Demonic Toys (AKA Dangerous Toys)

The Details:
Director: Peter Manoogian
Written by: Charles Band/David S. Goyer
Runtime: 86 mins
Release: Straight to video
Taglines: "Dangerous. Deadly…" & "It's Playtime..."
Production Company: Full Moon Productions

The Review:
First off, if you couldn't swallow Chucky being a threat in Child's Play, then this entire subgenera could never be acceptable to you. Don't even try to enjoy it even as a creep-out, but feel free to as a laugh. The very concept that something that's essentially limbless could fly through the air, grab you, and render you powerless is a staple of many horror films (including the hugely popular Slither). This film is no different. Demonic Toys is littered with successful attack after successful attack wherein a 6 ft human stands by, motionless, while a 3oz toy stabs them in the crotch/eyes/etc… Quite silly. But, especially for this breviewer's tastes, it's also quite hilarious.

There are lots of characters involved in the epic and adorable battle against evil including; a security guard, delivery boy, stow-away, and even a captive murderer who's mostly meant to keep things agitated and consistently on edge. The ragtag crew is thrown together and needs to find a way out of their prison of plastic and plush before morning or all hell is going to break loose on Earth.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

The Details:
Director: Jack Perez
Written by: also Jack Perez
Runtime: 90 mins
Country: USA
Language: English
Certification: USA:R
Production Company: The Asylum

The Review:
Another exploitation film from The Asylum, the studio that has brought us dozens of pop-culture rip-offs including Transmorphers (breview coming soon), The Terminators, and The Day Earth Stopped, MS vs GO is a fairly worthy entry into the giant-monster flick genre. Unfortunately, the movie as a whole obviously can't cash the checks written by the box art.

Clearly being fans of classic Godzilla-era films, the filmmakers whip together a traditional small-cast narrative that introduces a colossal, human-caused menace that chews on well-known landmarks. The plot is three statements long --> Monsters awaken after being released from ice by illegal military activity, Monsters terrorize planet for a while and put characters at risk, Monsters fight each other towards the movies end <-- Naturally, the writers want to draw you into the lives of the characters so that you'll feel something for them when they're inevitably placed in Mega-harms way. (Let's face it, folks, they also need to waste time between on-screen monster activity) Unfortunately, they do a poor job of getting us to like the scientists, and they are unsuccessful in creating the illusion that our phony people who stand around in phony locations spouting off phony words are in any sort of actual Ultra-Giant peril.

Ice Spiders

The Details:
Director: Tibor Takács
Language: English
Studio: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 86 min
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Certification: R

The Review:
A group of "Olympic" skiers are taken to a remote ski lodge by their coach in the hopes that being cut off from a wireless signal, those internets, and friends and family back home will force them to keep their minds on the slopes. However, none of them could guess that there is a military base nearby performing experiments on giant spiders, and that those spiders are now running amuck across the frozen landscape. Oh yeah, you smell that? We got ourselves a B movie!

Ice Spiders starts off with an ample amount of promise. The title alone is spectacular, and although "giant spiders" has been done, the setting and ideas are fairly unique. Also, when we're introduced to our first sequence involving Rocky and Bob, two overeager hunters who run into a german shepherd-sized, ash-gray spider that makes quick work off them, I should have been cheering. But, much like the rest of the film, the entire opening sequence is just not satisfying.

First off, Rocky and Bob aren't ignorant or arrogant enough to make their deaths gratifying. The spider itself shuffles along the ground at a menacing .003 mph, allowing it's victims plenty of time to escape. So, much like classic zombie/slasher films, the survival of the characters mostly hinges on how nimble they are. Luckily for this ice spider, the hunters have forgotten how to walk.

Hammerhead

The Details:
Directed By: Michael Oblowitz
Release Date: 18 June 2005 (USA)
Tagline: Half Man. Half Shark. Total Terror
Also Known As: Hammerhead (USA) (DVD box title), SharkMan (International: English title)
MPAA: Rated R for violence.
Runtime: 92 min / Germany:88 min (DVD version)
Country: Aruba / USA
Language: English
Color: Color
Certification: Germany:18 / Netherlands:16 / USA:R

The Review:
Sharks have always held a special place in my heart. In fact, I have a vivid memory of the very first picture I ever drew that I was happy with: A wholesome little crayon piece detailing a shark sinking its teeth into a helpless recreational swimmer. At that moment I knew I wanted to be an artist.

Now, some twenty or so years later, when I see a movie called Hammerhead I just can't help but snag it off the shelf. Call me sick, but I had a severe craving for some grisly shark attack mania solely for the sake of a few laughs...

But were the laughs delivered? Yes, yes they were.

Hammerhead is not the typical Jaws ripoff like one would expect. The plot revolves around a mad scientist named Dr. King played appropriately by B-God Jeffrey Combs. His poor son was diagnosed with cancer, so naturally the only solution was to fuse his son's stem cells with those of a hammerhead shark and transform him into an ugly-as-hell-but-cancer-free-half-man-half-shark-beast-thing! It's logical, really...when you sit and think about it...

Bottom Feeder

The Details:
Directed By: Randy Daudlin
Tagline: Hunger Pains have a whole new meaning....
Country: Canada
Language: English
Color: Color

The Review:
Sometimes I wish I could take a movie, chop out the excess fat, burn my own version, erase the entire experience from memory and watch it all over again. Such is the case with Randy Daudlin's monster flick Bottom Feeder.

This almost-good creature feature begins with the story of a famous geneticist hired by a billionaire burn victim to develop a serum to regenerate dying cells. The geneticist ends up producing more theories than results, and gets an overdose of his own medicine forced into his jugular. He is thrown into the cellar of an old hospital and left to survive off nothing but rats. The side effects of his overdose make him acquire the genetic traits of his food and he begins mutating into a rather lame and not very scary looking Rat-Man.

A city maintenance crew happens to be scheduled to work in that very cellar, and needless to say, it ends up being more than just another day on the job!

Octopus 2

The Details:
Director: Yossi Wein
Runtime: 94 min
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color
Sound Mix: 5.1 Dolby Digital
Certification: USA:R (but don't ask me why)

The Review:
Octopus 2 is a rather misleading monster-shlock. After reviewing the B-lariously awesome Octopus I confidently picked Octopus 2 out of the lineup of hack-jobs and Aliens / Predator / Abyss / Terminator amalgamations. However, much like the opening 20 minutes of the original Octopus, I found myself watching instead of pointing and laughing.

The major difference between the two movies is that this lack of giggles and guffaws never came to an end with 'pus 2. Even though the story is much simpler in 'pus 2, where we follow Nick, a member of New York's scuba police squad, as he tries to make sense of a mysterious drowning / murder, this movie throws so much

Sasquatch Hunters

The Details:
Director: Fred Tepper
Runtime: 88 minutes
Country: USA
Color: Color
Studio: Sony
Certification: R (but only because they say the word "F%$*" about 47 times for absolutely no reason, besides exciting 13 year-olds?)

The Review:
It's hard to begin this review. Hell, it's hard to begin, continue, and end this review. The easiest part of the entire process will be giving Sasquatch Hunters a rating.

Story: Extremely large group of people go into the woods looking for "something". "Something" eats a lot of them.

Even the worst of the worst B-monster flicks, including the ones churned out very quickly and very cheaply by more modern techniques, have at LEAST 2 storylines going on. This movie has just the one. It attempts a second by creating intrigue

Octopus

The Details:
Director: John Eyres
Country: USA
Language: English
Run Time: 100 minutes
Color: Color
Certification: UK:15 / USA:PG-13
Filmed in: Sofia, Bulgaria

The Review:
I'll get right down to the essentials on this slightly off-classic, giant monster movie. You'll have to wait at least 50 minutes before you can safely and resoundingly begin to snicker and giggle. Before you hit that mark, there is little to roll your eyes about beyond the horrendously produced musical tracks. I have never heard a score that took me out of the moment (as monster-movie-mundane as it may be) like the background tunes of Octopus However, the laughs continuously multiply and intensify tenfold over the following thirty minutes. The movie ends on such an hilarious high-note that I nearly threw my back out while bursting with laughter. Octopus fails to provide an enormous amount of misses, but when the misses do occur, they are of such an implausible nature, that one cannot help but blast proverbial milk from their proverbial noses. (see list of illogical lines below)

Revenge of the Rats (Ratten Sie Werden Dich Kriegen)

The Details:
Directed by: Jörg Lühdorff
Runtime: Germany: 98 min / USA: 104 min
Country: Czech Republich / Germany
Language: German / English (US dvd)
Color: Color
Sound Mix: Stereo
Certification: Germany: 12 / USA:PG-13

The Review:
Sigh... Revenge of the Rats is a German-made, perfectly A-typical "Attack of the _______" thriller. The plot is as follows: Rats infest city on a garbage strike, inhabitants struggle with the disease-filled rodents. Although this movie has the advantage of instilling a bit more immediacy due to it's realistic antagonist (aka it's got rats instead of mutant crabs or giant rabbits), it's only marginally better than your average straight-to-vid. If this is the first of it's kind for you, then you'll probably think it's pretty darn entertaining. Because you are 11. For the rest of us who have seen this archetype many, many times, there isn't much intrigue. But, let's sift through the mounting heaps of garbage, avoiding the terminal rat-bites, and see what we can salvage.

Baby Blood

The Details:
Directed by: Alain Robak
AKA: The Evil Within
Runtime: 82 min
Country: France
Language: French
Color: Color
Sound Mix: Dolby
Certification: Argentina:18 / Chile:18 / France:-12 / USA:R / West Germany:18 / Peru:18

The Review:
I feel like I need to take a shower.

In 1990, the year of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie, The Hubble Space Telescope, The Spin Doctors and Public Enemy's legendary "Fear of a Black Planet," a horri-B-ly appealing piece of cinema was released. Its title: Baby Blood.

The story of this French film follows a voluptuous young woman named Yanka. She begins as a lowly performer in some off-key circus, taking all kinds of verbal and physical abuse from her manager. Out of the blue, one of the leopards is found liquidated in its cage. While Yanka is sleeping, a slimy worm-like creature slips its way into her unsuspecting womb. From then on out, the movie basically follows Yanka from point A to to point B, then to point C, D, E F and G for nine months as the new life inside her continues to grow. But this aint yo ordinary fetus...This baby has a direct line to Yanka's brain, and he speaks more eloquently than 95% of America's internet-generation high school graduates!

Skinned Deep

The Details:
Directed by: Gabriel Bartalos
Runtime: 97 min
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color (DeLuxe)
Certification: USA:R / Germany:18 / UK:18

The Review:
This gem of a B-dazzling B-movie is initially a re-hash of classics much like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A group of travelers is welcomed into a freaky slasher country-house by a seemingly benign granny lady. Once they're sufficiently deep within the crazy-pit all hell breaks loose and the weirdies come out of the woodwork slashing, biting, and.. plate-throwing?

Yes, you heard right. There is a character in this movie named Plates. He is so aptly named because of a unique ability to buff and launch his porcelain discs at high velocities. Plates is played by the science-fiction and horror veteran Warwick Davis, the only actual actor in the film that has been in a movie anyone on the planet is familiar with, not that that is a prerequisite to being in a B movie by any means. This silly, nonsensical little lunatic is one of several enjoyable and unique characters littered throughout Skinned Deep.

Wolfhound

The Details:
Directed by: Donovan Kelly
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
Language: English
Unrated Version.
Runtime: 86 min
Studio: New Concorde

The Review:
When you run a movie review site such as this one, you're bound put yourself through a relentless amount of torture every now and then. But that's the risk we at b4brainz are willing to take.

Wolfhound has something to do with an American writer that has just arrived in Ireland. He's staying at his late parents humble ol' abode in order to garner some inspiration for his next novel. Problem is, he's brought his wife and kids along with him...bad idea buddy, haven't you ever seen The Shining? His wife is a sporadic bipolar nut-case, which sounds exciting written down but it's really not. The kids are...kids. There are a number of mangy dogs lingering around the supposed-to-be-beautiful-but-we-never-get-to-enjoy-it Irish setting. But the crusty canines are more than what they seem: through Michael Jackson music video style transformation they can morph into virulent voluptuous vixens!

The wolfbabes seduce the writer, and through some kind of insanely-overactive woman's intuition his wife IMMEDIATELY knows he cheated on her. Then they fuss and fight, spend plenty of time hating each other, bicker bicker bicker....yawn. It turns out the writer is also a wolfhound, and in order to find his true spirit he has to have some supposedly "kinky" sex with them. Sound exciting again? Nope! If the director seriously thinks this boring shit is "kinky," his head would explode if he were to spend a mere 30 seconds looking up "BDSM" on Google. Eventually there is a nonsensical showdown between the writer and another male wolfhound. We find out everyone in town is a wolfhound. Credits roll.

Cemetery Gates

The Details:
Directed by: Roy Knyrim
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color
Region: Region 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
DVD Release Date: May 30, 2006
Run Time: 91 minutes

The Review:
YYYESSS. Ohhhhh yes bloody yesss. Immediately after watching the nearly unbearable bore-fest that is Beyond The Wall of Sleep (which I'm not looking forward to reviewing), I had the pleasure of viewing Cemetery Gates. I rented it on the sole basis that it starred Reggie Bannister, who plays one of my most favorite characters of all time in the spectacular Phantasm & its sequels. Little did I know that I was going to get a no-holds-barred splatteriffic creature flick with a relentless sense of humor!

A couple of animal rights activists break into a research facility to liberate a poor tasmanian devil from experimentation. The problem is, it's not your furry little maniac you saw on Animal Planet...It's a giant genetically enhanced SLIMY maniac...aptly named "Precious!" After it massacres the two buffoons that set it free, the bad-beast is free to wreak havoc in the woods where a group of kids are conveniently making a low-budget zombie film.

The movie crew is the most cliche of all possible groups, and I say that lovingly. Let's get out the checklist...Nerdy introverted "let's get down to business" male: check. Equally intelligent "I'm intrigued by this nerdy guy" female: check. Smart ass "I'm the coolest fuckin' guy ever" idiot with always-agreeing stoner counterpart: check. Blonde "I must flaunt my body at every possible occasion" bimbo: check. And besides the film makers, Reggie's character is always a blast on screen. Overall, the character ingredients are all there for a good time, and the movie never misses any opportunities at exploiting each of their personalities.

The Terror Within

The Details:
Directed by: Thierry Notz
Runtime: 90 min
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color
Sound Mix: Stereo
Certification: Australia:M / UK:18 / USA:R

The Review:
I guess if someone produces hundreds and hundreds of movies it isn't fair to assume that every single one is going to be great, or even decent. There's bound to be a total flop in the mix at some point, and that my friend is the story of The Terror Within.

A plague has swept over mankind. A team of military scientists with modified brown thrift-store overalls (complete with id tags that list first, not last names) reside in an underground bunker. Apparently since they're out in the middle of the Mojave desert where nobody would be anyway we're supposed to get the feeling that they are some of the last remaining people on earth. On the surface are some vicious gargoyles...or uh...they're actually mutated humans...No wait, they just called them gargoyles! But aren't gargoyles mythological creatures that ward off evil from man made structures? Hell, no matter what they are, they are men in pathetic, unimaginative rubber suits with oversized alligator masks that are completely separate from their bodies. The mutants are also determined to mate with the only surviving women. All 3 of them.

Obviously, any chance of originality in the storyline is out the window. One would think that even though the scenario might be a blatant ripoff of past films that they would at least keep the audience entertained with some good gore or decent laughs. Nope, we get neither, and it's truly disappointing.

Humanoids From The Deep

The Details:
Directed by: Barbara Peters
Also Known As:
Humanoids of the Deep, Monster, Monsters
Runtime: 80 min
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Color (Metrocolor)
Sound Mix: Mono
Certification: West Germany:16 / Australia:MA (cable rating) / Australia:R (original rating) / France:-12 / Sweden:15 / UK:18 / USA:R / Norway:(Banned) (1980-2003) (cinema release)

The Review:
Boy am I a sucker for a good guy-in-a-suit monster flick. Especially when the guy-in-a-suit monster flick has sweet gore, a haunting soundtrack, a good sense of humor and a healthy dose of full-frontal nudity!

In a rural, fishing based town something is lurking in the very waters the population relies on. A large cannery corporation that is about to build a factory in town has released a chemical in the water. The chemical is devised to dramatically increase the size and number of their salmon, and therefore increase their profits. It was undoubtedly effective, but in more ways they could imagine!

When the local dogs mysteriously begin to turn up dead, all blame seems to be put on the scapegoat and lone Native American in town, Johnny Eagle. Johnny is also getting a bad rap because he is the only one opposed to the big evil cannery corporation entering town, and that's about the extent to which that subplot pans out. Who needs subplots though when you have young couples that have nothing better to do? And when there's nothing better to do, that means there's a whole lotta lovin' goin around! It just so happens that the new humanoids on the block have a tremendous sex-drive and can sense exactly when and where some horny kids are getting their freaky on!

Gorgo

The Details:
Directed by Eugène Lourié
Runtime: 78 min
Country: UK
Language: English
Color: Color (Technicolor)
Sound Mix: Mono
Certification: Finland:K-12 (re-rating) / Finland:(Banned) (original rating) / Sweden:15 / UK:PG / USA:Unrated / UK:X (original rating)

The Review:
You always know that you're in for a real treat when the first line of a film is flubbed. This is my review of the least Like Nothing I've Ever Seen Before film I've ever seen. Then again, if by "Like Nothing You've Ever Seen Before" they meant; "Most Like Godzilla We Could Get Away With", then it was very much Like Nothin.... oh, you get the point.

Here we go, Gorgo (aka The Story of King-Kong as played by Godzilla). Start in with a couple of salvage dealers, Sam and Joe, on board their ship. They encounter inexplicable volcanic activity. The ship is damaged in the high waves, but luckily there is an island nearby. Our two sort-of more main characters head out to find some fresh water (they have unexpectedly run out.....). Along the way these two fellows who are always looking for a way to make a quick buck happen upon some strange carcasses floating on the surface of the ocean. These dead bodies are "like nothing they have ever seen", and yet, there is no hesitation to press on and ignore their scientific, if not highly monetary, value altogether.