The fourth issue of Arkham Tales, the PDF magazine of weird fiction, is now available for FREE download. Just click here to have all of your nightmares come true.
Also please take a moment to answer the poll found here and help determine the future of Arkham Tales.
You know him and love him as a frequent commenter here on the B-Masters blog; now you can see Blake Matthews’ kung fu movie review site, It’s a Beautiful Film Worth Fighting For, in its new home at ColdFusionVideo.com.
Charles Roxburgh and Matt Farley, the driving forces behind Freaky Farley (2007), return with Monsters, Marriage and Murder in Manchvegas (2009), a similar tale of quirky goings-on in an off-kilter New Hampshire town. Say what you will about these guys, but they’re obviously making the movies they like to make. Does that mean that they’re movies that you necessarily want to see? Gotta read the review to find out, I’m afraid.
Aug 26
Sumpah Pocong di Sekolah (2008)
I’ve criticized Indonesia’s Maxima Pictures for putting out horror flicks that are a bit noisy and immature. With what seems like stunning self-awareness, Maxima actually produced a movie that turns its worst habits into assets: it’s set in a boys’ boarding school, where noise and immaturity are only to be expected.
Then they did something that stunned me even more: they switched gears in the middle, and made it a halfway-decent horror film.
This third (and for now, last) of my reviews of Maxima’s output shows once again what they could do, if they’d only set their sights a little higher than junk like Tiren.
For some bizarre reason, The Full Moon Archives Music Collection is available on Jamendo.com, which is a Creative Commons site mostly populated by indie artists trying to drum up some interest with free downloads. That’s right, guilt-free music downloading! This collection contains everything from classic Richard Band themes like The Pit and the Pendulum and Doctor Mordrid (here mislabeled “Doctor Morbid”) to title tracks from Evil Bong and Gingerdead Man 2.
Aug 24
Todd clocks in first with Teleport City’s trio of contributions to this month’s Roundtable, and in doing so, finally fulfills his final requirement for being a full-fledged B-Master:
My viewing of Zombie Lake was one of those events that lead you to question everything in your life that has lead up to it. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it was a “where did I go wrong” moment, because many of the choices that brought me to it couldn’t in themselves be considered mistakes. Nonetheless, when you get to the point where you see watching Zombie Lake as some kind of solemn obligation, it’s a circumstance that bares some investigation. And I would be lying if I didn’t admit that, amidst all the questioning of how and why, I also found myself asking if there was not some way that all of this could have been avoided.
To some extent, when it comes to Zombie Lake, I am a victim of my own conscientiousness. Had the current B-Masters roundtable topic, which asks the participants to reveal embarrassing gaps in their film-watching resumes, come up a couple of years ago, I would have had no shortage of movies to choose from. However, once I went from merely watching movies to writing about them on the internet, I felt duty bound to do a bit of caulking in that area — with the “caulk” that I am referring to being those films that I had yet to see that I felt I probably should, which I guess would then make the “caulking gun” that I would use for such purpose either my DVD player or computer drive, or whatever. It’s probably not a very good metaphor for me to have reached for, seeing as I’m not very handy with around-the-house sort of things.
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Embarrassing in a “YOU haven’t reviewed Zombie Lake!?” kind of way, anyhow. I did have a second “real” embarrassment picked out, but after Jurassic Park turned into such a marathon, I thought I’d take things a little easier this time.
Still…mad science, goofy dialogue, giant killer spider… Yeah, I should have seen this one. So – mea culpa.
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Mati Suri (2009)
That’s Rizal Mantovani; and the “golden hits” are any number of other famous horror films that have been “orchestrated” into… ummm… oh, hell. This pun isn’t worth the effort. Let me start again.
After a suicide attempt, a young woman named Abel finds herself faced with some very mysterious events. Is she being haunted? Is somone trying to scare her to death? Or are the two or three or four possible twists in the narrative all in her mind, a result of her traumatic mati suri (apparent death)?
Yes, this is a Maxima Pictures production, but relax: this time it’s only the heroine that’s potentially brain-damaged… not the script. You’ve seen it all before, no doubt; but if you’re like me, you’ll have a lot of fun seeing it all again.
From Indonesia’s Maxima Pictures comes a lopsided mix of horror and bad comedy. This movie is so ill-proportioned that the entire last 20 minutes have nothing at all to do with the plot. In fact, the whole mess wouldn’t even be worth mentioning — if it weren’t for the necrophilia, which raises the tone of the flick for a few brief moments.
