Fucking EPIC. By far the best movie I’ve seen this year. The performances are amazing and every award and accolade both Heath Ledger and this movie get is well deserved. I hope the other DL guys see this today becauseI’m going to want to talk about it all night during filming.

9.75/10 losing a quarter of a point because Christian Bale went really fucking over the top with his raspy Batman voice to the point where you can only understand half of what he’s saying.

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I’m back with another running commentary of a terrible movie that’s free on Netflix’s instant viewing section. This week brings you the Ray Dennis Steckler 1979 flick The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. Steckler is, of course, the king of nutzoid movie titles. His most famous being The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!?. That film happens to be a blight on existence and so I don’t have high hopes for this one. And lets not forget another great Steckler title: The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Green Grasshopper and the Vampire Lady From Outer Space. The flick I’m about to watch is obviously a play on the old Universal stuff like Frankenstein meets the Wolfman…let’s see if it is as good. And away we go!

0 min: Old creepy dude photographs a half-naked chick in red hot pants while thinking to himself “She wants me to do it to her”. Christ, we aren’t even a minute into this crap!

2 min: Death by strangulation! The audio is dubbed, poorly. The girl sounds like a phone sex operator as she is being strangled. Not that I would know what a phone sex operator sounds like or anything…

4 min: Steckler’s directorial pseudonym for this movie: Wolfgang Schmidt

5 min: Playboy Alert! Marilyn Monroe pictorials filmed in loving detail

7 min: Titties! The woman’s apartment not only has a movie poster of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Baghdad on her wall, but also a giant hot dog. The set design is impeccable!

8 min: “Nice little shot of my BUTTAX!” seriously, that’s how she pronounced it. By the way, there is no actual dialog in this movie. It’s all voiceover and really awful dubbing in post production.

13 min: Awesome. The bookstore has a poster for Robert Lippert’s Last of the Wild Horses. Lippert was a prolific producer of horror in the 50’s and 60’s and made stuff like The Fly, The Last Man on Earth, and The Earth Dies Screaming. Classy!

14 min: Flick-O-Rama Arcade: Marital Aids, Color Film, Pinballs, 25 cent Movies (on the marquee)

17 min: The Skid Row Slasher strikes! Homeless man bleeds bright red paint from his throat!

20 min: even more movie posters on the walls for inexplicable reasons: Teenage Massage Parlor, Paranoia (I can’t tell, but I think it is for the 1969 Umberto Lenzi sex flick Orgasmo) and Teenage Hustler.

23 min: Titties! Random out of nowhere shower scene!

24 min: Girl dries off in a Kiss towel, then after the strangler snuffs her out with a pillow, we get a dramatic zoom in closeup on a Kiss record! Gene Simmons, what does it all mean????!!!!

32 min: First attractive woman in the entire film appears. Gets naked. Strangler’s motivation revealed: His wife Marcia cheated on him with a bunch of dudes, now he’s trying to find someone to replace her who is “pure”. Unfortunately, every girl he photographs gets buck ass naked and he kills them. Oh yeah, and the Slasher is the chick he likes who runs the bookstore.

42 min: Ginormous Titties during nude roller skating!

45 min: Slasher takes out another homeless man (that’s her modus operandi)

50 min: Dear lord, only 20 more minutes of this hell….

53 min: Disgusting 70’s titties and bush!

56 min: Even more titties!

59 min: The sexual tension between the Strangler and the Slasher rivals that of Bogie and Bergman!

71 min: Strangler kills Slasher but Slasher stabs Strangler.  Strangler makes it outside before falling dead in front of a Deep Throat poster as Steckler dramatically pans to a marquee of a porn theatre showing Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and The Devil In Miss Jones. The End.

Final Thoughts: I’m pretty sure this is the film God showed the Jews before they committed suicide en masse at Masada. I just saved you 71 minutes of your life. You can send any thank you notes to splattercast@deadlantern.com

Filed under: Reviews, Running Commentary Review, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

So I caught the first episode of what is essentially Masters of Horror: Season 3 renamed and repackaged for broadcast television (NBC).

The episode was called “The Sacrifice” and involved a group of criminals who end up at an isolated quasi-fort run by three hot blondes. Turns out they lure passersby to their home in order to feed a vampire they keep locked up. I thought the episode was alright. I liked the winter, isolated setting. The acting was passable, Rachel Miner is hot, and I thought the whole idea of an isolated Amish style community (think The Village) whose existence is based upon the idea that their only function is to keep the vampire from getting loose and into our “modern” world was nifty. The problems are the usual suspects: predictable ending, unoriginal setups, nothing you haven’t seen before, etc. Still, it was worth spending an hour to watch. I can only hope that when these come out on DVD they actually show some gore.

Oh, that opening title sequence and song by Terj Tankian (of System of a Down fame) is freaking terrible. Whoever greenlit that garbage should be fired. They should have kept the old MoH tune.

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I’m watching my own Franken-movies right now.  Surprisingly I’m really liking the movie on at the moment, a Lions Gate flick simply titled, “Frankenstein”.  Problem is, Parker Posey is in it and the movie is suffering for it.  Seriously, everything about this film so far is good except for her.  It’s a good thing she’s hot, otherwise she wouldn’t have a career.

 Look for all sorts of Franken-fun and reviews on Splattercast #60 and all through the weekend.

Filed under: Commentary, Reviews, Splattercast | No Comments »

A couple weeks ago Steve and Mat were asking me what our total review count was at. I just went into the database and crunched some numbers to pull out that information, along with some other stats.

I should note that if you start double-checking me, some of my figures won’t add up. This is because I designed the database to not be very strict. So Mat can rate Hell of the Living Dead as “An Inescapable Abyss out of 10″ and Steve can rate Zombie 5: Killing Birds as “negative infinity minus 1 out of 10″ - and it’s good for some laughs but I can’t really do math on those reviews. So little things like that will throw off the stats slightly but it’s not like we’re doing brain surgery here, I don’t think it will matter too much.

So, here are some numbers pulled from our reviews database…

We currently have 557 reviews: 453 movie, 43 game, 33 book and 28 music.

Mat leads the pack with 316 reviews, Steve has 101, I have 24, Brady has 12 and Sleepycast co-host Ronin has 9. Carlin also has 9, but the most important contribution he’s made has been this one. Oh, and some guy named Adam has 34. I have no recollection of this dude, but shout-outs to him for contributing back in the day.

Site-wide, the average score of our movie reviews is a 4.4 out of ten. By reviewer, Mat on average gives a movie a 3.7, Steve a 4.9, Brady a 4.5 and I’m more generous with a 6.9 average.

A breakdown of number of movies by score is as follows, with fractional scores rounded down (so a 4.5 review score is reflected in the 4 figure)…

0: 23
1: 32
2: 42
3: 38
4: 43
5: 34
6: 49
7: 83
8: 61
9: 39
10: 6

The six 10’s were given by Mat (Predator, Aliens, Robot Monster) and Adam (The Shawshank Redemption, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Shaun of the Dead)

Filed under: Commentary, Fun Stuff, Reviews | 5 Comments »

I managed to watch a few DVDs this weekend and wanted to share some thoughts. I guess I should write up full-fledged reviews for these, but I don’t have that much to say about them so here are some quickie reviews..

The Redsin Tower (2006) This is the first “traditional” movie from Fred Vogel’s Toetag Pictures, whose previous endeavors didn’t really have a plot or narrative and were mostly faux-snuff showcases for grisly fx work. The Redsin Tower follows a group of teens as they have a rowdy beer-and-pot party in the titular tower. Some dude named Redsin did horrible experiments in the tower many years ago, so it’s naturally haunted. The malevolent spirits are roused by the airhead teens and carnage ensues. Strong points are Toetag’s trademark gore work and higher-than-usual production values for a straight-to-DVD indie affair. Weak points are some of the performances, a puzzling ending and an unbelievably wacky jilted lover character. Overall, I can recommend it for a single viewing on a lazy weekend - 5/10.

Vacancy (2007) This is sort of like a “torture porn” movie processed into a more mainstream and slightly higher-brow flick. A very small cast is headlined by relatively big names Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, who play a husband and wife whose marriage is falling apart over a family tragedy. They take the scenic route on a long road trip and wind up at a remote hotel in the middle of nowhere. The hotel management has made a cottage industry of producing snuff films. It’s a short movie with a very small-scale story and only a few characters. I thought it worked pretty well and I’d say it’s a solid rental - 5/10.

Necropolis Awakened (2002) I watched this because Steve listed it as one of several zombie movies that were available as we prepare for a zombie-themed episode of the Splattercast (look for that soon). This is one of those shot-on-video micro-budget indie horror flicks. I’ll save some thoughts for the Splattercast, but I will say this one was has a couple noteworthy things going on. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a terrible movie, but I liked the amount of car-chase action they did; you don’t see a lot of vehicle action in these movies. Also, the characters/actors are some of the most remarkably obnoxious I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s like they’re so obnoxious that you give them props for pulling off that level of obnoxiosity - 2/10.

Filed under: DVD, Reviews | 1 Comment »

It’s a goddamned review bonanza here at Deadlantern!  Halo 3, Plane Dead, 28 Weeks Later…and they all have zombies!  Check ‘em out!

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Read about it here!

Filed under: Movies, Reviews | 1 Comment »