every Friday the 13th, a group of friends heads over to my place and we watch some horror flicks. This is something we’ve been doing for roughly 7 or 8 years now. Generally, we have a set list of movies prepared beforehand, but last week, our planning failed us. We got through Piranha, which was awesome, but then it was on to Dinoshark. Unfortunately, Dinoshark nearly put us all to sleep. It was quite boring so we aborted it and decided to see what Netflix had for us to stream. After a few minutes, we all decided on ThanksKilling, hands down the most ridiculous sounding of all the movies we considered.

ThanksKilling bills itself as being the “ultimate low-budged experience.” That’s not far off form the truth, this is extremely low-budget. In fact, I’m pretty sure that there’s currently enough cash in my wallet right now to cover the entire production budget for ThanksKilling. Whether or not it’s the ultimate experience, I don’t know, but the entertainment level was off the charts. There’s that cliché saying “it’s so bad it’s good.” That is not ThanksKilling. This is head-hurtingly bad, but if you take this review as a warning to not view this flick, you’re making a mistake and missing the point. But I will say this, ThanksKilling demands to be watched in a room full of people that are able and willing to Mystery Science Theater 3000 the hell out of it.

The premise of ThanksKilling is surprisingly simple, a foul-mouthed, shit-talking, and axe-weilding turkey kills people. It’s that simple. There’s a slight explanation, but between awful acting and fact that nothing really makes any sense, the explanation is rather pointless. But yes, it’s a killer turkey on Thanksgiving. The turkey itself is a poorly-made, rubber-looking puppet that is somehow able to speak English and no one is bothered by this fact. That being said, the English-speaking abilities of this turkey work in our favor, as what makes this film actually worth watching is the horrible shit talking and one-liners from the turkey. Lines like “gobble gobble, motherfucker” and “you just got stuffed” are  littered throughout the entire film with reckless abandon. It’s quite wonderful.

ThanksKilling doesn’t spare the killing, there is plenty of it and much of it seems to have no real reason to it…which is the best kind for a horror flick. However, the characters seem rather unaffected by the deaths of others, they seem to only care about surviving themselves and even when family members are killed, they show little distress or sadness. It’s hard to tell if this is due to extremely poor acting or a poor script. Probably both.

One of the oddest things about ThanksKilling is that there is a certain JonBenét Ramsey joke that made it into the movie that completely throws you off. ThanksKilling was made in 2009 so a JonBenét Ramsey joke is neither topical nor edgy. However, what makes this joke worth noting is that it is said on three separate occasions in the movie. The second time the joke was made, our entire room was left completely dumbfounded, yet the characters in the film seemed to make no acknowledgement to the fact that roughly 20 minutes earlier, the same girl said the same joke. At first, it seemed as though this may have been a major editing goof that somehow made it into the final version of the film, but when the joke happened a third time, it was clear that this was intentional. I really don’t get this, to be honest, but it’s little things like this that make ThanksKilling such an crowd-pleaser.

There is plenty more ridiculousness worth mentioning, but much of what this film has to offer is the shock value of it all as it happens. I wouldn’t want to take that away from you.

Entertainment value (with friends): A
Quality grade: D-

Piranha is a wonderfully gory piece of entertainment that I should have seen while in theaters. Snoozing on this one was a mistake. Piranha is pretty much the Snakes on a Plane of the aquatic movies…only it’s better than that, it’s more of what Snakes on a Plane should of been instead of what Snakes on a Plane actually was.

Piranha marries together horror and comedy in the perfect way with just the right amount of each to make it much more of a horror comedy than a campy horror flick. Half the hilarity comes from the straight up ridiculous approach taken that makes it clear that the makers of this film were in on the joke in just the same way that the makers of Eight Legged Freaks were.  In fact, a reference to Eight Legged Freaks couldn’t be more appropriate for Piranha.

The gore is not rationed out lightly, instead the blood, guts, and dismemberment are poured on so heavily that it puts Starship Troopers to shame. Seriously, this film should replace the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan and become the new gold standard of bloody references.

When Piranha isn’t dumping gallon after gallon of blood onto the screen–which is most of the movie–it’s pretty much softcore porn. There are plenty of boobs and naked girls to go around, enough to make you double check the disc to make sure it’s not a Girls Gone Wild video.

The only real knock against Piranha is that they had Christopher Lloyd on board and completely squandered him. When you have Mr. Lloyd at your disposal, you can’t waste it! You need to use him to the fullest extent. He should be in every scene. Scratch that. He should be on screen at all times. Unfortunately, this was not the case. He was little more than a cameo in the Piranha.

That mistake aside, Piranha is just great and super entertaining. Watch this. Now.

Entertainment score: A

Ah, the second Grindhouse faux-trailer-turned-full-feature. To put it bluntly, Hobo with a Shotgun is absolutely brutal. I’m not sure that I want to say this in any definitive way, but it may have been the most brutal movie I’ve ever seen…and that’s saying a lot.

Hobo with a Shotgun is exactly what it’s supposed to be, a hobo…with a shotgun. While Rutger Hauer does in fact “deliver justice one shell at a time” just as the tagline says, the brutality comes much less from him and more from the bad guys. I won’t spoil things too much, but one scene actually caused my fiancée to tell me she couldn’t watch it anymore. It was less a blood, guts, and gore thing, and entirely just a principle thing. Hobo with a Shotgun is not for the faint of heart.

Where the movie lacks a little is with the actual hobo-delivered-shotgun-shell-goodness, there could have been more of that as it mostly took up only a small portion of the film. Thankfully, this is made up for with violence like the scene mentioned above. Hobo with a Shotgun is light on the story, but there’s enough to get you by and more than enough great one liners like “I’m going to wash this blood off with your blood” and “because sometimes on the streets, a broom ain’t gonna cut it! That’s when ya gotta get a shotgun!” to make up for it.

Out of the two Grindhouse flicks and Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun is probably at the bottom of the list, but it is the smuttiest, the most sadistically violent, the campiest,  the brutalist, and the most nutso. That’s a a lot of superlatives, but these are all of the things that Hobo with a Shutgun was supposed to be and that’s why it works. Highly entertaining.

If this kind of quality can be kept while turning the Grindhouse trailers into actual films, I say keep ‘em coming.

Rating: A

There comes a point for everyone when it’s just time to retire. Most of us strive to retire before we hit this point and go out on a high note, but sadly, many just keep going. For George A. Romero, the point to quit making zombie movies has come.

Survival of the Dead just isn’t very good. It’s watchable, yes, but it’s just kind of pointless. It doesn’t bring anything to the table. Each of the of the Dead movies has had purpose and reason for existing. Each covered a specific phase of the zombie apocalypse. Night of the Living Dead covered the very beginning of the outbreak with Dawn of the Dead following up on how society would fall apart after the initial outbreak. Day of the Dead gave us a glimpse into what happens after humans lose control and most all society has fallen apart and Land of the Dead covered man’s attempts at putting small and isolated, but feudalistic pockets of civilization and society back together. These four movies were all very solid and existed along a pretty obvious timeline. Diary of the Dead was decent, but served mostly as a nice look at Romero’s vision of a zombie outbreak in the 21st century amongst the user-generated content generation. The people would be the news source, documenting their personal struggles and experiences. If you take the actual timeframe of when the movies were made and simply apply the overall ideas from each one to a timeline, Diary of the Dead fits in nicely around the Dawn of the Dead phase of the zombie apocalypse. These five movies work great together as a series. They really do. This is what Romero got right.

Now, what Romero got wrong…Survival of the Dead. Where does this fit in? What is the theme here? What’s the point of this movie even existing? Romero tries to give a frame of reference by flashing back to the mercenary National Guardsmen who briefly appeared in Diary of the Dead. This is actually the story of those men, which would place this movie parallel to Diary of the Dead. I do like the connection between the two movies and I get the idea of trying to show another group of people’s experiences, but this movie just doesn’t bring anything to the table at all.

The film is rather boring save for a few decent encounters with the undead, but even the undead in this film are completely unimaginative and boring. These are Romero’s worst undead. They barely even care about the flesh of the living and seem to be about as dangerous as an empty box. The storyline revolves around these National Guardsmen as they get mixed up with two feuding families. Obviously, this doesn’t go terribly well for them, but there is hardly anyone in this movie that you actually care about. As a viewer, there are no characters to make a connection with. Each one either sucks or is just boring.

It seems as though Romero is really stuck on the idea of zombies developing low-level cognitive abilities as this idea has now made its way into half of the Dead movies. At this point, we’ve seen him run with this idea twice. The point has been well received and there is nothing new here, if anything, we’ve taken a step backwards with the idea.

I’m still trying to figure out Survival of the Dead‘s reason for existing. Anyone got anything?

Rating: D+

A friend recommended Bad Biology not that long ago so I figured that I’d give it a shot. As the credits began to roll, I immediately texted said friend asking “what the hell did I just watch!?” I still don’t have an answer for that. I think he stands by his recommendation and I’m not sure that I didn’t like it myself. Actually, I don’t know what the hell to think of it. This flick is definitely one of the weirdest films I’ve ever seen.

The story goes something like this…Jennifer has seven clitorises and gives birth to mutant babies two hours after having sex. The babies are discarded afterwords, to use the phrasing from Wikipedia for lack of a better way to say it, as she considers them to not be real babies. No man can satisfy her. Batz, is a dude with a drug-addicted, self-aware penis. Yup. Both are at the mercy of their biology (err bad biology?).

The film is completely outrageously overly sexual with plenty of nudity and discomforting situations and visuals. This definitely isn’t a family movie by any means. While my fiancée is generally down to watch just about anything with me, I could tell she was not enjoying it in the least. I contemplated turning it off and freeing her, but, with each passing moment, I felt myself asking “alright…now where are they going with this?” I couldn’t turn it off. I needed to see more. I needed to see what happened when Jennifer and Batz finally met.

I don’t know how to rate Bad Biology. I don’t even know if I think I should recommend it or not. It’s definitely worth a watch for those that are into weird, dark horror or hypersexuality, but beyond that, proceed with caution, I guess?

Sometimes, I wonder why I even want to check out some movies in the first place. Gay Bed And Breakfast Of Terror is one of those movies. Why would I think this would be a good idea? I hated Rocky Horror (I know, unpopular opinion, blah blah blah) and being a straight man, having “gay” in the title doesn’t make it any more or less appealing. But I added it to my Netflix queue anyway.

This was pretty bad. The first almost half of the movie was spent introducing too many characters that pretty much all hate each other for no reason whatsoever. Like really, they all just show up at this bed and breakfast after arguing in the car with their respective significant others and immediately start hating on each other. With the exception of one of the lesbian couples, these are some seriously miserable couples, but then a few minutes later, half of them are cheating on their partners with each other. From here, things get dangerously close to simply being a gay porn. Though nothing more than a pair of boobs is shown, which is odd because there were no lesbian sex scenes, only a couple of scenes with dudes getting it on with each other.

The story is a complete mess. The owner of the bed and breakfast is a crazy religious woman who hates gays and is trying to do the lord’s work by killing lesbians and trying to turn a gay man straight to marry her incredibly weirdo daughter who is much more interested in “pretty girls.” However, the character is a bit all over the place and doesn’t stay entirely consistent with herself. That’s the one plot. The second involves an oddly deformed boy-monster named Manfred…who seems to have his legs wrapped in a trash bag from what I could tell. Manfred is the bastard child of the crazy religious woman and 100 republican men. Oh, and he likes to kill people, so he does a bit of that.

So here we are with two different story arcs and two killers taking out these gay couples left and right. It really doesn’t make sense why there are both of these arcs. It seems as though there were two separate ideas and no one could decide on which one to go with, so they chose both. It was weird, but then things start to make even less sense with the turn that everything takes at the end.

Yeah, this was pretty horrible, but it was oddly entertaining. It’s not so bad it’s good, it’s so bad it’s entertaining. Somehow, it stays watchable and continues to get more and more bizarre as it goes on. It doesn’t take very long before you know there’s no way you could ever walk away from it.

Quality rating: D-
Entertainment rating: B+

Sometimes, I wonder why I even want to check out some movies in the first place. Gay Bed And Breakfast Of Terror is one of those movies. Why would I think this would be a good idea? I hated Rocky Horror (I know, unpopular opinion, blah blah blah) and being a straight man, having “gay” in the title doesn’t make it any more or less appealing. But I added it to my Netflix queue anyway.

This was pretty bad. The first almost half of the movie was spent introducing too many characters that pretty much all hate each other for no reason whatsoever. Like really, they all just show up at this bed and breakfast after arguing in the car with their respective significant others and immediately start hating on each other. With the exception of one of the lesbian couples, these are some seriously miserable couples, but then a few minutes later, half of them are cheating on their partners with each other. From here, things get dangerously close to simply being a gay porn. Though nothing more than a pair of boobs is shown, which is odd because there were no lesbian sex scenes, only a couple of scenes with dudes getting it on with each other.

The story is a complete mess. The owner of the bed and breakfast is a crazy religious woman who hates gays and is trying to do the lord’s work by killing lesbians and trying to turn a gay man straight to marry her incredibly weirdo daughter who is much more interested in “pretty girls.” However, the character is a bit all over the place and doesn’t stay entirely consistent with herself. That’s the one plot. The second involves an oddly deformed boy-monster named Manfred…who seems to have his legs wrapped in a trash bag from what I could tell. Manfred is the bastard child of the crazy religious woman and 100 republican men. Oh, and he likes to kill people, so he does a bit of that.

So here we are with two different story arcs and two killers taking out these gay couples left and right. It really doesn’t make sense why there are both of these arcs. It seems as though there were two separate ideas and no one could decide on which one to go with, so they chose both. It was weird, but then things start to make even less sense with the turn that everything takes at the end.

Yeah, this was pretty horrible, but it was oddly entertaining. It’s not so bad it’s good, it’s so bad it’s entertaining. Somehow, it stays watchable and continues to get more and more bizarre as it goes on. It doesn’t take very long before you know there’s no way you could ever walk away from it.

Quality rating: D-
Entertainment rating: B+

I liked this. The Crazies entertained me without dragging and without taking long to get going. While it was lacking slightly in the humor category and a little in the epic kill realm, it made up for it with tons of people being senselessly mowed down by the military, Though, that’s not really the point of the film.

The Crazies presents itself much like a zombie flick without the zombies, but focuses a lot less on the infected and more on a population’s reaction to the outbreak. Watching this film made me wonder how much of the original was an influence for M. Night Shyamalan when he made The Happening. That thought pretty much ended in me feeling like The Crazies is closer to what The Happening should have been than what that movie actually was…ignoring the face that The Happening went with suicidal over homicidal.

I’m not going to compare with the original because I don’t think there’s much of a point, but for me, The Crazies further solidifies my feelings that horror remakes are okay if done right. There have definitely been a ton of crappy ones–this film came with a trailer for the A Nightmare On Elm Street remake which looks relatively awful–but there have also been a ton of great ones as well. It comes down to being able to make a movie that differentiates enough with the original to make its existence worthwhile, but yet still remains true to the reason why the original existed.

Despite being predictable (what isn’t?), The Crazies has a lot of tension, keeps a fast pace, and gets down right terrifying at times. Check it out.

Rating: B+

2009 was a pretty fucking awesome year! Seriously. I’ll probably make another post about the rest, but there were some amazing movies and some great records that came out.

Top 10 Albums

A lot of people are making lists for the decade, but I decided that I just couldn’t do that. It was too difficult of a task. So I stuck with just doing a top 10 favorite records for the year. In previous years, I’ve done bigger lists, but I’m keeping it small this year. And, as usual, this is a list of my favorite records, kind of like a personal playlist, rather than ones that I would say are the best.

Anyway, the list is below and I’ll also be counting this list  on The Playlist with The Reverend on 90.3 The Core tonight at 9pm! Make sure to tune in. I’ll be playing one song from each album.

1. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone – Anti
2. Frank Turner – Poetry Of The Deed – Epitaph
3. The Lawrence Arms – Buttsweat And Tears – Fat Wreck Chords
4. M. Ward – Hold Time – Merge
5. Coconut Records – Davy – Young Baby Records
6. Monsters of Folk – Monsters Of Folk – Shangri-La
7. Dear Landlord – Dream Homes – No Idea
8. Conor Oberst And the Mystic Valley Band – Outer South – Merge
9. NOFX – Frisbee/Coaster – Fat Wreck Chords
10. Future Of The Left – Travels with Myself and Another – 4AD

And besides those, there are a few honorable mentions:

• Cheap Girls – My Roaring 20s
• Sonic Youth – The Eternal
• The Decemberists – The Hazards Of Love
• Mason Jennings – Blood Of Man
• Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
• Andrew Bird – Noble Beast
• Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
• Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career

You know, I almost wanted to put Lady GaGa on that list somewhere. I think I’ve spent some serious time in the second half of this year discovering a love for her. I never would have thought that I’d think so highly of her, but she’s pretty friggin’ awesome. However, I just can’t say that The Fame Monster was that great overall. It’s good for a few really great songs, but there’s also a lot of filler. Oh well.

And 2010 is already looking like it’s going to be a great year with new records by Murder By Death, Minus The Bear, Against Me!, Spoon, She And Him, and more already announced. I can’t wait!

Top 10 Movies

I actually had a much harder time making my list of top 10 movies for the year. There were a TON of good flicks this year and there were so many that I just didn’t have time to see either! Ultimately, these were my favorites:

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Star Trek
3. Up
4. The Hangover
5. Dead Snow
6. Zombieland
7. District 9
8. Paranormal Activity
9. Fantastic Mr. Fox
10. Coraline

And of course, some honorable mentions:

• Whip It
• (500) Days Of Summer
• Watchmen
• Last House On The Left
• Whatever Works
• The Wrestler

So there you have it, my favorite albums and movies of the year. I’m hoping to post another entry about other things from 2009 if I get a chance over the next week. But until then, don’t forget that I’ll be counting down that top 10 albums list tonight on The Playlist with The Reverend on 90.3 The Core!

You know, if you had asked me a year ago, before I had even heard of Zombieland, if I would have said “yeah, I think Woody Harrelson could wreck some zombies.” Now, ask me this after seeing Zombieland and the answer becomes something more along the line of “why the hell isn’t Woody Harrelson in every zombie movie?” Seriously, it’s a no-brainer. Dude knows how to kill some zombies.

Zombieland is one of those movies where you get so hyped up for and so obsessed with it before seeing it that the day before it comes out, you start to worry that it can’t live up to your expectations. Don’t worry. You will not be disappointed. Zombieland does everything right. It really does. Zombieland actually delivered more than I could have hoped for.

The obvious thing to do here would be to draw comparisons to Shaun Of The Dead. And while that’s not the most inaccurate statement ever, Zombieland isn’t just a U.S. version of Shaun Of The Dead. While both are more romantic comedy than zombie-focused, Zombieland stands on its own without needing a comparison.

Zombieland gives us a lot of great zombie kills, but keeps it light on the flesh eating. In fact, there are actually very few human kills to be seen in the movie. The ones we get are excellent, but like I said, the movie doesn’t focus as much on the zombies, it sticks with good old-fashioned romantic-comedy. This keeps the gore down a bit, but it’s not missed either. It just goes to show, that you don’t need gore for a good zombie flick…and you also don’t need to actually kill any of the characters either.

Bill Murray’s cameo was absolutely wonderful and Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, and Abigail Breslin were all wonderful too, but the start of Zombieland is Woody Harrelson. This dude was born for this role.

Rating: A+