I think there have been a handful of these death-animated slasher-scarecrow movies, all of which seem to come complete with a whole mass of acting and continuity problems. This one is no exception. As far as shooting, casting and special effects went, this movie reminded me of Bloody Murder 2, and it even had this chick from Bloody Murder 2. There are a scatter of hot-looking girls, which is cool. And another good thing is that, in this movie, you look forward to seeing just about everyone die.

There's this skinny high school kid that's constantly getting picked on by all of the nancy-boy bullies; this part of the movie is familiar enough. But they went overboard. The ridicule is just a little over the top, complete with a teacher that calls the kid white trash in front of a whole classroom; I don't think they can really get away with that kind of stuff these days, can they? Anyway, the little chick from Bloody Murder 2 is the only one that defends the guy. And he's in love with her. Then, the skinny kid sees the Bloody Murder chick kissing the pudgy football punk that ridicules him the most. Enraged, the kid goes home, and promptly walks in on his lowlife mother and some pot-bellied slouch fornicating like dogs. The slouch ends up killing the kid, and his soul jumps into the body of a very horror-movie-looking scarecrow.

This could have been cool, but they just messed it up. For some reason, the Scarecrow, armed with two small scythes, has to enter every scene with a spinning Power Rangers flip. Uggh. And, they gave him this stupid Freddy voice complete with a full arsenal of cheap one-liners. Uggh #2. Now, this is an area in which the time-honored techniques of the main man, Vorhees, divide the neophyte johnny-come-lately slashers from the true masters. Vorhees just goes in and does his thing, never stopping for some kind of jerkweed Freddy comment, just getting business done. Yeah baby. But, the Scarecrow does kill the football punk by cramming an ear of corn into his ear, and he does another creep with the let-you-see-your-heart-before-you-die trick. So, I mean, the movie does have its moments. However, next time, I'd go with alot more Vorhees and ALOT less Freddy.

The Bloody Murder chick ends up burning the Scarecrow, but it seems that he now has the ability to soul-transfer at will. Ostensibly, he can't be destroyed---so I guess his ghost haunts the images of a sequel yet to come. Maybe they'll get the formula straightened out by then.

Huh? Okay, when I hear holocaust I'm thinking thousands or millions. There's maybe five of six zombies in the whole movie, but they're not even really that, they're more like the supposed "astro"zombies from Astro Zombies. This movie has the reporter guy from Zombie, and it also has that chick from the New York Ripper. And I think maybe it starts in New York, or something, where a huge epidemic of like one cannibal has taken hold. It's this basket case lab assistant running around like a maniac eating rubber hands. Somehow, this leads the guy from Zombie (he's a cop this time) and the N.Y.R. chick to a jungle, along with a girl reporter.

From here the movie takes on shades of Bride of the Monster. There's this screwball scientist conducting experiements where he transplants living brains into corpses. He's kind of like a poorly adapted mad scientist Bella Legosi without a Tor Johnson. What is the ultimate objective behind these experiments? I don't really know, and I'm not sure he could tell you either. He takes the girl reporter, and "puts the zombie on her", and gets the cop too, planning to do the same thing. The N.Y.R. chick gets nabbed by a wacky tribe of cannibals and they want to make her some kind of naked voodoo cannibal goddess. At the end of the movie, the cannibals, who are just good people underneath their rotting Ed Gein exterior, storm the mad scientist's lair and save the day.

I gotta say, if you want to see a really really bad zombie film, I'd have to recommend Burial Ground "The Nights of Terror" over this one. (In that one you have more zombies, a much goofier plot, and a malingering little creature, much creepier than any zombie, that looooooves his mommy!)This one was just kind of boring. I bought it and I only watched it that one time.

I gotta say this one was an improvement. The first one was the slasher movie without the slashing. I mean, oddly, no gore, very little profanity, and no nudity, all of this overshadowed by a VERY Scooby Dooish plotline. But, it did involve a hockey mask, a summer camp, and some girls, so I liked it okay. In this movie, however, we see a return to time-honored traditions, and I found them encouraging. Essential elements are thrown into the mix.

The Plus Column:
a. You get to see the camp bullies (two sissies that looked like rejects from the bad karate kids in Karate Kid) turned into spare parts. Always cool. Subsection #1: Most of the people you dislike the most get bumped off at a reasonably fast rate, with only a couple of exceptions.

b. They actually explain the whole ambiguous Trever Moorehouse thing, which they skipped in the first one, although, unfortunately, the origin isn't very original.

c. Many of the murders happened at night, under the proper atmosphere, unlike the first one where almost everyone got semi-slashed in broad daylight.

d. Chicks, baby, chicks! Oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about. The first one had some pretty girls, but these chicks are much hotter. As a matter of fact, the whole thing centers around a nymphish blonde, honey-skinned and long-legged, ooh yeah, very distracting, which is cool because she takes your mind off of the lower points of the film.

The Con Column:
a. The killer had no theme at all. He wore overalls over a hooded sweatshirt, and a mask like the Tooth Fairy in Darkness Falls. No trademark weapons. I mean, I know in the first one they ripped both the Main Man Jason Vorhees and Leatherface with the hockey mask and chainsaw, but it was still better than what you have this time around. Vorhees wouldn't even spit in this guy's direction. Madman Marz, I hate to say, looked cooler.

b. The same Scooby Doo storyline. When the killer is revealed at the end, I know he was chomping his teeth to say, "Those meddling kids." But the good thing is, instead of Fred, Daphne, Velma, Scooby and Shaggy, you just kinda have a blonde Daphne.

c. The head camp guy, owner, whatever he was. Uuggh. He made Patrick from the first movie look like Bruce Willis from Last Man Standing. I can't see how ANY parent would send their kid to this guy for the summer.

All and all, I'd say this movie is worth the effort, especially if you saw the first one. I didn't rent it, I bought it, and it was pretty well worth the money.

I haven't seen a horror movie that impressed me this way since The Blair Witch. It was completely non-linear, which is what good movie making should be all about. The background story involves the little girl, Samara, who came about possibly by unnatural means. She has the ability to thought-project dark hallucinatory images, causing madness of an infectious scale. For a while, the girl is left in the care of an institution, where she is carefully studied, and her thought projections captured in negative print. Scattered images of Samara being monitored, even then a ghostly little girl with long dark hair hanging over eyes that look like swelled black pupils without irises. But eventually Samara is murdered, dropped into a well, and her abilities become demonic. Her residual imprint is captured in technology, her thoughts projected onto a simple video tape that provides her with a gateway into this world. If you watch the tape, taking in the nightmare images, forming the link, you die in seven days.

One thing that seems almost unsettling is the fact that Samara was, in life, a beautiful kid, despite the things that lurked behind her pale doll's face. She renters this world as a vengeful wraith, with real, physical power, and with her other abilities amplied. By opening the gateway, via the video tape, Samara is able to seek out her victims and just turn them into ruin. When they find the victims later, they're shriveled, drained, ash-grey, with eyes filmed like milk, and horrified expressions that twist their faces into hideous masks. It's cool. The best part is that you never see the actual deaths, just the aftermath. It's a shadowy playground for the imagination, unlike with Fear Dot Com, which was an okay movie but made the mistake by showing you everything.

I've heard this movie get maligned a little, but don't listen to any of it. This movie rules. The DVD itself has a short film that contains existing movie footage interspersed with deleted scenes, proving a little bit more in the way of background. (Actually I think it would have been even better if they had left those deleted scenes in.) There's also a trailer for the Japanese movie, Ringu, which The Ring was based upon. Haven't gotten a chance to see that one yet, but I want to, and I want to read the novel when it's released. For any true horror fan that's gut-tired of some of the worthless garbage floating around out there, this is the movie. Yeah baby.

This is undoubtedly one of the worst horror movies ever made, and it was no great surprise to see that it carried the dreaded Full Moon Entertainment insignia. It starts off in some kind of abandoned autopsy lab, or something. There's this [person] babbling about breaking through to some other dimension, and he's got zombies (which he calls his minions and yet simultaneously fears) trying to kill him. Later a bunch of slackers come in to shoot their own horrible zombie movie; truly a collection of flaccid, lackluster characters covering virtually every spectrum of the movie cliche pantheon. You've got the talentless, obssessed director, the oddball for the special effects, the stoner on the camera, and even the director's pointless assistant, "Topaz", thrown in for sex appeal.

[...] Army of Darkness this movie isn't.

Eventually "the gang" discovers some kind of [...] machine that evidently makes a gateway between this world and the world of dead, over-latexed cliche zombies. Of course Topaz is able to connect the right cables and reactivate the machine, and, oh boy, the horror really starts then. That [person] from the beginning of the movie---let's call him Zombie Guy---shows up with a group of zombies that look like they were never even human in the first place. The gang starts geting croaked at a mercifully fast pace, until, at last, you only have Topaz, the director and the special effects guy. After an idiotic fight scene that made me thing of Roadhouse, Topaz gets captured. So, director guy and special effects guy get ready to go get her back. What do they do? They dress up like zombies themselves, and somehow fool the other zombies, several of which have no eyes to even see the costumes. This particular technique, as some of you might remember, was perfected a long time ago by Shaggy and Scooby Doo. And that's pretty much what Zombie Guy is, a half-baked Scooby Doo villain with a plan straight off a public bathroom wall. Then, finally, you think you're safe when the movie ends, until you hear the title track, that is.

...If you've ever read the story "Dagon" you know it's just a short about a castaway that sails into a morass and sees a nasty green behemoth capering around an oblelisk, just Lovecraft meat and potatoes. This movie is actually based on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", though it's bottlenecked on an island instead of the coast of New England. I thought this was the best (and only decent) Lovecraft movie since T.D.H. with super hot Sandra Dee. There are major differences, of course, such as the addition of the hero AND his girlfriend. Lovecraft seemed to stay away from the chick factor whenever possible. And there is the fact that a hybrid priestess is involved, and the fact that Dagon's spawn, the Deep Ones, were a roughly bipedal version of fish and frog: In here, they tend towards octopoid traits, which makes you think of the main man Cthulhu. So don't worry, it's still cool.

The hero and his girlfriend get stranded on the island, and the girl is immediately abducted by the freakish Dagon cultists. The hero, Paul (Marsh) is constantly plagued by dreams involving a nice looking little chick who frequently displays tentacles, fins and fangs. He ends up in a moldering, filthy hotel (check out the toilet in that place!), like the classic scene from Shadow Over Innsmouth, waiting for the return of his girlfriend, not knowing that she's been taken. This affords a kind of comical part of the movie, where all the flounder-eyed, webbed and tentacled freaks come to pay him a visit. He ends up escaping, crashing through a window, running through a gauntlet of cultists, until he eventually finds the poor old drunk guy, the only human on the island, that explains to him the advent and degenerate worship of the god Dagon. In the movie, Dagon takes on an uncharacteristic alpha male love-hungry mode, demanding female sacrifices to carry his unholy seed. The result of these sacrifices is a race of hybrid creatures that eventually shed their human vestigies to become blissful, ageless sea monsters.

Marsh eventually finds the flesh and blood girl of his dreams, drawn to her in ways he doesn't understand. She is the local high priestess, no less, a blood descendant of the seafaring captain that originally brought the Dagon theology to the island. When he pulls back the sheet and sees that she's a little more monster than chick, he freaks out and is on the run again. All of the running with the shambling, loping and crawling man-monsters only a breath or two behind him, kind of creepy and yet funny too, really captures the essence of Shadow Over Innsmouth. I didn't get the whole ritual thing with the skinning and tanning of human hides, though. The cultists wear ther skins to their ritual ceremonies; I think maybe they watched Chainsaw Massacre about two or three hundred times too many.

Near the end of the movie, expect a cameo by the big man himself, Dagon, who just needs a little love and understanding. I hope that the effort that went into this movie might mark the future efforts of other attempts. What about At the Mountains of Madness? Shadow out of Time? Or the Call of Cthulhu? Yeah baby. If you like reading Lovecraft, you'll like this movie. if you don't, it might not be your cup of tea.

Only in a European zombie movie would you ever hear these words: "The zombies are coming, quick, everybody back to the villa!" Good God this is one of the best bad movies ever. It begins with this scientist that looks like Rasputin the Mad Monk, digging around in a cavern. A zombie, that looks alot like a rotten potato with a side of earthworms and nightcrawlers, just sort of appears, and the scientist is like, "Wait, I'm your friend." This gripping, horrifying scene sets the tone for the whole movie.

What you have is a group of people, drawn together for reasons absolutely unknown, to a villa. Then, it's a matter if seeing if they can stop fornicating long enough to get up and run from the zombies. The zombies all look like potatoes garnished with worms. They have crooked, oversized teeth, wear burlap sacks, and they stagger around like they've been drinking turpentine cocktails. Why are they here? Who knows? Do the zombies know? Let's ask...

Zombie: ...

Okay, I guess not. At one point, a woman runs from a zombie and steps into a steel-toothed bear trap set in the courtyard for no apparent reason, and she complains about the PAIN, the PAIN, oh God the PAIN, until the end of the movie. At one point, one of the couples is cavorting beside a flower bed, and like, there's a zombie buried in there too. Here's a key scene: The slouch that owns the villa, or whatever, sends the MAID to go secure the grounds. She reaches out of a window to close a shutter, and one of the zombies, with maybe one good eye obscured by worms, is adept enough to knife-toss a railroad spike, pinning the maid's hand to the shutter. Mmm hmm, yeah. I won't even go into one of the disturbing relationships that takes place among two of the people trapped in the villa. Trust me, after that one you'll be ready to see the rotten potato zombies again.

The "Nights of Terror" only turns out to be one night of terror, after which the last scatter of survivors hotfoots it enlist the aid of a local group of monks that just happen to be potato-and-worm zombies too, baby! But, the zombies have shown themselves to be skilled at railroad spike throwing, scythe beheading, and basic carpentry. The movie ends with the zombies trying to shove a guy's face into a table saw. It's an emotional, tear-jerking conclusion to a profoundly sensitive feel-good movie.

I didn't ever think they'd release this one. Going way back, to the original Night of the Living dead, two resultant movie series were given birth. Romero's Dawn of the Dead/Day of the Dead storyline involed an apocalypse in which the zombies had taken the whole world, reducing humanity to small pockets of self-destroying resistance. But, with the Return of the Living Dead, it was the exact reverse. You had small outbreaks of zombie epidemic, stemming from original zombies, stored in canisters, that couldn't be destroyed. Where Romero's zombies were kind of mindless (except for "Bub" of course)and more a kind of mass attack than anything else, the zombies from Return of the Living Dead oftentimes had faculty of thought and speech, which just seemed to make them a little creepier somehow. More than that, you got a tighter pictures of those infected with the zombie disease, gaining insight into their transformations, nausea, numbing cold, going through rigor, which seemed to make the idea of turning into a zombie more palpable.

Additionally, the movie was funny. It was that Chainsaw Massacre "My family's always been in meat" kind of funny. The zombies looked more outlandish then most, the cast was larger than life, a bunch of clowns that talked tough until the zombies were knocking at their back door. The story centers around, well, a graveyard, and a mortuary. There's one part where this guy cooks himself in his own crematorium. The two Return of the Living Dead sequels weren't that bad, but they're both eclipsed by the original. Also, the movie has a killer soundtrack...

If you like zombie movies, you'll love this one, a spotted gem in the rotted crown of undead massacre films. For me, this movie goes right up there alongside Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Zombie, and Resident Evil. Oh yeah, baby, give this one a try.

This movie rules! I'm a huge fan of the book, and I can say that the movie really does it justice. The whole story involves a group of kids, all "losers", drawn together by a supernatural force to confront an ancient evil that takes the form of a malignant clown.

Tim Curry was, I think, born to play Pennywise the Clown. Sadistic, waddling freak with his doughy, grinning white face, red wet lips stetched as wide as his ears. In his clown form, he is able to charm the younger kinds, but he becomes the fears of the older ones, taking them down into his sewer dungeon to feed on them. The kids that finally beat the monster, Big Bill and Haystack and Bev and the rest of the Loser's Club, manage to force It back into It's lair, not dead, but nearly mortally wounded....

Driven by a feeding cycle, It rises again decades later, and the Loser's Club, now forgotten in adulthood, is drawn back together to face the monster one final time. This was originally made-for-television, so the movie is only capable of so much, but I think that fact alone gives the movie special merit. The casting was pretty much dead-on (especially in the case of Pennywise) and the special effects were surprisingly good. Probably the fact that the film makers were incapable of going the hack-and-slash rated-R route helped to improve the suspense and the atmosphere. The book was great, and the movie was great. I would recommend them both. I think that the humble perfection of a classic good versus evil story can sometimes be overlooked. The purity of a tale in which you can easily lose yourself. And that's just what It is. Two big thumbs up from me.

Firstly, I must say, I guess I'm one of those guys who "unfortunately needs to see Chun Li in her animated underwear." Secondly, I think one should not approach a movie about a bunch of gladiatorial cartoon characters looking for a complicated storyline. It's just cool. Just watch it---and appreciate it for what it is. Even if the roles were stretched kinda thin, the movie included most of the classic street fighters. Blanka, in particular, I liked. Sagat, Balrog and Vega were of course the hired thugs of M.Bison, each of them making notable appearances throughout.

I have many personal high points in the movie. The brawl between Ryu and Sagat is rock n' roll all the way. Sagat is like twelve feet tall, as wide as a bus. You get to see the dragon-punch that left Sagat with that big ugly scar, falling back on the background info behind the game.

The fight between Chun Li and Vega. Yes, she's in her underwear, and yes, it's cool. In that scene she uses virtually every one of her classic moves from the game. Vega slices her bathrobe to ribbons, and she ends up kicking him through a wall.

Some of the Ryu and Ken flashbacks were cool, which inevitably dovetailed into the rivalry between the two friends. I liked it when they harnessed their power to thrash Bison; Bison was a motormouth that never shut up.

Guile was my favorite guy, and he sounded kinda like Ben Gazzara when he talked. There was an immediate sexual tension between Guile and Chun Li, and I was cheering him on all the way. And later in the movie, maybe Guile was defeated by a five-hundred pound Bison, but it didn't matter, because he made off with Chun Li in the end. Now that's what it's all about, stars and stripes, baby.

I think if you like the game you'll like the movie. It's just fun to watch. Yes, the story can be more-or-less mindless, so if you feel guilty afterwards, just read a book. I mean, come on, it is a cartoon we're talking about. If you have fun watching it, then it's served its purpose. So, for all of the Street Fighter fans out there, go for it. Two BIG thumbs up from me!