Yes. I’m about to watch a film called Tiki.  Full Moon used to have a monopoly on puppet sized terrors but their recent output has been pretty abysmal. This flick is put out by Image Entertainment and already, there seems to be some false advertising. The Netflix and Imdb pages list this film at a whopping 2 hours. Yet as I load it up on the instant viewing player, it’s showing it at only 82 minutes. Thank the film gods!

You may be wondering why I’m watching this? Well, I’m uploading all 4 tapes of Outpost Doom scenes we shot this past weekend and I need something to kill my time. Tiki is from 2006 and is directed by Ron Ford, who seems to bathe in crappy horror projects (he’s got Witchcraft XI on his resume). I’m anticipating some really awful stop motion puppetry and boobies. Will I get what I demand? And away we go!

2 min: Crazy dude has stuffed a redhead inside a sack and duct taped her mouth shut. We find out that her father owns an evil corporate cruiseliner outfit that put him (the “little guy”) out of business to line his pockets with greed. It’s payback time!

4 min: Tiki man slices off the dude’s fingers. Suspiciously, there is plastic all over the floors just like The Grand Horror…

5 min: Eyeball gouged out, throat slit…body falls perfectly onto the plastic. I’m having ‘Nam like flashbacks…

10 min: “Untie my frickin hands! C’mon, I’m not goddamned Hannibal Lecter!”

14 min: How ironic. The main character is going to college to be an actress. Maybe the director was trying to give some not-so-subtle advice.

20 min: I don’t know how it’s possible, but I think I’d rather be watching The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher…

22 min: Boobies! Courtesy of the nasty, manish lead actress

28 min: Theatre kids are all bonkers. Take it from me. If you’ve ever been around a group of pretentious theatre majors you’ll know what I’m talking about. Anyway, this film is all told in flashback via one of the actresses who is now in an asylum. They play a trick on Amy and get her to show up at her instructors house in the middle of the night, looking to score. Once everybody starts laughing at her, she has a seizure on his front lawn. Oh yeah, she had been cast in the lead role of Pygmalion…

40 min: The Tiki Man is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s literally just a piece of wood they are bouncing up and down. It didn’t even kill the last person. The guy just fell over on his own pitch fork.

41 min: They’ve got the Tiki Man attached to a wire and the actor is flailing around, acting like it is strangling him. This is some of the dumbest shit since 666 Demon Child

45 min: “Beads injected into her brain?!!!!! This sounds bad to me!!!!!”

53 min: Whoa! lesbian threesome out of nowhere! Only one girl takes off her top. lame.

56 min: Worst. Car off a cliff. Scene. Ever.

58 min: Tiki Man beats the big girl to death with her own shoes. Seriously.

68 min: Tiki Man ripps off the top of crazy girls’ skull. Then the main character wakes up from her coma, causing the Tiki Man to lose its power. Sigh…

76 min: Tiki Man scalps crazy girl. The End.

80 min: Catering by : Yo’ Dog Catering. Filmed on location in Spokane, Washington (that town must be proud)

Final Thoughts: Just an awful, awful movie. I’d rather have my wang puréed and then be forced to drink it then to ever watch this travesty of lost time ever again.

Filed under: Running Commentary Review, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Opened my inbox to find an e-mail about a new horror flick called Frat House Massacre. Check out the trailer right here and find out more about the film at the ScreamKings website.

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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

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… got nothing.

Attention fellow Deadlantern crew, feel free to post on this here website

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just about ready to head off for another weekend of Outpost Doom’ing. We’re supposed to do 7 scenes this weekend but that is in serious jeopardy as one of our main actors won’t be available.

ah, the travails of independent moviemaking!

We’ll figure it out…I hope

By the way, if you don’t ever visit the forum or just despise it, you can get all your Outpost Doom needs right here. It’s a total hub of horror!

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Our spin-off political & current events podcast Dead Politics is on hiatus for the time being. We’ve got too much other stuff going on right now. We do plan to get it going again in the fall, when the political scene really heats up. In the meantime, you can catch up on all the hate speech you may have missed at deadpolitics.podomatic.com

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I went to a screening of a film tonight at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre which was presented by Eli Roth. The film is a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark done over 7 years in the mid-80’s by a couple of kids in Mississippi (max age 17ish). Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation was kitsch gold. I wished that all of the Dead Lantern/Grand Horror crew was there to see this DIY masterpiece. It probably won’t ever make it to DVD because of the obvious copyright restrictions but it has been making the indie-theatre circuit for 5 years with the blessing of Mr. Roth who hooked the filmmakers up with a renewed career in film and even a meeting with Stephen Speilberg himself.

Spinning from this amazing backstory is a Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) screenplay (and perhaps comic?) and Paramount project in the works based on the kids who made it (now in their late 30s).

When I get to catch things like this, it’s pretty fucking rad to live here.

Filed under: Comic Books, Movies, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

So I happen to be an organ donor. I don’t know why but my drivers license has the little donor heart symbol on it. Well I don’t want to be an organ donor. I hate people and want most of them to die from horrible diseases. So I think when I go to get my license renewed I’ll have my donor status revoked. Think about it. How many life saving organs can you donate after death? Six? Seven? I’m not really sure. I mean you can donate your eyes supposedly but you can live without eyes so those don’t count. I’m talking about stuff like a heart or your kidneys. We’ll say six organs. The way I look at it then is if you die and you’re not an organ donor, it’s like you’re taking six people with you then. And I know that’s not exactly the high score or anything but I still think those should count dammit.

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Via Destructoid.com, a fun list of survival horror clichés. I like #5…

5: Architects are clinically insane:
Can we truly be sure that Raccoon City’s inhabitants were the victims of the T-Virus? My personal theory is that, rather than becoming infected by a biologically engineered disease, they were simply driven mad by years of having to use keys in the shape of helmets and pushing blocks around rooms just to open fucking doors.

It seems that most buildings in survival horror games were designed by schizophrenic lunatics who felt that it should take two hours to get from the kitchen to the bathroom, with a collected eighteen miles of backtracking in between. Why does a hotel need a working music box to open a door? How did the local council give that planning permission!? It doesn’t matter, because it’s part of why survival horror is awesome.

Filed under: Commentary, Uncategorized, Video Games | No Comments »

Well what do you know? I’m back. “Why so soon?” you may ask. Well I have this really bad characteristic that seems to be ingrained into my very being. I procrastinate. A lot. I’ll put off just about anything if I get the mind to do so. When I’m not procrastinating, I’m getting things done at a speed that would make molasses feel like Michael Johnson. This is most evident in my school work. I absolutely will not do anything relate to college work/assignments/research until the very last possible minute.

This is the week before Finals and I planned on, once again, getting either nothing done or moving slowly. Turns out, I got this wild hair up my ass to finally get everything done ahead of time. For example, instead of waiting until today to do an 8 page paper that had to be submitted by midnight, I did it yesterday. I also did all of my other assignments early this week as well which means I suddenly have nothing but free time on my hands (other than working on video, which I don’t consider “work”).

See this dude? He’s Augustine of Hippo. He’s the architect of all of Western Christian thought for the past 1500 years. I’m in a debate this coming Monday and as a representative of Cicero, I had to find a way to dismantle the entire logic behind Augustine’s system. I found it…I think, in a philosopher named Adorno that I studied in my Film Theory class. Can film theory sucker punch Christian philosophical structure? We’ll see on Monday….

Anyway, expect daily updates to Dead Lantern to resume in short order.

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Has been uploaded - check it out

Disclaimer: DeadLantern.com will not be held responsible if downloading this mp3 inadvertently summons the Cenobites.

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Hey there loyal readers, this is just a heads-up about some downtime we’ll be experiencing tonight. Our hosting company is doing some maintenance and server moves that will take our site down for a while.

The outage is scheduled to begin Friday, February 8, at 10PM PST, and is expected to last up to 8 hours, until Saturday, February 9, 6AM PST.

Hopefully it will all go smoothly and the site will come back up on schedule. I know you guys all just sit there at your computers 24/7 hitting “refresh” on our page, so the downtime will be a hardship, but why not take the opportunity to go see Rambo at the theatre, or watch some Howling DVDs? Just hold your loved ones close and we’ll make it through this together.

Thanks for your patience!

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Happy 68th Birthday, Mr. Romero.

Just about everyone’s favorite Romero film is one of his Dead flicks, but I think in terms of the film I like the most, it would have to be Creepshow. It’s just got such a fun over-the-top way about it.  I love all the stories in it and I think, as a film, it stands up quite nicely to the Dead trilogy (no, I’m not counting Land as part of the canon. I’m still angry about that movie) though it’s generally overlooked.

So, what’s your favorite Romero flick?

Fun Fact: George Romero is younger than John McCain by almost 4 years

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Watch this video.

They were always real to me.

That makes me really pissed off the G1 style models weren’t used in the movie.

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Yeah, I’m a geek and I get up early specifically just to watch the Oscar nominations (eat your hear out, Jeff )

Johnny Deep and Javier Bardem both got nods. No Country For Old Men nominated for Best Picture (along with Juno!?). Crazy stuff. Now I’m going to geek out some more.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »