1989

Directed by: Steve Miner
Written By: David Twohy
Genre: Biblical time-traveling magic fights

Watch it now!

Checklist

• Time traveling
• Know-it-all Amish
• A kitchen de-fingering
• Posh British accents
• Flying powers as a direct result of eating children

Tagline
He’s come from the past to destroy the future.

What Netflix says happens:
“In 17th century Boston, a warlock (Julian Sands) escapes death and magically leaps 300 years into the future, where he searches in Los Angeles for the three parts of the Devil’s Bible that will unmake the world. Meanwhile, the witch hunter (Richard E. Grant) who brought him to trial — aided by one of the warlock’s victims (Lori Singer) — is in hot pursuit to stop his heartless path of violence and foil his destructive plans.”

What really happens:
An evil warlock in Puritan-era Boston escapes captivity and goes to the future somehow where he tries to find all the pieces of some book that will give him the true name of God (so he can speak it backwards and undo all of creation, of course). He appears in some annoying girls apartment who then attempts to take care of him but instead gets cursed to age twenty years a day. A la Terminator, another time-traveler shows up to stop the previous evil time-traveler and teams up with the girl as they travel across the country chasing the evil warlock. A bunch of crazy stuff happens along the way, the warlock kills a bunch of people and they meet a nice all knowing Mennonite (who also dies) and finally they chase him down and kill him in a cemetery by injecting him with salt-water.

Brief Thoughts:
Aside from the incredibly annoying female lead and her terrible dialogue, this movie is awesome. It’s got some great biblical spell-casting type action, and Julian Sands kills it as the evil warlock. There’s some pretty good death scenes all around and aside from the aforementioned lead, its a generally pretty sweet flick all around. I’d give it a five out of ten on the cheese scale, not terribly cheesy, but there is certainly a lot of really dumb magic bullshit. Two thumbs up!

1989

Directed by: David Schmoeller
Written By: Charles Band (you will soon notice pattern here)
Genre: Egyptian demonic killer puppet psychic slashers

Watch it now!

Checklist

• A killer puppet with a drill for a head
• A killer puppet that has sex with men and then pukes leeches onto them
• Nazi puppets!
• Exploitative 80s psychic sex scenes

Tagline
Evil Comes in all sizes.

What Netflix says happens:
“In director David Schmoeller’s taut chiller, perverse master puppeteer Andre Toulon (William Hickey) harnesses the power of ancient Egyptian magic to breathe life into his crew of marionettes, who morph into demonic killers. Many years later, a group of modern psychics looking for clues to explain a mutual friend’s mysterious suicide end up trapped in a creepy hotel stalked by Toulon’s miniature assassins. Paul Le Mat also stars.”

What really happens:
A guy who really likes puppets is killed by Nazis. Fast-forward 50 years and some guy in the same hotel dies. A bunch of psychics show up for some reason or another and start being jerks and having psychic sex all over the goddamned place. Then some puppets that are alive for some reason (“Egyptian magic” the movie explains) start murdering them all. The two main love interests survive and a bad guy shows up to fight them. The puppets kill the bad guy and then the good guy leaves.

Brief Thoughts:
The ending. What ending? After the puppets kill everyone the antagonist reveals himself and his devilish plan (to do what?) and tries to kill the two main love interests. The puppets then kill him in an elevator through no help from either of the main characters. It then cuts to the next morning and the good guy leaving the hotel. Wait what?! The puppets just stopped apparently after killing this guy? And the two characters stayed the rest of the night in a hotel where half a dozen people were just murdered by demonic killer puppets without calling police or anything? And then the guy just leaves the hotel and says ‘Hey tootse, maybe you should come by where I live some day.” The End.

On the other hand it did have fucking sweet stop-motion and some great death scenes including the nightmare inducing, leech puking succubus puppet. Two thumbs up!

Of course after a year or less of doing that the store shut down and I stopped finding those awesome movies. I still like writing about lesser known movies, be they really bad or really bad, but I never seem to be able to gather the effort to be able to do more than one or two before I quit.

Where am I going with this? Anyway, the short little write ups I used to do I think are the perfect succinct  little blurb to be able to accomplish (or so I hope) more than one or two times.

So earlier this month, being October, thanks to the wonders of Netflix Instant Streaming I started watching and re-watching some of my favorite awesomely bad 80s & 90s horror movies. Not entirely unlike Alex Navarro’s 30 Days of Hate over at Screened.com I figured I would try and do a small writeup for each of them and see how far we get. But unlike his pieces, these movies are totally good and should totally be watched. And then I decided to call it Schloptoberfest for some reason. So look forward to some of your favorites from Full Moon Entertainment and occasionally overlooked horror (or maybe not) classics from the direct to VHS age.

Trailer:

The original short it was be based on:

High(er) Quality Version

On a completely unrelated note Mike Patton recently talked about Faith No More reuniting (sans guitarist Jim Martin) for a European tour. As cool as this is, I was more interested by a little note that I had not previously heard. Since I loved the first Crank, I’ve been excited ever since I’ve heard about the sequel, but now my excitement has reached a new height somewhere slightly above “free bacon and beef jerky day.” Apparently Mike Patton has been busy recently doing his first ever fully original film score, for Crank 2: High Voltage. I think this is going to be awesome.

Fun fact: Patton contributed his voice for the ‘infected’ in Left 4 Dead.