'Skinned Alive' will disappoint almost everyone

Skinned Alive (1990)
Starring: Scott Spiegel, Susan Rothacker, Mary Jackson, Floyd Ewing Jr., Lester Clark, and Barbara Katrz-Norrod
Director: John Killough
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

When a family of crazy cannibalistic taxidermists (Jackson, Rothacker, and Spiegel) are stranded over night in a small town, they see no reason to stop their ongoing killing spree.

"Skinned Alive" is a clumsily constructed horror comedy that features a talented cast doing their best with a weak script and a special effects crew that either didn't have enough money or enough skill to stretch the money for decent gore effects. There are only two instances in the film that will have you squirming in your seat due to the splatter/ick factor... and that's entirely too few for what this movie seems to want to be.

And the fact I say "seems to want to be" illustrates the biggest problem with "Skinned Alive", Watching it, I got the sense it wanted to be a cross between "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Spider Baby", but it lacks cohesion, so I'm really sure if that's what writer/director Killough was going for, or if that just my mind trying to bring order to the chaos.

If you're looking for a gory splatter-fest, "Skinned Alive" does not deliver. It doesn't even deliver on the promise of the title, as the only person who comes close to being "Skinned Alive" is a character who inexplicably kept coming back from the dead, in a manner that I couldn't determine whether it was supposed to be a joke or just a symptom of bad continuity. IF you looking for an intense and horrific viewing experience, "Skinned Alive" won't satisfy you either, because it unfolds in an entirely too random fashion, with too many characters being present for no good reason and the pace being too choppy and uneven for any tension to build in the film. The only possible audience for this film who will be satisfied are those looking for a Bad Movie Night experience; that this movie is perfect for.

With the horror falling flat, many of jokes being so lame they can't even be described as un-funny, the overall package of this film is pretty bad, despite the fact that most of the featured actors do a good job in the sense that they are hamming it up big time. Those over-the-top performances make the film more fun to watch than it otherwise might have been... and why it would be a nice addition to a Bad Movie Night. (Producer J.R. Bookwalter would have done everyone a favor if he had made this film part of the "Bad Movie Police" line-up from a few years ago. He might even have found that endeavor to be more successful than it was if he had.)

'Spy Hard': Where the suckage began

Spy Hard (1996)
Starring: Leslie Nielsen, Nicolette Sheridan, John Ales, Stephanie Romanov, Charles Durning, Barry Bostwick, Andy Griffith, and Marcia Gay Harden
Director: Rick Friedberg
Rating: One of Ten Stars

When I saw the names Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer in the credits, I should have known what I was in for. "But," I told myself, this is an older film and Leslie Nielsen is starring, so it can't possibly be as bad as their more recent efforts like 'Epic Movie' and 'Disaster Movie.'"

Alas, I was wrong.

Even in their debut film, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer--only writing here, with the directorial chores being handled by Jason's father Rick--they sucked. In fact, this movie is a little worse than "Disaster Movie" because it doesn't even have a character as hilariously insane as the Enchanted Princess. It barely has any funny jokes.

A limp-wristed spoof of James Bond-style action flicks, the film's story-line sees Special Agent WD-40 (Leslie Nielsen) come out of retirement to save the daughter of his old partner and lover (Stephanie Romanov) from the clutches of megalomaniacal villain General Rancor (Andy Griffith). Along the way, we are treated to badly executed sight gags, poorly delivered slapstick routines, and numerous of the lame references-to-other-films-passed-off-as-jokes that Team Friedberg & Seltzer have become infamous for. The worst (or perhaps most iconic for Friedberg & Seltzer) of these is a dance scene based on the Uma Thurman/John Travolta dance in "Pulp Fiction"... it is random, pointless, and absolutely unfunny--the cinematic equivalent of non-biodegradable Styrofoam packing peanuts.

I watched this film in a mindset that had me very eager to be entertained; I was suffering from writer's block on two different projects (a werewolf story and a game featuring supermodels beating the hell out of each other) and I needed a movie to write about for the Watching the Detectives blog, and still I was so bored with what was unfolding before me that I barely made it to the end.

The best part of this film was casting Andy Griffith against type, but even that amounts to little more than Team Friedberg & Seltzer's random references to other movies. This can't even do the repetition gag properly--where the same joke comes back again and again in slightly different forms. In a Zucker-helmed project those kinds of jokes can be the funniest moment in the entire film, but here they are just eye-rollingly stupid.

'Teenaged Exorcist' shoulda stayed in school

Teenage Exorcist (1994) 

Starring: Brinke Stevens, Oliver Darrow, Eddie Deezen, and Michael Berryman Director: Grant Austin Waldman 

 Rating: Two of Ten Stars 

 Brinke Stevens stars a Good Girl who rents a house that a demonologist has transformed into an eternal vessel for his evil soul and miscellaneous other demonic and undead riff-raff. She is soon possessed by an evil, over-sexed demon and transformed into the ultimate Bad Girl. Can her sister, her ultra-straightlaced brother-in-law, and a dim-witted pizza boy save Brinke' soul (and the neighborhood's property values)? 

 This is intended as a horror comedy, but it is mostly unfunny due to a lack of comedic timing on the part of most of the actors, and the simple fact that many of the jokes just aren't that funny. The horror side is also markedly un-scary. 

The only reason to watch this film is the opportunity to see Brinke Stevens wander around in skimpy outfits--but you can get to see her do that in better films than this one.

'Underground Comedy Movie' is underwhelming

The Underground Comedy Movie (1999)
Starring: Vince Offer, Gena Lee Nolin and Michael Clarke Duncan
Director: Vince Offer
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Sketch comedy is hard. The comedians that made up the Monte Python's Flying Circus group mastered it, as did a rare few of the "Saturday Night Live" ensembles over the many years. For the most part, everyone else is hit and miss when it comes to creating funny, short comedy bits. And, unfortunately for viewers, the creators of "The Underground Comedy Movie" serve up mostly misses.

Many of the sketches in this film have a seed of Funny at their heart, but they are too drawn out and too repetitive to really let that Funny fully emerge. "The Adventures of Dickman" and "The Watts Up Talk Show" are the only sketches that are short and sweet enough to be amusing. Others, which started pretty funny--such as "The Gay Virgin" and "Batman vs. Rhymer" drag on and get repetitive to the point where the Fast Forward Button is a blessing.

I'm giving this film a generous rating of Two Stars, because "The Adventures of Dickman" and "The Watts Up Talk Show" truly were funny. But everything else was too dumb or too belabored to be even close to working.

As of this writing, "Underground Comedy Movie" is out of print on both DVD and VHS. The clip included below illustrates why.

No need for you to answer this call

Night Caller (aka "South Beach") (1993)
Starring: Fred Williamson, Peter Fonda, Gary Busey, Robert Forster, and Vanity
Directors: Fred Williamson and Alain Zaloum
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Three retired football players (Busey, Fonda and Williamson) are living the good life in Florida while dabbling at being private detectives when they're bored. When the ex-wife of Williamson's character (Vanity) is threatened by a stalker who murders one of her co-workers, the fun and games become deadly serious for everyone.


"Night Caller" suffers from a severe case of attention deficit disorder. We have the stalker, we have gangsters wanting protection money from local merchants, we have gangsters trying to protect their girlfriends from being shamed over nude photos taken of them (yeah, I wondered about that one, too), we have obscene phone-calls being made to a phone-sex worker (yeah, I too thought that went with the territory)... and then we have our main characters wandering blithely from situation to situation and getting by on script fiat and luck more than detective work or anything resembling common sense or decent story logic. This movie tries to be a buddy picture, a sexual thriller, and a detective story and if fails miserably at being all three.

If you add to the fact that everyone in the film--even Fred Williamson who is usually fairly bad--gives performances far below their usual standards to the pathetic script, as well as the appearance that several actors seem drunk in more than a few scenes (although I suppose they could just be trying to play "jovial"), I think it's a safe bet that everyone in this picture is there more for the Florida vacation than actual work.

Tomie: Great comic book, crappy movie

Tomie (1999)
Starring: Yoriko Douguchi, Miho Kanno and Mami Nakamura
Director: Ataru Oikawa
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Junji Ito created one of the only truly scary comic book series I've read--"Uzemaki." His other famous series Tomie is almost as creepy, although you'd never know it from this astoundingly boring movie adaptation.


"Tomie" is the tale of a teen girl who is the center of violent love triangles where everyone involved ends up dead, including her. And, yes, it's plural, because Tomie is so evil that even death cannot stop her--her body always regrows, even from dismemberment, into an exact replica of when she was at her most beautiful... and then she goes looking for more victims to seduce and lead to destruction.

"Tomie" is an awful movie in every sense of the word. The only reason I suffered through it until the end was because I wanted to review it for here and because I kept thinking it HAD to get better.

"Tomie" fails to take advantage of nearly everything that was truly creepy in the original source material, so it starts boring and it stays there; is filled with drab characters having inane conversations; spends too much time with characters talking about how horrific things are instead of showing the viewer the horror; and has special and gore effects so awful that Ed Wood is embarrassed on the filmmakers' behalf. Finally, the film seems to assume that the viewer is familiar with the Ito comics series, which is an unforgivable sin in my opinion.

"Tomie" would have been a One Star movie, except the actors seem to be doing as good a job as can be expected with the awful script they're working with. I still recommend that you avoid this one.

There are at least six other Tomie movies that have been made since the release of this one, and this is one series where the films get better as they go. This is the only Tomie film bad enough so far to end up here. The rest will be reviewed here.

'The Killer Eye' isn't worth looking into

The Killer Eye (1998)
Starring: Jonathan Norman, Jacqueline Lovell, Costas Koromilas, Blake Bailey, Dave Oren Ward and Nanette Bianchi
Director: Richard Chasen (aka David DeCoteau)
Producer: Robert Talbot (aka Charles Band)
Rating: Zero of Ten Stars

Dr. Grady (Norman) has discovered a way to look into the 8th Dimension using eye drops and a special inter-dimensional microscope. Unfortunately, a creature from that nightmarish realm has used his mehtod to cross into our world, possess the eyeball of a male prostitute and grow it to giant size, bursting free of his skull... and it is now roaming the building where Dr. Grady has his lab, seeking women to hypnotize and fondle with its tentacles.


"The Killer Eye" sounded like it might be a fun spoof a Lovecraft-style tale where scientists unleash horrors from distant dimensions. It is not. It is a film that fails on every level, and the only kind things I can say about is that the camera is never out of focus, the soundtrack is audible, and none of the actors are awful... but none are particularly good, either. (Blake Bailey, who plays an attic-dwelling weirdo, is the best of the bunch and the only player here who manages to deliver laugh lines in a way that actually manages to make viewers smile. Even Jacqueline Lovell, who plays Dr. Grady's slutty wife and the Killer Eye's favorite fondle target, gave a barely passable performance. This was surprising to me, because she was so great in "Head of the Family" and "Hideous!"... but I suppose this is just further proof that many actors are only as good as the material they have to work with.)

"The Killer Eye" fails as a comedy, because it's not funny. It fails as a horror movie, because nothing in it is scary. It even fails as a softcore-porn flick with live tentacle-monster action, because the sex and nudity scenes are shot in a timid, almost prudish fashion and are overly long and boring. It even fails completely as a movie, because, even with its scant running time of just over an hour, it's obvious that there's about 25-30 minutes of actual material here that's been stretched longer than the groping tentacle of a monster from the 8th Dimension.

If the comments above haven't warned you off "The Killer Eye", consider this: The director, David DeCoteau, is hiding behind the psuedonym of Richard Chasen; and producer Charles Band is hiding behind the pseudonym of Robert Talbot. So, if people like DeCoteau and Band, whose names have appeared on some real stinkers, didn't even want the Full Moon label associated with it, it should be clear that this film (hopefully!) marks the fetid bottom to which the quality-level of a Charles Band production can sink.

'Evil Clutch' will have you clutching the remote and stop button

Evil Clutch (aka Horror Queen) (1992)
Starring: Coralina Tassoni and Diego Ribon
Director: Andreas Marfon
Rating: One of Ten Stars

The story in "Evil Clutch" (such as it is) is about a young couple who leave the city behind for a quiet vacation in the Italian Alps. After an encounter with a mysterious young woman who claims to have been attacked and a self-described writer of 'supernatural stories,' they go camping in the woods. Naturally, they end up being stalked by monsters.


A staple of craptacular movies are filler shots of people walking along with spooky music playing for no reason, storylines devoid of any logic, characters devoid of any common sense or personality, and actors so bad that it makes one consider a career in the movies. "Evil Clutch" has all these in spades. Additionally, in this film we've to clumsy attempts at foreshadowing and even clumsier attempts at copying scenes that have already been done many times in much better in other films.

After all that negativity, I suppose I should point out the two things that recommend this video. First, it has a nice score consisting of electronic music. It's just too bad that said music plays at times that seem as unmotivated and inexplicable as the actions of our heroes. Spend your money and time on something else. You'll regret the loss of both if any is wasted on watching "Evil Clutch."

'Project Vampire' is a failure

Project Vampire (1993)
Starring: Brian Knudson, Mary-Louise Gemmill and Myron Natwick
Director: Peter Flynn
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

A mad scientist, Dr. Klaus (Natwick), is perfecting a longevity serum that turns those who use it into vampires. A brave intern from the univsersity hospital (Knudson), a kind-hearted nurse (Gemmill), and a Chinese genius (Cho) join forces to save themselves from the effects of the serum and to stop Klaus's convoluted schemes from coming to fruition.


At the center of "Project Vampire" is a neat idea--I like the notion of the vampire serum--but that idea is brutally strangled by a script so badly structured I doubt the writer/director has even heard the term "three-act structure", and then dumped in a shallow grave by a cast of actors who have almost certainly heard the phrase "don't quit your dayjob" many times. To make matters worse, the film is a mixture of a chase story and a race-against-time story, but both of these normally dramatic plot-types are made deadly dull by chase scenes that have all the excitement of my daily commute to work.

"Project Vampire" is yet another badly executed low-budget film where a good idea falls victim to a shortage of talent. (It's also the only film of recent vintage that features a Chinese character that brought to mind Lionel Twain's rant at Inspector Wang in "Murder By Death" about geniuses being unable to grasp the use of preposition, articles, and pronouns when speaking.)

Nothing to sing about in 'Rockabilly Vampire'

Rockabilly Vampire (1997)
Starring: Stephen Blackehart, Margaret Lancaster, Wendy Walker, and Dennis Davis
Director: Lee Bennett Sobel
Rating: One of Ten Stars

A struggling, Elvis-obsessed writer (Lancaster) falls in love with a vampire who bears a passing resemblence to The King when he was young (Blackehart). Boredom ensues.

"Rockabilly Vampire" is an unfunny, badly executed comedy with pathetically weak horror overtones. There isn't a scene in the film that doesn't go on for at least four mintues too long and that doesn't feel like it was ad-libbed and then not edited down. There isn't anything scary (or tragic or particularly sexy) about any of the vampires, including the one our heroine falls in love with; he doesn't even do a good Elvis impression.

Spend the time you would have wasted on this film reorganizing your underwear drawer. Even Troma should feel embarrassed over picking this one for distribution.