It’s been a busy second half of October for Teleport City.

EATERS Back in the late 1970s, when we had our first huge zombie movie glut, it was thanks in large part to the Italian exploitation machine latching onto the concept and cranking them out. Sadly, that machine, once mighty and seeming insatiable, petered out and died during the 1990s. When the microbudget horror revolution started to bloom in the 2000s, a lot of budding horror filmmakers turned to the zombie movie. It was an almost entirely American affair, though, with Japan chiming in with slightly higher budget zombie fare from time to time. Eventually, thanks most likely to 28 Days Later, other countries started getting in on the undead fun. Before we knew it, the zombie outbreak had gone international. But something just didn’t seem right. There were still no Italians.
Neraka Lembah Tengkorak The world presented in Neraka Lembah Tengkorak (English translation: Hell Skull Valley) is similar to the Martial World of Chinese fiction, complete with various feuding clans and schools, as well as every chance meeting between strangers resulting in a brief fight before anyone bothers to figure out whether they have a beef or not. This is, at least, what seems to be happening during the first half of the movie. We spend a good deal of time watching as the members of one particular school fend off challenges from whatever random lone fighters shows up at their doorstep. Thanks to their advanced martial arts skills, they don’t appear to have much trouble doing this — until, of course, the real villains of the piece make their entrance.
Soulless So I decided that I might as well take the plunge. Or maybe not a plunge, but at least wade slowly into the waters of modern horror writing. But still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy one of the many books with a sword-wielding witch girl in skinny jeans and a crop top on the cover. I’m not a man who is especially prone to shying away from things “not meant for men,” but if I was going to test the waters of horror, I was going to do so via a setting more suited to my particular tastes. In other words, something with waistcoats and cravats. Some random poking around lead me to think that Gail Carriger’s Soulless – a thoroughly modern take on traditional Victorian England — might be just the thing for which I was looking.
F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon With it being October and all, I was in the mood for a decent horror video game that fulfills my basic requirements for a game — that it be old enough so everyone else has lost interest in it, thus driving the price down to an affordable ten bucks or so. Of the many recommendations I got, I decided to go with F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon, because I thought the blend of supernatural horror with a SWAT type first person shooter would be interesting. Plus, I’d been told the game was genuinely scary in many places. Seemed like the perfect late-night indulgence. And for portions of the game, it was. It’s a fast paced shooter that does indeed boast some incredibly effective spooky material. But it’s also too repetitive, and the horror often gets forgotten in favor of room after room of shooting it out with basically identical opponents gussied up in the same sort of assault team gear your own character is wearing.
Creature with the Blue Hand The movie begins with a frantic Dave Emerson (Klaus Kinski) being convicted of murder despite frantically pleading his own innocence. He is committed to a sanitarium run by the slightly shady Dr. Mangrove (Carl Lange) while his family — including twin brother Richard (also Kinski) bemoans the sorry state to which Dave has fallen. But all is not as it seems, which becomes evident when Dave escapes — with suspicious ease — and suddenly people are finding themselves ont he deadly end of the blue metal claw. Is Richard really Dave, or is Dave Richard? Is Dave pretending to be Richard pretending to be Dave? Man, as if krimi weren’t convoluted enough, this one goes and throws twin Kinskis — Twinskis, if you will — into the mix.

And finally, our impressions regarding this year’s New York Comic Con are being posted here.

In Top Secret, when the world is threatened by nuclear terrorists, The Powers That Be know that the super spy to put on the case is… Bill Cosby? That’s just one reason why the movie is as exciting as a slowly melting pudding pop.

What can I say?  Life gets dull when your house is 80% uninhabitable.  Plus, I managed to knock out nearly a third of my increasingly unmanageable screener pile.

Banshee!!! (2008), in which I don’t know what the hell that thing really is, but it certainly isn’t a banshee…

Colony (1995), in which cheating on a brilliant genetic scientist is a really bad idea…

Gold (1968), which has almost as little to do with gold as Banshee!!! does with banshees…

Hostel, Part II (2007), in which you should seriously just go to the frigging beach or something…

Joy (1983), in which someone finally made a daddy-issues movie that doesn’t totally suck…

Mondo Trasho (1969), in which getting run over by a transvestite in a Cadillac is merely the start of the adventure…

Reflections of Light (1988), which I guess doesn’t totally suck, either…

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988), in which there are even weirder things than robot cancer…

and…

Valley of the Zombies (1946), in which both valleys and zombies apparently cost too much money.

Take a dash of Universal Soldier, add a few tablespoons of Blade Runner, and several cups of The Terminator, and you get T-Force, a derivative but fun exercise that delivers the minimum requirements you have for a B movie of this nature.

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And after a thoroughly ridiculous amount of pondering, my nomination for the first true killer animal film is—

THE NAKED JUNGLE (1954)

In which plantation owner, practising domestic tyrant and all-around self-declared superior male Charlton Heston gets a little more than he bargained for with the arrival of mail-order bride Eleanor Parker. Their inevitable conflict is, however, somewhat rudely interrupted by the arrival of what is at one point described as, “Forty square miles of agonising death”.

It turns out to be an understatement.

Fun fact: this is one of the films to which I attribute my hang-up about eye-violence…

In the 1980s, animation director Don Bluth seemed to be becoming a serious rival to Disney, with movies like An American Tail and The Land Before Time. But after those two movies, Bluth slowly descended into making movies that were mediocre in quality and box office grosses. A Troll In Central Park may have been his lowest point, because the American distributor lacked so much confidence in it that the movie received almost no theatrical release. Was this decision justified or not? Read on.

Well, partly anyway.  I’d already reviewed most of this year’s lineup, so I’ve padded the update with a couple of other things.  I imagine you’ll see at once which two are the odd reviews out.

Castle of Blood (1964), in which betting a ghost’s landlord your ass is just as bad an idea as betting the Devil your head…

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2010), in which being afraid of the dark is exactly the thing that one ought to do…

I, Monster (1971), in which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde dare not speak their names for some unfathomable reason, even though John Lanyon and Frederick Utterson have no such compunctions…

Island of the Doomed (1967), in which some people simply never learn about sticking their noses into a mad scientist’s business…

and…

The Stepmother (1971), in which half the audience spend half the film wondering when they’ll get to the not-quite-incest, and half the audience will spend the other half of the film wondering when that detective will finally get around to busting the protagonist for murdering his client.
 
 
 

What? A Vietnam veteran who is not a raging psychopath? Yes, in The Ballad Of Andy Crocker, one of the first movies to deal with Vietnam veterans returning to the United States, we get a balanced look at such a person. Though all the same, the title figure finds out it’s a long road… when you’re on your own.