Husk

So, BlockbustMyBalls finally sent me 2 new slashers to watch, and I decided on Husk. It's a film in the After Dark set, so I'll most likely add some more of them to my queue to watch. I've enjoyed some of their past efforts, such as Dark Ride and The Hamiltons, so it'll be fun to explore the quality of the rest. Oh, and SPOILER time!

Husk is in a genre I've always enjoyed, that of killer scarecrows on the loose. The story opens up on a group of young guys travelling past endless cornfields, having a conversation about some kind of risky jump one of them wants to take. The conversation distracts them while driving, and the vehicle slams into a bird. The impact pretty much turns the bird into a Jackson Pollock painting on their windshield.

When they pull their truck over to the side of the road, we start getting to know them all. The trio who caused the accident are Scott, Chris and Johnny. In addition to them, we also meet Natalie,who was sleeping in the backseat, and her boyfriend Brian. Wave hello, everyone!

Chris, the one in the glasses, gets out to look at the damage, while Brian checks Natalie for signs of a concussion or other injury. Brian yells over to Chris, just to confirm that he, too, is in okay shape. This is quickly turning into that scene at the end of every episode of The Waltons, where 9,000 characters have to wish each other a good night. Come on guys, don't screw this one up...I love a good killer scarecrow flick!

Chris wanders around toward one of the cornfields, trying to get reception on his phone. He learns from the others that Johnny has somehow managed to wander away, and is now missing. He continues exploring their surroundings, while Brian calms Natalie down by snuggling up to her. Yeah, because nothing says "an afternoon quickie" quite like a car accident.

Chris spots a building past the field, and urges the others to go with him to look for assistance. They all bundle up to protect their skin from getting smacked by cornstalks, then begin the journey. Well, maybe not all...Chris and Brian enter the field, leaving Natalie and Scott with the wrecked truck.

Once they actually enter the rows of corn, it proves to be rough going. Brian seems to be plowing right on through it, but Chris gets into a coughing fit trying to keep up, which slows down their progress considerably. Uh, why did you bring the chess club guy, as opposed to the OTHER fellow athlete you had with you? Smart decision.

Well, nothing happens to them. Yet. Instead, we see Scott and Natalie bond over cigarettes. When the movie switches back to Chris and Brian, they're talking about having a party with as many women as they can handle. So much for generating any suspense by splitting them up a little.

Oh, and then they discover a rusty mailbox in the field. Beyond that, they find abandoned vehicles. And then, finally, they see a scarecrow. Yay! Chris, who just minutes ago could barely walk, decides that he should climb the post that the scarecrow is resting on, to try and get a position on the house. He sees it, and climbs off of the scarecrow. And still, nothing happens...

Back at the truck, Natalie is now wandering around outside, but staying close to the vehicle. She checks on their supplies, while Scott looks like he's trying to hot-wire the truck. Natalie strolls away from the vehicle, and uncovers a sign that says "GEN HILL". Then she spots someone hiding in the corn, and chases after them. Scott hears the commotion, and quickly catches up to her.

Then, more wandering with Brian and Chris. They find the house, but it looks long-abandoned. The interior is filthy, and they both agree that no one lives in the house anymore...so, of course, they resume calling out, "Hello? Anybody here?" Genius.

Scott and Natalie discover a scarecrow as well(okay...NATALIE discovers it....), and Natalie thinks it might actually be a human corpse. She runs back to the truck, and Scott follows. After a brief debate, they agree to try to follow Chris and Brian through the cornfield. Hmmm...what if she found Johnny?

Still wandering around in the House That Crap Built, the Dork-namic Duo hear some machinery. They enter a room with a bare light bulb lit up, and see a vaguely human-ish shape working at some kind of generator pedal, presumably to keep the light on. Brian gets closer to the figure, and asks if it's Johnny...

Then more running through corn. Fun. Natalie finds the house, and calls out Brian's name. Then Brian and Chris get close enough to the figure at the generator device to see that it is, indeed, their friend Johnny. Or was. His corpse is somehow making the machine work, and when he stops, the light goes out.

Natalie is still shouting for Brian in the corn, and hears something near her. Whatever it is, the thing attacks her, and knocks the frightened girl to the ground. Despite her screams and struggling, the attacker drags her away into the field. Bye!

Everyone hears her screaming, and the remaining 3 guys reunite. Scott tells Brian that he saw a brief glimpse of the thing that took her, and points in the direction that she was dragged in. Chris, being a wus, remains at the grungy house as the sun sets.

Scott and Brian run around in the dark, and find Natalie hanging from a chain wrapped around her wrists, looking fairly dead-ish. When Brian tries to undo the chains, some unseen mechanism hoists her body higher off the ground. Brian finds another body in the corn, then hears some whispering in close proximity, and then he and Scott get Natalie's body off of the chain device.

Scott gets back to the abandoned house first, and tells Chris that they all need to leave. Brian, carrying Natalie over his shoulder, takes a break to rest. As he tries to find any signs of life in her, something rushes at them. Brian starts to run away, and is hit by a chain. He has a scuffle with 2 of the zombie scarecrows, and he stumbles out of the corn to warn Chris. Before Chris can even react, a scarecrow tries to get him too, but he breaks free. As the 2 teens catch their breath on the ground, they see a scarecrow move back into the wall of corn.

Back in the house, they tend to their wounds and look for weapons. As they argue over whether or not to escape or fight, Brian accuses Scott of letting the monsters have Natalie to save his own ass. Then they search some more.

After determining that the cars are probably useless, Chris spots another scarecorpse. He falls into Dumb Horror Movie Rookie country, and decides to have a better look at the figure, which leaps at him. Brian saves him, but the attack somehow gives Chris visions. That sounds entirely logical, huh?

Anyway, he has a vision of a farmer and his son performing a ritual sacrifice involving spilling the blood of a chicken. As the farmer praises the boy, he sees his other son standing in the corner, not getting involved in the ritual. The farmer drags his second son over to a fresh chicken, hands him the knife, and tells him to start cutting. Then the vision ends. And that, kids, is the story of how Colonel Sanders started his empire. Or How I Met Your Mother. I forget which.

Back in the present, Brian gets his shit together, at least mentally speaking. He and Scott then move some furniture around and trash the house while looking for supplies. Scott thinks that he sees someone in the next room, and decides to explore some more.

He finds a room with electricity running in it(in the form of a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling), and calls out to Brian. Then a zombie version of Natalie shambles in, and starts sewing. The door slams shut, trapping Scott with the undead girl. Luckily, his friends hurry to find something to break the door down. Unluckily, Natalie attacks Scott.

They finally get the door open, and Scott runs out of the room. He tells them that Natalie attacked him, which makes Brian go bananas looking for her. Chris runs outside and has another weird vision, in which he sees the same rebellious farmboy from before stab his brother through the back with a pitchfork.

Then something attacks Chris in the corn, and he is strung up by his feet. A scarecrow shows up, and slices his exposed stomach with Freddy Krueger-ish claws. Then his friends find him, and he tells them about his visions. Brian decides to investigate by himself, and Chris follows him back into the house. Then Chris gets the crap scared out of him when Scott shows up and grabs him.

Somehow Chris gets one of the abandoned trucks started, and flies by his shocked friends when they hear the engine. He crashes the vehicle into a scarecrow, and it eventually "wakes up"on the hood of the truck, and tries to get to him by smashing the windshield. It goes after him 2-3 times, then vanishes.

Brian gets his hands on a shotgun, which proves to be no match for one of the scarecrows. After he dies, we get another vision with Chris seeing the evil farm kid going after his father. Oh, and he hid his brother's corpse by dressing it as a scarecrow, and placingit in the middle of the field. He then finds Scott, and tells him that the killer is the ghost of the murdered brother, who jumps from scarecrow to scarecrow to claim each new victim.

Chris finds zombie Brian, and tries to speak to him. When Brian stops sewing, he appears to let Chris take his lighter and escape the room. Then Chris finds Scott, and they waste time looking for the shotgun.

Scott gets badly injured in an attack, and Chris suggests that they go in different directions. Chris then hides in the corn and waits for zombified Brian to come after him. They face off, and Brian impales him in the gut. Chris seems to defeat him, but who knows at this point?

Then Scott is dragged into the corn by one of the undead scarecrows, and he goes into melee combat mode. As they fight, he discovers that Chris has also been captured. Chris screams at him to run, and Scott does as he's told. Unfortunately, he's also attacked again, just as he sees a car coming down the road.

The film ends with Scott sprawledon the ground, whispering for help, as the motorist opening his car door to come looking for him. Between them is a killer scarecrow, trying to decide which one to kill first. THE END.

Well, not the worst killer scarecrow movie I've ever seen...which is kind of sad to contemplate. I obviously had trouble telling who was who in this film, and the "visions" served no purpose in the plot, so it seemed somewhat generic. Also, only 1 female in the cast? That was a bonehead decision: this movie needed more characters and plot. 2 killer trees out of 5.

And what did I learn from watching Husk?

-Well, obviously no one's names.

-Scarecrows love to teleport from body to body....especially if they get a chance to do some major sewing.

-Dead birds leave 1,000 gallons of blood behind when they die.

My next movie is a prequel, Wrong Turn 4. I'm praying that it's better than my last few.

Granny

Well, with my Netflix account not back up yet(long story short:I screwed something up...), and my Blockbuster account telling me that I won't get my next 2 movies for several days(PLEASE hurry, Netflix....can't stand Blockbuster!), I've decided to try watching something slasher-y on YouTube. I was debating between a few films, but I guess I'll watch something called Granny. Grab your walkers and hearing aids, we're entering SPOILER territory ya young whipper-snappers!

The credits are red and blurry. Great. And the movie stars pretty much no one. Even better. Then the first scene starts up, and the dialogue is hard to understand as well. This is not going to be one of the better slashers, I'm boldly predicting that right now. On the plus side though, it's only an hour long. My suffering will be short...

Anyway, the opening scene is at least somewhat self-explanatory: A group of young people are being told a scary story, and the storyteller is passing around various slimy, wet or mushy objects as he tells his tale. It's about his grandmother, and he tries to convince his pals that they're touching her organs. Spoiler: they're pig guts. The group breaks apart, and there's a mostly-muffled chat between 2 females. Both are cute, but the dialogue keeps getting louder then softer, making this film even harder to comprehend than The Forest. I'm sorely tempted to just turn the volume all the way down, and just make up my own plot, like I had to do for most of that movie.

The next scene reveals that all of these folks are finishing college together. Can most of them even spell "college? A guy who appears to be named Vic insults all of the females in the room by drunkenly announcing that only men have contributed anything to history. This leads(eventually) into an inane conversation about whether men or women are more manipulative in regards to sexual encounters and relatiosnships. Can you guys go back to being hard to understand? I liked you better when I couldn't hear you as well.

A new-ish girl in the group, Michele, admits that the thought of sex makes her nervous. THAT somehow gets them to discuss their worst fears(or "paranoias", as they call them, for no discernable reason), and they mostly discuss common fears....being alone, commitment, etc. Then one guy, Tom, tells the others that his "paranoia" is mind-blowing, but also complicated. Tom gets them all to leave for an hour, in order for him to decorate thye house as his "paranoia", or whatever. We're less than 20 minutes in, and I already don't give a crap about any of these people. Either say "phobia" or "fear", or buy a dictionary!

When the group returns, they find a note on The front door from Tom. It seems that he had an emergency, and had to leave. Again, who cares? They all stand around on the front porch discussing what to do, and decide to enter the house after all. Hurray for making a decision!

They all sit down in the living room again, and hear a noise from either the basement or the backyard. They even debate which area the sound is coming from. It's someone crying, and it's just as muffled as everything else so far. A dark-haired guy, John Doe #1, checks out the basement. He loudly announces that Tom is scaring him, even though he has a dopey grin plastered all over his face. As the crying gets louder, he comes face-to-face with someone in a white robe wearing an old woman mask. Wait, don't tell me: Granny?

Before WhatsHisFace can react, Granny picks up an axe, and plants it in his forehead. Then Granny lets the weapon swing by his/her side, and decides to get a closer look at the wound. Take a picture, Granny, just get this horrible movie going again.

Another character, Monica, a cute girl dressed in red, decides to re-apply her lipstick in the bathroom. It's a shame that none of these people can act...the actresses are all very cute in this one. But the quality of the film makes Fear look like Citizen Kane by comparison.

Anyway, she puts on about 7 layers of lipstick to draw the scene out. Yeesh. Then we return to the others, who grow sick of waiting for Monica to return from the bathroom. As a group, they all head into the basement. Boy, the suspense is nail-biting, huh? If anyone decides to make a sandwich, I might piss my pants.

Monica finally finishes her makeup, and then gets worried that she might not be alone. Uh, it's a bathroom, not a corn maze! And yet, her fears prove to be sound, as Granny pops up directly behind her. Unlike the guy in the basement, we don't get to see Granny do anything, as the scene ends right at that point. Booooooooo...

The others tiptoe into the basement like they're auditioning for a remake of Scooby-Doo. Rucking Roopid!! As they all try to frighten one another, we see Granny still upstairs in the bathroom, stabbing a cardboard cutout wearing Monica's shirt. Geez. After Granny stabs her shirt about 20 or so times, we see Monica on the floor covered in Heinz 57. The friends then find Monica themselves, and confirm that she is actually dead. Maybe the ketchup was spoiled, and she was poisoned by it?

They run back into the living room, where they find Tom standing around. As they all accuse him of murder, they see Granny at the top of the stairs, watching them. Well, I guess the killer isn't Tom...

Tom and ? decide to try to capture the killer themselves, and go after her. As ? opens a door to see if Granny is hiding, the killer emerges behind both men, and closes the door on ?. With Tom alone now, Granny begins to club him to death. The rest of the group hear the noise, but they all remain downstairs. Nice friends! To finish the job, Granny throws ? out of an upstairs window. Bye ?....I'm sorry I never knew your name.

A girl named Kristine makes a dash for the door, and escapes the house. Tom sees her through a window, and rushes downstairs to find out what happened. He tells the others that Kristine will most likely be killed outside, and that he blames the others for not making her stay. Um.... WHAAAAAAAT? Is Tom on crack?

Tom tells Vic to stay with Michele, as he and Nancy go searching for Kristine. Yeah, splitting up is always wise. We see Kristine just sort of roaming around in a daze, until Granny finds her. Granny wraps a rope around her neck, then binds her hands together as well. Granny makes her march a short distance, then appears to snap her neck.

Back in the house, Michele sees Granny outside the nearest window, so she runs away to find Vic. She discovers Vic in a chair with his back to her, and tells him that she saw the killer. When Vic fails to respond, she turns his chair around, and reveals that it's actually Granny that Michele found. Which lacks any kind of sense at all. What, can she teleport now?

Michele runs away, and Granny pursues her. Deja vu, anyone? Michele runs into Vic, and he tells her that he found a gun, but with only 1 bullet in the chamber. Vic tells her that he can get her to safety if she follows his every order. Then he gives her a 40-minute kiss, which gives Granny enough time to stab him in the eyes with knitting needles. Lucky bastard...I still have to watch the rest of this steaming pile.

Michele is found by Tom and Natalie, and Tom urges the girls to escape in a car. This somehow leads to Granny attacking the girls from the backseat, where she wraps Natalie's head in plastic, suffocating her to death. Michele just passes out, and revives almost immediately, so we get yet another tedious chase sequence. Even at 58 minutes, this whole thing seems bloated and overly padded.

Natalie goes back to the house, and finds Tom still alive. They're separated by glass, though, and we all know that glass is impossible to break... Before Natalie can reach him, Granny drags Tom away. Damn you, impenetrable wall of transparent, breakable material!

Michele gets the gun and goes looking for Granny. They have a reallllllly short confrontation, and Michele shoots Granny. Then she staggers to the front door, and appears to have either a heart attack or an asthma attack. Maybe a Big Mac attack. Somne kind of attack, at any rate.

In the final scene, we learn that there was no Granny. It was all a prank on Michele, and none of them knew that she had a heart condiion. At her funeral, they all start fighting over who was to blame for scaring her to death. Oh, and it turns out that Granny was actually Tom's brother the entire time, and probably Tom at some points, to account for Granny being in 2 places at the same time in some of the chase sequences.

Everyone gets upset, and then a car drives up to the graveyard. Even though it doesn't quite look like her behind the wheel, I'm going to assume that the twist here is that Michele faked them all out, and out-pranked them. Otherwise, it doesn't really make much sense...but that then begs the question, who the heck did they just bury? THE END

This monstrosity was only an hour long, but it felt like 3. The Granny costume was somewhat cool, but it was wasted on the dumbest movie ever. And I'm getting pretty sick of these "fake" slasher movies. It was okay once or twice, in movies like April Fools' Day and cry_wolf, but after the 4th or 5th time you see it, it sucks on an epic level. No killer trees for this turd.

And did Granny actually leave me with any wisdom?

-Well, I know which slasher movie plot twist I hate the most.....

-If you have a kind of cool killer, wait until you have a script that deserves to have them in it.

-Don't expect classics when you watch movies for free on YouTube. Lesson learned.

-And a bonus one: What kind of idiots bury someone without knowing who they just buried?

Assuming that they arrive sometime this century, my next 2 movies from BallBuster will be Wrong Turn 4 and Husk. Both will be better than Granny...I feel very safe in making that particular prediction. And if Netflix ever sends me movies again, I'll be watching Bad Dreams. Either way, I think it'll be a better week. I hope so...

Go to the movies!

Go to the movies and see The Cabin in the Woods...several times! It rocks!

Pieces

Pieces. Again. Finally.

Quite a while back, I had rented Pieces for that week's SAW. but I was hospitalized, or lost the DVD or something. So this week, I get to try again, because I ordered a slasher movie boxed set from Amazon. There are 10 movies in the collection, so I can always use the set to get a movie from, if I don't get a rental or watch one on TV. Anyway, on with the show, SPOILERS and all.

So, I'm going to just say right away that this one is wacky and messed up. There are even discussion threads online that have people listing their favorite funny moments. Your mileage may vary, but there are tons of laugh-out-loud moments to be had.

The first scene sets the tone pretty well: a young boy, Timmy, is putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Oh, and he looks like he's wearing makeup. The setting is Boston, and the year is 1942. Write all of this down, there'll be a quiz later.

Timmy seems to be pretty engrossed in his puzzle, because he fails to hear his mother entering the room behind him. She's smiling down at him at first, until she sees that the puzzle is a picture of a nude woman. The only 2 pieces Timmy hasn't placed on her body are the feet and the vagina. Let's hope he knows which is which.

His mother slaps him around a bit, then starts throwing items around the room and smashing picture frames. She demands that Timmy fetch her a trash bag, and then continues to throw random debris around the room. What is this, a biopic about Joan Crawford?

Timmy returns, but has an axe instead of a bag. He gives his mother several good whacks to the forehead, killing her. Then we get rushed to the next scene, where Mary Poppins is at the front door of the murder house. She rings the bell a few times, then calls their phone. Oh, and the phone is a push-button, which apparently means that Timmy is a time-traveler as well as a killer.

Speaking of Timmy, he's been busy hacking his mother's body up, and finishing his puzzle. He looks out of an upstairs window at one point, and sees the woman from before pantomiming to 2 cops about trying to enter the house. Timmy goes back to his puzzle, and eats a cookie.

The woman outside the house enters with 2 cops, so Tim decides to hide in the closet. As the cops see all of the blood in the bedroom, they hear a noise from the closet. That's Tim's cue to pretend to be frightened, and call out for his mommy. And then the opening credits begin to roll. One kind of humorous detail about the credits: they're displayed in a font that was probably supposed to resemble dripping blood, but they're yellow. So, instead of blood, the credits look like wax.

As the credits finally wheeze to a halt, the killer is seen rummaging through a box. The items in said box are revealed to be things that his mother had on her body the day he murdered her: shoes, her dress, stuff like that. At the very bottom, there is a photo of his mother(I guess?) with a big, red "X" across her face.

Then we get the first of many, many randomly weird scenes in this movie. There's a perky brunette on a skateboard, while some badly off-tune "funky" music is playing. Groovy. In a bit of foreshadowing that's as subtle as a pneumatic drill to the groin, a truck carrying large panes of glass pulls up to the sidewalk. Gosh, I just fell off of a turnip truck, and can't possibly imagine where this scene is going...

Roller Girl rolls past several people, just grinning her oblivious little ass off. As she approaches a corner, she decides it would be smart to turn her head and wave at 2 people as she passes them. She then sees the giant glass panel and decides it would be safer to scream than it would be to, oh, I don't know, TRY TO STOP HERSELF FROM MOVING?!?

The killer then takes another box and opens it to--wait, what? What about Roller Girl? What was the point of that scene? Did he somehow cause her accident? Was he a witness? Why the Hell were we watching that scene, if it had nothing to do with the rest of the movie? Un-freaking-believable.

*sigh*

The second box turned out to be the one that contained the puzzle. Whatever. I'm already getting a headache trying to find the sense in this one. I hope Cabin In the Woods is better than this...(I'm going to see it tomorrow! Yayyyyyy!!!)

Okay, so the puzzle sequence also kind of just meandered, and now there's a cute chick on her stomach in some grass, just reading a book. She gets distracted by a guy trimming hedges with a chainsaw, and demands that he go work elsewhere. She goes back to reading, and gets a chainsaw through the neck, spraying blood everywhere. Then there's a brief shot of her headless body.

A pair of investigators arrive at the school's campus, dressed like bankers. One even looks old enough to have signed the Magna Carta. They ask to speak to the dean, and after a brief debate, he emerges from his office to usher them in. Good, now maybe we'll finally learn something useful about the killer. Oh, and the dean looks like Count Dracula, on a budget.

Nope. They switch scenes on us again, and we have to listen to a bunch of potheads discussing waterbeds in the school gym, and how it feels to screw on one. Then, a student with the most improbable breasts in any film ever made(including the 3-breasted woman in Total Recall) decides to flirt with her favorite teacher, Professor Brown

Anyway, Professor Brown looks like he's about as much fun as genital warts. Maybe even slightly less so. She tries to get him to notice her breasts, but apparently he's as nearsighted as Mr. Magoo. Hell, astronauts landing on Mars could see those things, no telescope required.

Outside the dean's office, the secretary fills him in on all of the details of the investigation...after he catches her eavesdropping on them through her intercom. The cops have a theory that the killer is either a teacher or a student. Gee, that really narrows it down!

Dean No-Name buzzes the receptionist, to ask her to locate Professor Brown. Lucky him. He steps into the office, and is asked if he had the dead girl as a student in any of his courses. Which dead girl, the one on skates, or the one who was chainsawed? Chainsaw girl, I suppose, but I'd still like to know why we were shown Roller Girl's death scene.

It turns out that Brown teaches Anatomy, which makes him look better and better as a suspect. Brown denies even remembering the girl, and gets pretty pissed off when the dean volunteers him to show the detectives around the campus.

Outside of the office, the detectives question Brown about the girl, as well as his department. When Brown implies that some of their questions seem random, or unrelated to the case, the older detective uses the analogy that they're "buying clothes without labels, just trying them on for size". Uhhhhhh......huhhhhhhh....

Brown then tries to throw the investigation away from him, claiming that the dead girl had many friends and boyfriends, and was quite popular. Wow, that's pretty good, considering he wasn't even sure who she was 5 minutes ago!

Another scene, another chainsaw. This one['s being swung by Bluto himself, presumably just moments after he slaughtered Popeye with it. Seriously, though, he DID play Bluto in the movie Popeye, I wasn't just mocking his appearance. Well okay, I was, but still...

Dean Dracula spots the groundskeeper rubbing the chainsaw and chuckling((Bluto's name in this movie is "Willard"(or as the dean says it, "Will Ard"), by the way), Oh, and it turns out that his landscaping is only a temporary assignment....Drac hints that he'd like Willard to finish within a few weeks, then leave. As the dean strolls away, Willard raises the chainsaw in a vaguely menacing fashion and growls, before spotting a couple of coeds getting intimate on the grass.

Then back to the stupid jigsaw puzzle. The killer's taking his time with it, so the film teleports us to the campus library now. Plot development? What's that? Heck, let's just throw in Aunt Martha's home movies while we're at it!

A guy((I'm guessing here, because he looks like the "Pat" character from SNL) gets a note from a hot chick, then tries, and fails, to throw the note away in a waste basket. The killer, dressed entirely in black, grabs it off of the floor. You'd think that his outfit would make him stick out like a sore thumb, but these kids are completely clueless.

As she exits the library, the blond decides to have a loud, annoying chat with some friends. All 3 spot Brown walking away, and they make it obvious that he's the main topic of their discussion. Man, this one is terrible.I'd almost encourage a remake, just to make a more coherent and compelling plot out of the mess that this became.

Our pretty student exits into a poorly-lit area, and decides to become an impromptu stripper. Interesting career choice, though I'm not sure that there's much profit in improv striptease routines...especially in empty rooms.

The good news is, someone decided to be her audience. The bad news is, it's the killer. He sneaks in, waits for her to get naked, then lets her go swimming. He watches her do a lap, then uses a net to tangle her up and drag her in his direction.

He drags her out of the pool and waits for her to recover from nearly drowning--just so that he can show her the chainsaw before he hacks her to death. Does she run? Nope. Does she attempt to get away by getting back into the pool, and swimming in a different direction? Nope.

What DOES she do? Well, she sits there, and watches the killer come after her. Then she flinches and screams. And then, she just pretty much lets him kill her. This is like Slashing for Dummies.

Back in the library, the nerdy guy who got the note is still waiting for her to return. Another, even nerdier guy gives him a note as well. So apparently, "library" is code for "place where everybody hooks up for sexy party time". Oh, and the second nerd makes a melodramatic statement about leaving to commit suicide over the late delivery of the note that he just gave to the first kid. Have fun, Melvin!

Oh good, the killer's back! And he's carrying a bloodstained sack around with him. He adds it to his body part collection, then we see Bluto have a random brawl with the detectives. After that, they find the latest victim, and question Brown. Heck, then they let him tamper with the crime scene! This movie must have been written with Mad Libs....it's all just random crap!

The 2 nerds from the library are then questioned, before we get back to Dean Dracula. Most of the cast is in there as well. Y'know, if the killer set off a bomb in their, we could end the movie early....

There's an aerobics class, and the killer is enjoying the spectacle(as am I!). He waits for 1 girl to wander off by herself, and follows her. Too bad for him, she meets up with a friend, and they exit together.

After one of the male students from earlier is questioned atb the station, he meets a tennis pro named Mary. One of the detectives asks him to protect Mary, which seems like an odd request to make of a guy who may be one of your main suspects.

This, of course, means that we have to endure a tennis match. After the match, Dean Dracula flirts with Mary, probably to see where he could plant his fangs in her neck. As he promised, the kid from the previous scene is watching Mary like a hawk.

The killer puts more pieces of the puzzle together, then goes back to stalking a girl doing aerobics again. She stops doing her routine, because she senses that someone is watching her, but she doesn't see the killer. She quickly gets dressed, and then runs through the building as fast as she can move.

At an elevator, she seems to relax around the killer. Oh, and she completely misses seeing the large chainsaw he's holding behind his back. Awesome. Just like the girl in the pool, Elevator Girl pretty much just stands there and lets him murder her. This story was written by a committee of geniuses.

Our intrepid investigators arrive on the scene,and find both the professor and the young guy there already. The body is taken away, and one of the detectives tries to figure out if it might be worthwhile to get suspicious about one of the 2 suspects, just to have something to do. By the time they solve the case, the campus will be empty! Oh, and Dean Drac arrives, just as a flash of lightning strikes. I can't wait to see him transform into a bat! And Bluto is on the scene as well!

Frantic to solve the case, the detectives decide to have full background checks done on everyone on the college staff. Wait, they just decided that NOW??? Wouldn't that have been a smart move about 3 murders ago?

That night, a naked couple has a chat in their bedroom, just as the pretty tennis pro decides to take a late stroll. This being the most random film ever, the tennis player is attacked by a martial artist, then she hears a chainsaw. Nothing happens to her, because that young guy is still watching over her.

Then the movie decides to switch her out for a different girl, also walking around the dark campus. This girl decides to stroll past some trees, then she enters an unlit house. As she continues to walk around in the dark, the killer leaps out at her, brandishing a huge butcher knife.

She runs around screaming, and falls into what looks like the waterbed mentioned earlier. The killer lets her turn onto her stomach, then he shoves the knife into her head, so that the blade emerges from her mouth. Ouch.

The young guy heads home, where he gets scared by some random nerd in a rubber mask. Then we see the killer put more pieces into the jigsaw puzzle. Aren't movies fun when they don't have an editor? Nope.

An attractive brunette takes a shower after tennis practice, while some marching music plays. After her shower, the killer finds her in the locker room, and a chase sequence begins. Wow, so 1 girl has the common sense to run! Good for her.

She gets to an exit, but the door is jammed. The killer just casually strolls over, and the girl runs into the restroom, where she locks herself into a toilet stall. The killer saws through the flimsy door, then hacks her up. While she's being killed, the tennis pro is talking to both Bluto and her "protector", so I guess we can rule those 2 out as suspects now.

The tennis pro, Mary, claims that she can hear someone screaming, and asks Bluto where the control panel is for the loudspeaker. As they go together to turn off the band music, the young guy suspiciously ducks into the locker building.

Bluto silences the music, then they realize that the "bodyguard" is no longer with them. It turns out that his name is "Kendall", by the way. He comes out of the locker room crying, and tells the others that he found the latest victim of the maniac.

Mary decides to see the body for herself, and pukes. Then she pulls the same kind of "shouting" scene that Jen Love Hewitt did in the first 2 "Last Summer" slashers. Then there's a pointless scene where one of the investigators asks someone else to do his job for him. Wow...is there anyone in the movie who isn'T lazy???

Back on campus, Mary walks to class with Professor Brown. He tells her off when she asks about his private life, and storms away in anger. Then Mary nearly gets flattened when she literally bumps into Kendall. He watches her walk away, then helps one of the cops weed through student files for clues.

Mary visits Dean Dracula at his home, and he steps into the kitchen to make her a hot beverage. She takes a few sips, and tells him that the detectives will be getting search warrants to look through every building at the school, even resident buildings. DracuDean brings her drink back into the kitchen to freshen it up, and possibly spikes it with something...

Kendall and the detective discover that Dean Dracula was the boy from the first scene. Kendall then remembers that Mary was going to his home, and they rush off to rescue her. Yeesh. These guys couldn't catch a cold with a fishing net.

Mary starts to feel he drug paralyzing her, and Drac makes his move. As the heroes drive as fast as they can, Mary watches the dean fetch a large knife from a nearby drawer. He raises the weapon just as the detectives and Kendall get to his home. They find Mary, but no sign of the dean.

The cops leave to put out an APB, and Kendall stays behind to help Mary get out of the house. From behind a curtain, the dean emerges to attack the young couple. As the dean gets into position to stab Kendall, the cops(and, for some reason, the professor) come back in and shoot the maniac in the forehead.

The older cop finds the jigsaw puzzle and shows it to Kendall, and a false bookshelf swings open. The woman the dean was building out of body parts falls out of the secret compartment, and all 3 of the witnesses scream. In the final scene, Kendall stands over the body, and it raises a hand to claw his penis off through his jeans. I shit you not. THE END

Well, sorry it took so long to watch this, but it was a pretty busy week. Bizarre movie. There must have been some epic weed in the writing of this script. I can only imagine. 4 ot of 5 killer trees, simply for not boring me half to tears...for most of it, anyway. And what the heck was that roller skating scene about?

And what did I take out of watching Pieces?

-Well, some women find it impolite to try to run away from their murderer.

-Jigsaw puzzles make you completely batshit crazy.

-Roller skates are deathtraps.

No idea what my next movie will be, or when it will arrive. I'm going on a small vacation in a few days, so I may just have to wait until next week to watch another slasher. We'll see....

The Initiation

This week's SAW is another 1980's slasher, The Initiation. It stars Daphne Zuniga(Spaceballs) in her first lead role in a movie, so it might actually be interesting. Let's cross our fingers! Get your SPOILER goggles on, and follow me....

Right off the bat, it has some B-movie cred going for it, in the form of actors Clu Gulager, Vera Miles and James Read. Vera Miles, of course, was in the first 2 Psycho movies(ie, the GOOD ones!); Clu Gulager has a long history in genre movies, appearing in everything from Nightmare on Elm Street 2 to Feast; and James Read has been a familiar TV actor for years....he's probably most recognizable to current audiences as the dad on Charmed. So again, this one's looking up a bit.

It starts out on the usual "dark and stormy night", in a child's bedroom. There are dolls everywhere...baby dolls, teddy bears, wild animal dolls, clown dolls. You get the idea.(Note to self: Add the movie Dolls to my list of horror movies...for some reason, I have them on the brain now) Then we see a little girl in the Valley of the Dolls, fast asleep.

The girl eventually wakes up, possibly because she remembered that this movie had started filming. Offscreen, the director was probably screaming, "WAAAAAAAAAKE UUUUUUP!" Or not. Anyway, she looks at a doll in her bed that appears to be headless, then decides to go exploring.

She leaves her room, and follows the sound of ghostly whispering to her parents bedroom. Seeing them having sex, the little girl backs away toward the hallway, then she reappears next to the bed, and starts stabbing her father with a very large knife. Then her mother leaps out of the bed, as another man enters the room, and her father is seen putting his clothes on like nothing had happened to him. You know, like getting his leg stabbed or something.

Both men start brawling, so I'm guessing that the second one is the girl's father, and the guy stabbed in the leg was some dude her mother was banging. A bottle of wine is poured all over the girl's father by the man-whore of her dreams, and Dad gets engulfed in flames when he stumbles too close to the fireplace. This would make a great PSA for playing with matches!

So, after her Daddy is oven-roasted to perfection, the girl becomes about a decade or so older, and wakes up a second time. This time, she's surrounded by a bunch of scantily-clad sorority babes who are holding candles and chanting something that sounds like "Delta Ro Kai will never die", or words to that effect.

How did we get from a murder to a cheesy porno? And what magic phrase must I utter to make that happen with every movie I watch? Delta Ro Kai must never die, Delta Burke's thigh would feed a family of 5....did it work?

One of the women tells our lead character that a vote is going down, and she leads the girls away in a single file line. As they exit, they all smile and continue chanting. The one they woke up follows the line. Maybe this is a live action version of the video game Lemmings!

The girl and her fellow pledges are brought before their sorority leader, Big Red Riding Hood. Our main girl is named Kelly, and the other pledges are Beth, Marcia and Allison. The pledges take a pledge(heh heh), and swear to be obedient servants for a week, at the beck and call of the other sisters. After that week, it is ON!

The leader, Maggie also anounces that the following week will involve parties, activities, and Hell Night. When Maggie presses another sister for details about the traditional Hell Night prank, we get to listen in on the dumbest plan since Danny Ocean's crew carried off a heist in 5 minutes, then wasted 2 hours tricking the audience into watching a fake caper go on.

Okay, so here's the prank: Kelly's father just happens to own a mall that has a dress shop that apparently has some nice items in it. She has to steal his keys, let the sorority in to throw a party...oh, and get the night watchman to give them his uniform. I've seen blocks of Swiss cheese with less holes than this plot!

Back in the bedroom that they share, the pledges moan and gripe about the stupid prank. Mostly, they're worried about getting caught, arrested, and expelled. Wow, this group may be smarter than the usual human targets in slasher flicks!

As the 4 pledges keep yammering, they discuss how the pledging process began with 15 girls, and they're the only ones left. Hey, no fair! You guys are supposed to film the SLASHER stuff, not the aftermath! Man...why do I have to think of everything?

As they get ready to sleep, Kelly tells Marcia that her recurring nightmare has returned. Uh, yeah Kelly, that's kind of the point of "recurring" nightmares. Buy a dictionary, dumbass, it may just save your life.

The following morning, the movie takes us on a field trip to a looney bin. A bitchy nurse admonishes various patients for different infractions, then sees someone out on the lawn that she can yell at. It turns out to be the dude who was baked goods in the dream sequence. I assumed before that he was Kelly's father, but I guess not, since we were just told that her dad owns a mall. So this guy must be the one that was having sex with her mother. I'm starting to see why Daphne Zuniga was on Melrose Place...her life in this movie was a soap opera.

Anyway, the nurse screams at him to stop digging up the garden, then she storms away. The guy reveals a pretty lethal(or at least "painful") looking digging tool in his hand, which he continues to plunge into the ground. On an interesting side note, as the nurse stomps off, she brushes past a female patient who has her back to the camera. This mystery woman is pounding her fist against her leg, timing the punches to the tool being plunged into the dirt outside. Kelly's mom, perhaps?

Well, before we can clear up that mystery, the nurse makes an announcement: It seems that some of the patients were refusing their meds at the meals. As she threatens to keep their food from them if they don't start to comply, both the men and women in the different sides of the ward begin banging loudly on the chain-link that separates them from the hallway where the staff walk freely. On an ominous note, the mystery woman is also banging her fist to the rhyhmn of their banging as well.

That evening, still at the mental hospital, we see someone roaming the halls. Nurse Bitchenmoan is then seen walking out of the building after her shift, and heading into the parking lot. She suddenly gets a weird vibe, and turns to see if anything is out of place.

Oh good, it's only the patients. Someone let them out of the ward, and they've decided to play a game of Ring Around The Nursey. She orders them to get back to their beds, but they just keep singing instead. In a tizzy, the nurse runs to her car, quickly gets in, and locks the doors.

As she starts the engine, a hand grabs her from the back seat, pulling her head back. The person then uses their other hand to reach around to stab the nurse, who bleeds profusely as the escaped patients all watch her die. She is stabbed a few more times, but only a single lunatic decides to stay and watch the rest of the show.

The morning after the attack, an elderly couple receive a gift. As they discuss opening it, they refer to Kelly living at college, and how getting away from her family might be good for her. Then the phone rings, and the old man grabs it. He refers to a "Dr. Howe", and the scene just ends right there. Nice, keep us confused.

Kelly drives over to visit these fogeys, and they turn out to be her parents. Wait, really?!? They're not her grandparents maybe? Or some elderly couple whose home she randomly broke into, for the sole purpose of pouting on their couch? Man, she must have been a horrible kid, to make them age like this in a decade or so.

She apologizes for not calling them, and her mom admonishes her. After all of the pouting and nagging, her mother says something nice to her about her complexion. Then dad pops a champagne cork like it's a cannonball, and wishes her a happy birthday.

Back on campus, Kelly and Marcia are walking and talking together. They start with Marcia's lovelife(or lack thereof), then switch to what they want to write for their term papers in Psych class. Marcia wants to write about the disturbed mind of one of the bitchy sorority sisters, while Kelly wants to do her paper on the interpretation of nightmares. Gee, I wonder why?

A guy named Andy runs up to the girls, and Marcia makes a hasty exit. Andy tells Kelly about a dumb costume party that's coming up, and invites her to attend. Then we get this bizarrely hilarious exchange, wherein both Andy and Kelly decide to shout their dialogue back and forth to each other. It's random, and I just couldn't stop rewinding the scene to watch this part over and over again.

When talking to her Psych professor, he more or less accuses Kelly of using her topic to suck up, because he's doing a thesis on dream research. When Kelly angily denies it, Mr. Adams asks her for some details. She tells him about her dream, and he sounds somewhat interested. He then offers to show her "the dream factory", which sounds like a bad pick-up line.

Mr. Adams asks her when the dream started, andc Kelly tells him some bull about a treehouse. Supposedly, when Kelly fell from the treehouse, she had a huge memory wipe of everything that happened before the accident. To make matters worse, she was never allowed to see anyone who could help her with her recovery of those memories.

After she tells Mr. Adams all of this, a girl named Heidi literally pops up. She and Adams explain that they hook willing subjects up to some equipment that can help them to recover and extract images from the human mind. So we've gone from Freedy Krueger territory to Dennis Quaid in Dreamscapes. Weird.

When Professor Adams finishes his sales pitch, Kelly catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror. She freezes up, and her entire demeanor changes. She tells the professor that she needs to think about it first, then leaves Heidi and Adams to ponder what just happened. Maybe she saw Heather Locklear in her future.

When Kelly walks down the hallway, the lights begin to flicker and dim around her. She picks up the pace(I wish the movie would...), and soon reaches a lit corridor with other students hanging out. She goes into a restroom to freshen up, and sees an image of herself as a little girl, with her blouse covered in blood. Of course, when she glances back to see the girl, nothing is behind her.

That evening, someone is lurking outside her house. The folks are inside, having a conversation that even David Lynch would find perplexing. There's a reference made by her mother to "living a lie" and some kind of attempt to fool Kelly about something. Then a noise outside distracts them. Do I need a decoder ring to watch this crap?

In the front hall, Dad draws a gun. He opens the front door and sees some Halloween decoration down the street, but decides not to shoot it. Then Mom also goes outside, but appears not to see what he saw, so they return to the house. Does anyone have crib notes for this thing?

On campus the following day, a guy in a striped shirt strolls past the camera. I bet he3's the key to the whole plot! Tell us your secrets Stripe Man!

In the lab, Kelly is calling out "Daddy!" in her sleep. I'll be her daddy....oops, am I still typing? So, yeah, they show a highlight reel from THE NIGHTMARE: bedroom, blood, burning. The 3 Blahs. Kelly wakes up screaming, and Professor Adams asks her to lie back and tell him what she remembers.

They skip over that, and show the teacher explaining some of the dream symbolism to Kelly. As they go over it, Heidi interrupts to tell them both that Kelly's brainwaves indicated very little dreaming, if any, at all. Adams chalks it up to a malfunction in the technology. A class bell rings, and Kelly gets mesmerized when she looks into a mirror. Again. The professorv makes a cryptic comment about her parents and mirrors, and the scene ends, just to confuse us further.

At dinner that night, Dad bores the family with business talk. When he gets up to make a phone call, Kelly tells her mother about her professor's dream research, and keeps calling him "Peter" instead of "Professor Adams". Someone's hot for teacher!

The chat becomes a heated discussion soon enough, as Kelly gets tired of having to bow to her mother's wishes concerning her romantic life. She leaves the dining room, only to catch a snippet of the conversation her father is having on the phone. It sounds like he's calling someone "babe", and making plans to meet them that night. Oops!

Someone is seen lurking outside again, and an owl tries to give a warning hoot. Seriously, this actually happens. The stalker moves in closer as Dad turns away, then stabs him in the neck with the very same(or similar) digging tool that Butterface was using at the asylum. Well, at least that narrows down the suspect list to only a couple of possibilities. Plus we finally started the slasher portion of this accursed film! Yay!

As Dad gets stabbed several more times, Mom gets drunk. The lush. She gets tired of drinking alone, and goes to the front door to see what's taking so long, only to see his car driving away. She then makes a snarky joke about how he'd lose his head if it wasn't attached, which would be awesome if we had seen him beheaded. But we didn't. If he was, it was removed from the version I watched.

Next, the killer approaches the sorority house. They're all in various states of undress, which is unusual for these kinds of films. There's even a full frontal scene, featuring a young Hunter Tylo. Maybe they figured if the slasher stuff didn't pan out, they could do a college comedy instead.

As Kelly leaves the shower room to get dressed, she notices that a window has been left wide open. She shuts it, then dresses as someone watches her from a hiding place in the closet. She shuts the closet door as well, and out pops Andy, I believe. Frankly, I had forgotten about him almost entirely after his early scene in the film. Oh, and for some reason, he's dressed like a singer from Oingo Boingo, and his date is Maggie, the Ice Queen of the sorority. That should be a fun date.

The "party" is like watching bad outtake footage from American Bandstand. People are aimlessly moving their arms and legs around when the camera is on them, but none of them seem capable of anything resembling human dance movements. I've seen zombies dance better, and I'm not even referring to Thriller.

Kelly and Professor Adams find a place to talk, and tease each other about their costumes. Then we see a guy dressed as a gigantic penis, next to his mortified date. I'll bet it took balls to put that costume on.

What follows next I'm not even going to bother fully describing. It's a stupid-ass montage, showing various characters trying to pick each other up. It's like the portion of the show HeeHaw where they all just stand around in a fake cornfield telling jokes, minus about a zillion IQ points, if that's even possible.

Marcia's date, "Ralph", asks her to confirm some rumor, but the DVD glitched out the portion about the rumor. It picks up with her leaving him alone. Confusion reigns supreme in this stupid movie!

Back in Adams' office, Kelly reveals what she remembers about her past. They kiss, and night turns to day. Kelly is hypnotized, and she's describing what happened at the treehouse. Her dolls were all broken, but not by her. Meanwhile, her mother is seen arriving at the school, but she can't locate Kelly. She finally asks a student where the Psychology Department is, and is pointed in the right direction.

As she walks in on the dream study, Professor Adams is unable to get Kelly to wake up from her session. Counting doesn'tv work, his soothing voice fails to calm her, even saying her name. Her mother gives them a different surname for Kelly, and that does the trick. Sure it does.

Kelly reluctantly leaves the room, so that her mother and teacher can speak in private. They have a shouting match, and Mom threatens to sue the school if the instructor continues to try to experiment with Kelly's memories. Adams demands to know why Kelly has a different last name, and that makes Mom leave his office.

Alone again, Professor Adams and Heidi realize that Kelly isn't having a nightmare, but a repressed memory. He also theorizes that she has a split personality, and that the mother might have one as well.

The night of the mall prank has arrived! The guard sees a light on his security panel go off, and leaves his station to investigate. He strolls through the mall, stopping in a room with red, flashing lights. Using a key, the guard goes outside to the loading dock, where a tin can rolls in his direction. He crushes it under his shoe, then heads back in.

As he starts to backtrack to his desk, he hears his radio get turned off. He picks up the pace, and discovers evidence that someone may have messed with his control panel. He does some more looking around, and stops to admire a rack of sunglasses, but detects a presence close to his location.

He calls out and returns to the main lobby area, where he backs up into the killer. He gets stabbed by the same gardening tool in the chest, and several dolls and mannequins watch his murder. I'll bet they make lousy witnesses.

There's a silly scene where we see Megan "bless" the pledges, minus Kelly. Megan tells the others that Kelly doesn't ever need to be told about the blessing, and will never get one. Bitch of the Year goes to....

As the pledges arrive at the mall, one girl has a hissy fit. She refuses to go in, even after Maggie threatens to kick her out. They should have done a sequel, where this girl gets stuck in a different slasher scenario, and is the first one killed. That would have been mildly amusing, at the very least. More than this snoozefest, at any rate.

After she exits the realm of slasher movie history forever, we see a trio of frat boys sitting drunk in a car. Then Maggie catches up with the pledges, and takes the keys that Kelly absconded from Dad. She locks the pledges inside the mall, and the plot finally kicks into gear.

The trapped girls sneak over to the night watchman's desk, then worry when they can't find him. Kelly reassures the others that he's most likely making his rounds. She devises a plan, and asks Allison to create some type of distraction, while Marcia will remain at the desk, in case he comes back, so that she can explain that Kelly needs him to be discreet and give them his uniform.

They ask Kelly what her part in the plan is, and she tells them that she's heading to the employee lounge, because the guards keep spare uniform in there. That's actually somewhat clever. What couild go wrong? I mean, besides the whole "splitting up and getting slaughtered individually" thing...

Well, Maggie could screw it up for them. She gathers the trio of guys we saw earlier in that red room. and tells them that they'll split into pairs: her and Andy, and the remaining 2 guys. They have 2 goals, to be sneaky, and to scare the pledges when they are spotted.

While strolling through the mall and looking for Todd, Alison(I think....this cast is pretty bland) is seen trying on tight clothes, then puts on a pair of roller skates(???). Also, Kellly ransacks a closet for a uniform, and the killer briefly checks out the knife selection in a hunting/camping equipment store.

Marcia gets bored at her hiding spot. As she decides to leave the guard station, Alison skates out of the store in her tank top and short-shorts. She skates past the hunting goods shop, never noticing that it's been broken into, and that the display case has been tampered with. She explores the mall, and meets up with Marcia. Both women then realize that they haven't seen Kelly since they all split up. Marcia spots someone on another floor above them, but Alison convinces her that she's just "spooked".

Literally 2 seconds later they bump into Kelly, and she has the uniform. As they wander the mall a bit, a phantom bowling ball frightens one of the girls so much, she almost literally chews the scenery. The girls taunt the person who rolled it, and it turns out to be 2 of the srat boys who were instructed to scare the pledges, Chad and Ralph.

The pledges decide to leave the mall, only to discover that Megan has used the keys to lock them in. They reluctantly decide to go back into the mall, and wait for someone to show up. Good thinking...without them, there'd be no film!

Outside the mall, a motorcycle cop sees one of their cars in the mall parking lot, and decides to check it out. He whips out a flashlight, and examines the interior as he circles the vehicle. Then he sees a Texas license plate, and that just clears all of the confusion right up. Not.

Megan decides to ditch her boy toy Andy, and he chases her, even though he's half-naked. Andy sees lights on various floors flickering on and off, then hears her voice, and follows the sound of it. He slows down near a Christmas sisplay, then runs in the diresction of the elevator. The elevator door opens, and Andy gets a forehead full of aze. And we're not talking about body spray!

Megan/Maggie/Whocarespeople? then appears, saying that she was just joking around. Before anything happens to her, we return to Marcia and Alison. They decide that either the night watchman is pranking them, or that maybe he was paid to leave early. They decide to out-prank the pranksters, and split up to hide.

Still looking for Andy, Megan/?Jane Doe heads to a shadowy satairwell. She then wanders through a lamp shop, and gets rattled as entire sections of lamps begin to switch on around her. She runs away, and the killer fires an arrow into her chest.

Kelly reunites with Marcia, and they start to look for the other various characters running around in the mall. Chad and Ralph put on rubber masks and wield rubber knives, and leap out at the pledges from inside a curtained booth. They all realize that Alison, Andy and Megan/Jane Doe are missing, and the guys tell the girls that they're spooked.

Back on campus, Professor Adams is interrupted in his very serious coffee ritual by Heidi. She has a ton of papers and folders in her arms, and she shows Adams a newspaper article from a Texas newspaper. Dated a decade earlier, the article is about an act of arson, in which a man was severely burnt. It turns out that the man in Kelly's memory was her father, and that the "father" she was living with was her mother's lover. The man Kelly thought of as her father was actually the chairman of the board at some department store.

After showing Professor Adams a second article, about Kelly's mother marrying her lover a short time after the fire, she drops a piece of info: Kelly's real father was ome of the patients who had escaped the asylum the previous week. Adams tries to call Kelly in her room at the sorority to warn her, but he doesn't know that she's out at the mall....

When no one picks up, the professor tries to call the house where Kelly's "parents" live. Someone picks up the receiver, but places it on the table next to the phone. Adams calls a second time, gets a busy signal, then rushes out of his office to find Kelly. Heidi is left behind, and she bitches and moans after he leaves.

In the mall, the remaining group get drunk together. Then Marcia is teased by Alison about being a virgin, so she tells a story about a teacher who molested her when she was a child. Awkwaaaaaard. The group disbands, and Alison is ditched by her boyfriend so he can take a leak. The lights in the restroom turn off suddenly, but the scene just ends there.

Alison sees a wedding display and tries on a veil, while Kelly announces over the loudspeaker that she wants Megan and Andy to meet them at the entrance and unlock the doors....or else! Boy, there's a huge threat, huh? Oh, and Alison finds a dead body, then another.

She runs back to Kelly, who wants to see the bodies for herself, but Alison is too frightened to return, so Kelly tells her to hide at the security desk. Alison scampers off, leaving Kelly to investigate the area by herself.

She finds Chad, and starts to break down. Then she hurries away, and we see Megan and her main squeeze boinking. Then the killer rises up from out of nowhere, and stabs them both several times, as Megan screams. Kelly arrives just in time to witness the bloody aftermath.

Professor Adams meets up with Mrs. Fairchild, and she tells him that her husband is dead. Adams calls the soroity house, and a girl named Becky informs him that the rest of them are at the Fairchild Mall, pulling a prank. He hangs up on poor Becky, then yells into Mrs. Fairchild's face, asking if she has KEYS! I NEED KEYS! to the mother-flunking mall.

She gives him a set of keys, and he tells her to CALL...THE...POLICE! When he takes off, we see Marcia and her boyfriend Ralph getting dressed after sex. Seriously? After she literally just revealed that she was molested? Dude, choose your moments better! He reveals that he only jokes to cover his inner pain, then his outer pain is revealed with a swift arrow in the back.

As Marcia realizes that he's not joking, another arrow sails past her head. Kelly hears her screams, and rushes to rescue her. When they find each other, both are screaming into each others' faces. This would make a great screwball comedy.

They huddle together in a freight elevator. Marcia's cries waver between donkey brays and mouse squeaks. The scene ends with her making this bizarre open-mouthed face that has to be witnessed, as it truly is beyond words to describe. This movie is so horrible that nit's awesome.

We see the professor speeding to the mall, then we see the girls still hiding. Just as Kelly gets Marcia to calm down a little, the freight elevator is plunged into darkness. Both girls are now screaming, and then we get the best moment in this movie, thus far. Both sides of the elevator open up, and Kelly ditches Marcia the first chance she gets! She then turns back, only to witness Marcia being dragged back into the freight elevator by the killer, right before the door shuts again. That's what friends are for....if you're an asshole.

Professor Adams is STILL driving, which could make his arrival at the mall a post-credits sequence at this point. Kelly is seen walking around in the loading/unloading area of the mall, and spots the killer dragging a body around a corner. Then she spots her father, the Krispy Kritter, and he tries to approach her.

After another split-second of the longest car ride ever filmed, we see Kelly attempting to escape from her father via a ladder. He follows, but why not just say something like, "Hey Kelly, who's your Daddy?ME!" That would work....maybe....okay, probably not.

They both climb up into a dark, shadowy area, and he DOES try to talk to her. Man, I called that one! Kelly hides from him, and she pushes him off of the roof. Then she cries and whines because she has second thoughts. Your timing sucks, Kelly.

And that's when Professor Adams finally arrives. He finds the dad's body, then enters the mall. As he and Kelly embrace, she stabs him in the side, and ANOTHER Kelly arrives on the scene. Ah, okay. The killer was her twin sister. That was why she seemed to be in 2 places in her flashback scenes, and why they had to hide the face of the woman in the mental hospital. Kinda clever.

The sister smiles at Kelly, taunts her, then they run around in the mall. Kelly begs for her life, but the sister hates her for being free while she was locked up. After another short chase, she reveals that the scarred man was their real father, and that she plans to kill Kelly, then assume her identity.

Just as Kelly is about to get stabbed, a shot rings out. It turns out that their mother showed up at the mall, armed with a small handgun. Then we see that the professor survived, and he, Kelly and Mom watch the bodies get carted away. Then some soft jazz starts playing. THE END

Boy, this movie was all over the place....part soap opera, part comedy, part horror....and mostly crap. The effects were good, though. They just needed a good movie to be featured in. Since this was a pretty average film, I'm giving it an average score: 3 killer trees out of 5.

And what did The Initiation teach me?

-Telling your boyfriend about that time you were molested doesn't make him any less horny.

-When you reunite with a parent you haven't seen in a decade, it's customary to throw that person off of a rooftop.

-Walking away from an obvious slasher scenario is actually an option! Why has no one tried that before?

My next movie will probably be either Pranks or Pieces, depending mostly upon which one arrives first. Oh, and next Saturday is my birthday, so if you see me that weekend, offer to dry my big, pathetic, middle-aged tears! It'll take a beach towel.

Dark Night of The Scarecrow

It's been a crazy week here, Dudes and Dudettes! First, I had my Netflix account accidentally canceled on me(a family member received an email about a Netflix charge, and thought it was theirs, even though they had already ended their account...), so that sent me scrambling to figure out if I could continue doing this. Then, I somehow managed to get strep throat, so I've been sick as a dog for a few days now. What else could happen?

Anyway, supposedly Netflix is working on reinstating my account, so this week I'm watching the last video they sent me before everything went wacky: Dark Night of The Scarecrow, a made-for-television slasher(!) from the early 1980's. It's about a group of vigilantes who kill a mentally disabled man because they mistakenly thought that he had assaulted a child. In the aftermath of the killing, a mysterious stalker dressed as a scarecrow begins to go after them....Gee, I wonder if they live? As always, it's Howdy SPOILY time!

So, the movie starts out in a field of tall grass and flowers. I'll bet there's a little house somewhere on this prairie! The not-yet-dead disabled man, Bubba(played by Larry Drake, of Darkman), is picking flowers and singing along with a little girl named Marylee. He shows her one flower that he plucked, but it was accidentally crushed in his gigantic Manbearpig paws. Oh Bubba, you flower-wrecking rascal you!

After Bubba becomes the Flowernator, Marylee shows him how to properly pick a flower, then sends him to find another one. He gives her the intact one, and she shows him two leis she made. She puts her lei on, then helps him to wear his, then she insists that they have to kiss.

Okay, hold the phone! Was this movie written by Michael Jackson??? A young child playing with a large man in his 30's is already sort of creepy to begin with, and now they're sharing a kiss? And it's the girl's idea? Forget going after Bubba--the angry mob should lock her up. Not a single horror movie moment has occurred yet, and I'm already weirded out by this film. I can't wait to see what's next...

Yup, it got weirder. As Marylee gives Bubba a peck on the cheek, the local mailman is peeping on them with a pair of binoculars. I have a feeling that I may want to sterilize my hands after touching the DVD to put it back in its sleeve.

The mailman, Otis, decides to pay a visit to his buddy Harless, who is busily throwing large tree branches into an even-larger woodchipper. Harless switches off his noisy machine, and he and Otis express their displeasure at seeing Bubba always playing with Marylee.

When Harless suggests beating Bubba up(and a reference to having done it many times before), Otis disagrees. He compares mentally disabled people to unfumigated stink weed and cutworm, and calls Bubba a blight. Wow, very enlightened people existed 20years ago.

Anyway, Otis implies that the best way to deter Bubba from playing with young children would be to kill him. Harless replies that he'd definitely rough the guy up, but not kill him, as long as he's committed no crime. Otis just hands the farmer his mail, then drives away.

As Bubba and Marylee walk home together, the little girl spots a fountain in a neighbor's backyard, and pries some boards loose in their fence to get a better look. She tells Bubba that she's going into their yard to look at the fountain up close, but Bubba doesn't want to follow her, fearing that he'll get in trouble again.

Marylee goes into the yard by herself, as Bubba watches through the fence. As luck would have it, the family dog shows up, snarling at Marylee. She tries to remain calm as she calls out to Bubba to save her, but that only agitates the dog further. Bubba then bursts through the fence to save Marylee. As he fights off the dog(offscreen), about 9,000 lawn gnomes witness the attack, and seem stunned.

Okay, movie. You just showed a montage of "reaction" shots of garden gnomes. All is forgiven. Keep the crazy batshit stuff coming on a regular basis again.

The next scene is equally epic in its kookiness: we see a housewife in her kitchen, and there's a knock at the door. She answers it, to find Bubba on her front step, holding Marylee's limp, possibly lifeless body. Both of them have blood in their clothes, and Bubba is crying. The housewife screams at the sight, as Bubba sobs, "Bubba....didn't...do it!" If this was where the film ended, I'd give it 5 killer trees, just for the giggles it gave me.

Alas, no...there's more. After the housewife screams, Harless hauls ass over to the post office, to tell Otis that Bubba killed Marylee. God, just reading these names all together like that gives me a headache. It's like the cast of a redneck soap opera. As the Trailer Turns.

Anyway, Otis is told that everyone in town is going to be at the courthouse to see Bubba get charged, and Otis opens a drawer in front of him, where he keeps a gun. See? even 20 years ago, "going postal" had the same definition that it has today.

Otis tells Harless that they'll take care of Bubba themselves, then they stop by the local gas station to get some hunting dogs. Um, why? Since Bubba's already turned himself in, and everyone is headed to the courthouse or jail to see him, what do these dingleberries need to hunt down?

Their next stop is some kind of granary, where they fetch a guy who makes Otis look like he's anorexic. No name is given, of course. Then we see Bubba trampling through a forest, so I guess he somehow avoided being captured and arrested after that housewife saw him. Yeah, giants covered in blood are really easy to miss.

Harless drops off the 3 other men at the entrance to the woods, then drives around to keep Bubba from escaping from the other side. Bubba isn't exactly making great progress in his escape either, tripping over branches and rocks every 5 seconds or so. Oh, but the large guy now has a name: Philby. No first name, no last name. Just "Philby". Like "Madonna", except the exact opposite of her in every possible way.

Anyway, we then get the name of their 4th group member, Skeeter. After learning that, we see Bubba arrive home. His mother meets him at the door, and he briefly fills her in on the dog attack, and how it ended up with him getting the blame. Mama tells Bubba that they need to play "the hiding game". and they run off together, away from the house.

A short time later, the vigilantes also arrive at Bubba's home. Mama meets them at the front door, and informs them that her son isn't home. Then she reminds them that they have no legal authority to do anything to Bubba, and she shuts the door again. HA! Score 1 for someone with a brain in this movie!

The dogs pick up Bubba's scent again and get agitated, so the group decides to see where the dogs go. They arrive in a field, where the dogs lead the group directly to a scarecrow. Gosh, where could Bubba be hiding? I wonder if the title will give me any hints....

So, the rednecks look around a bit, and then get ready to leave. Unfortunately, Otis decides to have a closer look at the scarecrow, and sees Bubba's very frightened eyes behind the sack "head" of the scarecrow. Whoops!

Very slowly, Otis, Skeeter, Harless and Philby back away from the scarecrow. As Bubba whimpers, Otis lifts his gun and then hesitates, even after the other 3 men lift their guns. When Bubba quietly cries that he didn't hurt the girl, Otis fires 2-3 shots at him at point blank range. The others also start shooting, and Bubba gets at least a dozen new openings in his body.

After a few seconds, Harless and the others hear a CB transmission coming from his truck. They learn that Marylee is not dead, and that Bubba saved her from the attacking dog. To cap it all off, this was all discovered a half hour earlier. Nice.

Upon hearing the news, a creepy-sounding wind starts to blow, and Otis walks back to the truck. He grabs a giant pitchfork from the truck bed, and positions Bubba's corpse in such a way as to have him holding it by his side. The wind gets stronger and stronger, until eventually, it makes Bubba start to sway to and fro.

The movie then delivers us to a courtroom. All four men are on trial for murdering Bubba. As the prosecutor insists that Bubba was helpless from his position, the defense attorney holds up the pitchfork to show that he wasn't defenseless at all. Wow, who knew that Otis could be that clever? Not I....

The prosecutor responds that a single pitchfork is still no match for four men armed with guns. Then Otis makes up some crap about giving Bubba several chances to surrender and firing several warning shots into the air, at which point the prosecutor yells that Bubba had 21 bullet wounds all over his body. Ouch.

The judge calls both lawyers to approach, and tells the prosecutor that he doesn't think that the case against the vigilantes is strong enough. Say what now? 21 bullet wounds doesn't seem a little suspicious, or an attack of 4 against 1 doesn't raise any alarms in their heads? Geez, remind me to stay the heck away from THAT town!

So, yeah, Judge Dumbass finds all 4 men innocent. That causes Bubba's Mama to totally lose it. She stands up and declares that all of them are murderers, then makes a cryptic statement that there are "different kinds od justice", which sounds pretty ominous. Hey, wouldn't it be a hoot if she somehow got a posse together to kill the 4 of them, then another vigilante group sprung up to take her group out, and on and on and on...? It'd be like the Moebius Strip of slasher films. Someone start writing that script, please.

They all leave the courtroom together, and quickly start cheering and giving each other and the other townsfolk high fives. Then the prosecutor pops up to tell Otis that if he eventually does find the evidence needed to execute them, he'll see that it happens. Otis, being Otis, makes a stupid remark about fried chicken, then leaves with his buddies.

At the local hangout, Otis and the others have their beers and fried chicken, and laugh about the prosecutor's last encounter with them. None of them realize it, but just outside the restaurant, the same weird wind that was blowing when Bubba died is blowing again. Is there a restless spirit arriving in town? My guess would be yes.

We see Marylee in bed, as an older woman(her aunt? grandmother?) watches her sleep. The woman then tells her husband, Frank, that she never had the heart to tell Marylee that Bubba died. Frank tells her to keep it a secret for as long as she can. Wow, this is a really dysfunctional town, huh?

Marylee wakes up after her folks have gone to bed. She senses Bubba nearby, and calls out his name a few times, to no avail. She puts on some slippers and a robe, then decides to climb out of her bedroom window to go looking for him.

Marylee arrives at Mama's house, where she sees a light on in his bedroom. She knocks on his window to invite him to play, but he doesn't answer her. Being a total nutcase, she decides to try to break in. Hell, I'm more afraid of this weird kid than 10 Bubbas. I kinda hope that she's the killer, even though she's too small to wear the scarecrow outfit.

Anyway, Marylee explores the lower level first, and finds a lot of his things around the house, but no sign of him. Heck, she even finds the lei she made for him. I could use a good lei. Take the edge off, you know?

So, when Marylee heads upstairs, Mama finds her. She demands to know why the little girl is in her home, and her demeanor softens considerably when Marylee tells her that she wants to see Bubba. They go back downstairs together, and Mama tries to explain that Bubba isn't coming back anymore. Maryann doesn't let that stop her: she insists that she can sense that Bubba is somewhere close, probably hiding or playing some sort of game.

The next day, all 4 of the killers are back in their daily routines. Otis is delivering the mail as usual, only stopping when he spies some porn mag that he wants to look at before the owner gets to have it. Harless is busy trying to figure out what's jamming up his chipper. Quick, wave goodbye to the arm that he's about to lose....pretty soon he won't be able to!

His wife joins him in the field to mention that they were invited to some dance. She loses her train of thought though, and asks Harless if he's planting his crops early. When he says no, she then asks why he put up a scarecrow in the field. Uh oh....

Harless drives over to the local diner, where he meets up with Philby and Skeeter. At first they are happy to see him, but the mood soon changes when they see how angry Harless is. He tells them that someone put a scarecrow in his field, and they all get pretty nervous about what that could imply.

They pay a visit to Otis, who is now living in what looks like some kind of very run-down boarding house.. When they tell him about the reappearance of the scarecrow, he plants the idea in their single group brain that they all share that it's some kind of threat from the prosecuting lawyer. Then Otis suggests that they go home, and never visit him again.

That's followed by Harless driving his truck home, then taking a swig or two from a drink outside. Instead of going inside his house, the farmer decides to stagger around his property with a flashlight for a bit, which is always a smart idea when you're drunk, alone, and someone dressed as a scarecrow is stalking you.

There's this weird squeaking sound, but the scene is so dark, I can't tell what exactly is making it. Harless finds a large cross on his property, exactly like the one where they found Bubba hanging like a scarecrow, He kicks it over, then turns to head back to his house. Wanna bet that he doesn't make it that far?

When he turns, Harless sees the woodchipper turn on, so he decides to go examine it up close. Smart fella, or fart smella? Anyway, he somehow manages to switch it off without getting killed(damn...), then starts yelling for Sam(the lawyer) to stop fooling around. Then Harless puts down his flashlight and picks up a small scythe.

What happens next makes no sense whatsoever....As Harless climbs up to the hayloft to search it, he thinks he has found where "Sam" is hiding. He approaches a shadowy corner of the loft, then hears a noise below. When he leans over the side to look, the chipper turns on, causing Harless to startle, then fall out of the loft and into the chipper. Awesome, but also epic in its stupidity. And entirely bloodless.

Instead of blood, the scene switches to breakfast at the boarding house. One of the old farts tells the others(including Otis) that he heard a lot of commotion during the night, and that Harless was found dead. When Otis joins the crowd to watch the authorities take care of the dead man's widow, Sam turns around to give Otis the ol' stink-eye.

Later, Otis, Skeeter and Philby meet to discuss the horrific way their friend died. When Otis suggests that it's Sam who killed Harless, the other 2 men disagree. Then Otis decides that it was all an accident, until Philby asks who turned the machine off after the deed was done. D'oh!

The three men decide to examine the chipper, and discover that it was, indeed, switched off. Then Otis has two tense encounters, one with Marylee(who runs off when she sees him), then another tense chat with Mama. She implies that all of the spooky crap happening and the death of Harless is simple, Biblical vengeance. Mama also warns him to leave Marylee alone, then shuts her front door in his face.

We next see Philby by himself, so I guess he's next to die. His pigs are oinking like crazy, and he spots a scarecrow out in his field. He runs over to get a closer look, which just confirms that these 4 are the biggest lunkheads that ever lived.

Philby gets right in front of the scarecrow, then drops to his pudgy, stupid knees. Wow, do these guys have a suicide pact going that they forgot to mention? On an even weirder note, the scene just abruptly ends right there. Does Jabba live or die???

The next scene opens on a Halloween skeleton decoration. It's the town's big party, I guess. As a group of children(including Marylee) play a game of hide and seek, Otis wins the award for Pedo of the Year when he peers through a window in at them, using the eyeholes of a skull decoration. Creepy guy.

Marylee counts while the other kids hide, then she turns and has the world's creepiest encounter with Otis. He keeps trying to sweet-talk her into approaching him, then she tells Otis that Bubba told her what the 4 men did to him. She runs off before Otis can get anything more specific out of her, and he looks pretty nervous.

During the dance, Otis grabs a drink. His partners in crime find him, and Philby claims that he actually saw Bubba outside. He brings Otis to the spot, but of course, Bubba's not there at that point. When Skeeter suggests telling the sheriff, Otis tries to talk him down. Philby gives Otis an ultimatum: either figure out a way out of their jam, or he's going to the cops.

Mama makes some tea, and her house is as quiet as a crypt full of mimes. Otis assaults her, and warns the old woman to stop scaring him and his buddies. When he removes his hand from her mouth she screams, so Otis clamps her lips shut again, He tells the frightened old lady that he won't hurt her if she keeps quiet.

When Otis removes his hand from her mouth again, Mama has suddenly died. He backs away, then nearly dies himself when her tea kettle starts shrieking. Always thinking, Otis takes the kettle off of the stove, then cranks up the gas oven, hoping that with the fireplace going, the explosion will be a great way to cover his tracks.

The house explodes with a friggin' mushroom cloud of fire. I shit you not.

While Marylee is outside playing, Sam investigates the cause of the explosion. He's told by the gas guy that the elderly always forget to turn off the gas, or even turn it down. Yeah. Even Sam doesn't buy that.

In the next scene, Philby hears his pigs acting up in the middle of the night. He goes outside to investigate, then he fixes a loose chain. He sees a light go on in his house and gets in his car, but it won't start.

Philby starts feeling chest pains, so he takes his pills, then gets out of the car. He thinks that he hears someone nearby, so he decides to run and hide in his grain silo. Genius. When the noises stop, Philby tries to exit, but the silo door is jammed shut. As the old farmer panics, the silo starts to fill up with grain. Philby screams and flails around for a minute or so, then drowns in his own grain.

The next morning, Otis finds the gas station almost empty. He sneaks up on Skeeter, and assaults him. He tells the younger man that it was Otis who killed their buddies, and promises to prove it to him. They head out that night, prepared to dig up the grave that Otis was buried in, only to discover that he's still in his grave after all.

Skeeter runs away with a case of the screaming meme's, then Otis tackles him to the ground next to the open grave. as the younger guy blows about a metric ton of snot out of his body, he begs Otis to go to the police for protection. The mailman gets him even more worked up when he suggests that their stalker is actually maybe Marylee.

A little girl? Really? Is this some kind of blooper reel I started watching?

Nope, he's serious. When Skeeter refuses to aid him in murdering a little girl, Otis decides to change tactics. He calms the blubbering gas station employee down, then leads him over to the open grave. As Skeeter puts the lid back over Bubba and starts rambling, Otis bashes him from above with the shovel. Hilariously, the cap Skeeter had on even sticks to the shovel. Then Otis re-packs the grave, burying Otis and Bubba together,

As he careens around on the dirt roads, Otis nearly runs his mail truck right into Marylee. He runs out of the vehicle to hunt her down, and finds her within a minute. She screams, as he insists that she's the person who killed his friends.

Then the creepy-sounding wind starts up again. A bulldozer that is driving itself chases Otis, even though Otis thinks that Jack the prosecutor is driving it. Is there anyone in this movie who hasn't made his suspect list yet??? He stumbles through a field, half-drunk, then collides with another one of those scarecrows. Otis staggers back, and we see that the figure held a pitchfork that stabbed Otis in the gut in several places,

Otis falls to his knees, then dies. As the camera pans up, all of the machinery and lights that were on shut off simultaneously. Damn, I was sort of hoping for a flesh-and-blood killer. Still, the scarecrows are creepy as hell to look at.

Anyway, back to Marylee, for some reason. She's still hiding in one of the fields, among the pumpkins. The scarecrow lurches in her direction, and hands her an intact flower. She accepts it, then tells Zombie Bubba that she's going to teach him a new game the following night: the chasing game. Rut roh! THE END

Pretty awesome stuff this week. Some good kills, a simple story to follow, and people who could act. Not bad. I give it 4.5 killer trees out of 5, with half a point lost for the way the pace slowed down in the middle for awhile. But not bad at all.

And what did I learn from Dark Night of The Scarecrow?

-There are a lot of customs about flowers that should only be practiced by consenting adults.

-It's incredibly hard to convict old rednecks of murder, especially if they offer to buy beers for most of nthe town after the trial.

-Zombies can teleport from their graves, put on costumes, commit several murders, remove the costumes, teleport back into their graves, then reappear to give their friends flowers. Yup, that all sounds like sound reasonable thinking!

Next up: A film called The Initiation, starring Daphne Zuniga. See you then!

Uncle Sam

Another week, another goofy-ass slasher flick. This week, we have one of those "holiday" slashers to watch, a 4th of July-themed film called Uncle Sam. Let's get to it....and, as always, there will be SPOILERS up the wazoo! I hope you all remembered to clean out your wazoos before the film...

Okay, so the movie starts out with 2 schlubs riding around in a jeep. A couple of helpful subtitles inform us that they're in Kuwait, and it's June 14th. They pull up to a wreckage in the road, and it's revealed that an American chopper crashed. The ranking officer tells one of his men to check the body in the helicopter for his dog tags, and the soldier reads that the dead man is named Sam Harper. Gee, I wonder if Sam's an uncle...

Before he can do much else, the poor grunt is shot by Sam, who sits up and fires away. Then he also turns the officer into Swiss cheese. Before the scene ends, Sam tells the corpses, "Don't be afraid...it's only friendly fire!" And then we get the opening credits, set to fireworks, patriotic music, and images of Uncle Sam(not the killer...the character on the recruitment posters).

When the story starts up again, we're told that it's now taking place in "Twin Rivers, USA". Boy, my US maps must be waaaaaay out of date, because, I don't see a state with that name anywhere on 'em! I hope Sam has a good GPS device. Wait, maybe I should be hoping that he doesn't have one? I'm confused...

We see a little kid in bed, and he's having a nightmare. Nightmares must be expensive,because his looks like it primarily consists of public domain war imagery, mixed together with a photo of a soldier saluting. The kid knocks the picture over as he sleeps, and the glass in the frame breaks, waking him up.

The boy cuts his foot on the glass fragments, and hops on over to his mother's room. As she gets some items to treat the cut, he tells her that he was dreaming about his Uncle Sam, marching in the Independence Day parade. His mother tries to tell him that he's much too young to remember her brother, but the kid insists that he does. Okay kid, whatever.

Okay, so let's stop here for a sec....Uncle Sam--the undead soldier we just watched kill some of his comrades in the opening sequence--is just hanging around somewhere? Is he buried? Walking around? Running around as a politician named John Kerry for his cover identity?(come on, you KNOW that guy's a zombie!)

Anyway, the next scene has a police officer dropping his date off at her house, She is Sam's widow, and it's been 3 years since anyone has apparently heard any news about him. A member of the military has been waiting on her front porch to let her know that Sam's body was finally recovered. Hey, I have an idea! Let's start saying character names out loud, how about that? We're 3 scenes in, and I can only name 1 character thus far. And his name is in the title.

Anyway, the army rep tells Sam's widow that they can bury him at Arlington, but she's adamant about having him in the family plot, near her. He gives her Sam's dog tags, tells her the motel he's staying in(the anonymous soldier, not Sam), then he leaves.

Then we finally meet someone who has a name:Jed, a former Sergeant. He's played by the late Isaac Hayes. Chef! Jed's trying to button up his uniform, but years of junk food have made that nigh impossible. He seems to have a flashback, and picks up an old photograph. This movie must have been funded by a camera company....everyone has an old photo near and dear to them.

The picture looks like a group of guys standing around a Chain Chomp(from the Mario games), and Jed remarks that he's the last of the folks from his army unit still alive. Don't you worry, Jed...I have a feeling you'll be having a reunion with your buddies sooner than you'd think. Do the Mario!

We then get treated to the most awkward scene transition in recent memory, as we go from a shell-shocked war veteran, to that little kid from a few scenes ago, reading a war-themed comic book that he created. The kid's mom calls him Jody, and they apparently live together with Sam's widow. Great, so now we know 4 names. At this rate everyone should be identified by, oh, I'd say the 3rd sequel. Uncle Sam: Electric Boogaloo!

Whoops, gotta get back to the film! Oh, and I cheated by pausing the film to look up who that actor was playing the soldier who was talking to Sam's widow....Bo Hopkins. He's been a steadily-working actor in television and movies for a loooong time. Genre fans probably recognize him as the sheriff in the second From Dusk Til Dawn movie.

Anyway, sorry, got sidetracked again, didn't I? So the whole point of Jody making his own war comic book was that he sees Sam as a heroic figure, but I get the impression that the adults in the family have a different opinion. Sam's widow tells her sister that his body was found, and is being shipped home.

At this point the Netflix DVD keeps skipping and stuttering. Luckily(...?), the movie is also available to watch streaming. So, now the widow has a name: Louise. Boy, now we're cooking! As Louise and her sister discuss how abusive Sam was, and how stressful making arrangements for his body will be, Jody is seen eavesdropping by the stairs. He goes back to his bedroom before heading off to school, and grabs a heavy-looking green metal box.

At school, Jody tells his teacher, Mr. Crandall, that his uncle's body was found. He also reveals that there was a rumor that the chopper was shot down by American soldiers. As the teacher explains the concept of "friendly fire" to the class, Jody brings out the green box, which holds all of Sam's combat medals.

Mr. Crandall reveals that he was a protester during Vietnam. Jody calls him a coward, but clarifies that his uncle was the one who told him that. As he returns to his desk, Jody vows to join the army himself someday. Heh, instead of "Son of Sam", we get "Nephew of Sam"! I crack myself up, I really do.

There's a very brief sequence showing Sam's coffin arriving, then Jody gets home from school. Jody sees that the coffin is sealed, and asks if he can put the medals in with his uncle's body. Sgt. Twining(I cheated again...) tells Jody that he should keep the medals himself, until he's old enough to enlist. Wow, nice thing to say in front of the widow: "Hey kid, we killed your uncle. You're next!"

As Louise shows Sgt. Twining out, Jody tries fiddling with the seal on the coffin. Louise sees him, and tells him to stop, then fixes the flag over the coffin again after he leaves the room. Inside the coffin, we get a good view of Sam's rotting hands, but nothing happens. Not even a twitch. Damn.

Twining gets on the phone with one of his co-workers, and implies that the whole reason he took the job of delivering bad news to war widows is because he wants to bang 'em. Classy guy. He giggles and hangs up, drunk and goofy.

At the house, Jody's mother greets the deputy at the front door. He offers to take her out, but apparently it's just her and Jody in the house, and she doesn't want to leave him alone with the body. Given how he tried to break open the casket, can't say that I blame her. Jody's got some screws loose, if you ask me. And where is Louise? And why is the deputy having dinner with his girlfriend's sister instead of his girlfriend? This movie hurts my brain. I can't keep track of half the names, who's dating who...it's like a bad soap opera.

Deputy Dork bores them with dinner chat about how the sheriff's department finagled a ton of money from the government. What a douchebag this guy is. After he explains to Jody how he cheated the IRS out of money, he asks Jody if he wants to ride up on the July 4th parade float with him. The deputy's going to be dressed as Honest Abe...excuse me, I think I just threw up in kmy mouth a little over the slimy nature of this guy. I hope Uncle Sam kills him first.

Jody asks to be excused, and the deputy(named Ralph) tries to cozy up to Jody's mother. So wait, is he dating both women, or was the aunt dating a different member of the sheriff's office? And who the hell writes this many subplots into a damned slasher flick? Seriously. A slasher flick shouldn't require Cliffs Notes to watch it.

Up in his room, Jody is playing with his army men. He names one action figure "Ralph", then runs it over with a tank. Wait, are they trying for a Child's Play vibe here, where we're supposed to wonder if the killer is either Jody or Sam? I swear, if that's the twist, I'm going to be majorly pissed.

In the middle of the night, Jody sneaks downstairs with the box of medals under one arm. As he attempts to break the lock on the coffin, Sam's hands begin twitching. Jody says something about how lonely death must be, then gives up on the lock and goes back to bed.

The next day, Jed shows up to pay his respects. He sees Jody staring at him, and brings him out to the porch to see the artificial leg Jed wears as the result of a war injury. Then Jed does what anyone would do around a child: he tells Jody that his dick is still intact, then fills his head with amputee horror stories. Funny, that never came up with Chef on South Park....

When Jody expresses an interest in joining the military, Jed starts to bad-mouth nthe military life. Jody doesn't believe him, but the old guy at least tries to dissuade him from wanting to enlist. Then he tells Jody that he took Sam hunting as a young boy once, and Sam seemed to derive pleasure from killing. Yikes! Keep Jed away from kids!

Jed tells Jody that only dangerous lunatics look forward to battle, then he goes back home. When Jody goes back into the house, he overhears Ralph saying that the war in the Middle East was stupid, and Jody lashes out at him with an insult. That gets Jody grounded, even from the holiday festivities. D'oh!

Jody reads the last letter Sam ever wrote to him, then goes to bed. As the clock strikes midnight, we see Sam in his coffin. Despite zooming in on his rotting face, nothing happens. Maybe that should have been the title for this one: Nothing Happens....The Movie! They could call the sequel Still Nothing!

A group of teens show up at the graveyaed, defiling the headstones with swastikas. They douse an American flag in lighter fluid, then light it up. This somehow wakes Sam from the dead, despite the fact that he's in a different part of town. Logic? Who needs logic? This film sure doesn't.

Sam gets the lid open, and sits up. He creeps upstairs to Jody's room, and takes back his various medals, then we get a gruesome montage(MONTAGE!) of Sam pinning the medals to his bare chest, before buttoning up his uniform once more. Ouch. Then he visits his wife's bedroom, and nothing happens. You're as shocked as I am right? Yeah.

Sam decides to do a little peeping before his killing spree, and he somehow found an Uncle Sam costume and mask to wear. Then what the hell was the point of wearing his uniform over his medals??? How many layers does a zombie need to wear on an average July night? He's not exactly going to die from catching a cold....

Oh well. The good news is that the blond he's spying on is pretty damned hot. She completely disrobes, and it's revealed that the guy outside is a different Uncle Sam. He's one of those guys who wear the costume while on stilts, which is a cliche I've never really understood. Is it traditional to get your neck broken on Independence Day?

The woman puts her clothes back on, then leans out the window to yell at the perv. He's busy, in the meantime, making the slowest, most awkward escape ever filmed. A police vehicle nearly hits him, yet he still gets away. This is like the most useless police force in the history of law enforcement. Next to these guys, Boss Hogg's deputies seemed like rocket scientists.

Uncle Sam(ours this time!) shows up, and begins stalking the stilt guy. We see the killer take out a sharp pair of shears, and the one on the stilts starts to panic. He looks over his shoulder to see if the zombie is still following him, and gets a direct hit to the face by a thick tree branch in his path.

He hits the ground, and Sam takes his mask. After killing the guy, Sam cuts the pants of the Sam costume to a normal length, then puts it on. Okay, same criticism as before: is he wearing the costume over his uniform? Seriously, wouldn't the mask be a sufficient disguise?

Whatever, let's go check in on the vandals. They use Sam's open grave to get rid of their empty beer cans, then 2 of the guys start to leave. The 3rd guy stops first to pee over the gravesite. Again, very classy.

Uncle Sam pops up from out of nowhere, and sprays the peeing guy's face with one of the paints the hooligans used earlier to deface the graves. The guy passes out, and wakes up with a red, white and blue face. He snapped one of his legs falling into Sam's open grave, and the bone is sticking out of his pants, looking pretty gory.

Uncle Sam watches the young man try to pull himself out of the grave, leg injury and all, but it's too deep. He waits for the guy to notice him standing over the hole, then starts to shovel in dirt to bury the vandal alive. Nasty way to die.

The guy's 2 friends discuss going back for him, but only one does. Nice friends. A brief shot of the buried-alive victim shows his fingers poking up through the dirst, waving weakly, but Uncle Sam covers them with the last of the dirt. He sure seems to be breathing heavy, for a guy who doesn't need to breathe anymore. Why would a zombie get winded?

The doofus who went back for "Rick"(the vandal's name) keeps calling his name, and wandering through the graveyard. Uncle Sam gets a cord around the guy's throat, and begins to hoist him up a flagpole. As the struggling guy is raised higher and higher, "Taps" begins to play. Near the top, his neck snaps.

The following morning, Mr. Crandall, Jody's teacher, is setting up for some kind of patriotic pageant or something. He goes back to his classroom to fetch a part of one child's costume, and we can see Uncle Sam hiding in the room with an axe in his hand.

Outside the school, Ralph asks where the teacher went, and is told that Crandall went back inside to get an axe. Then we see the axe buried in Crandall's forehead. Ow! On the bright side, he'll never lose track of it!

Jed fires a cannon, and a group of folks dressed as soldiers march by a small crowd of spectators. Jody can hear all of the festivities from his bedroom, and decides to sneak out to enjoy the holiday. As he looks under his bed for the box of medals, he realizes that it's now missing. He thinks one of the adults did it, and gets pissed. My money is still on him as some sort of killer. The kid is creepy...

Speaking of creepy kids, there's a brief scene depicting a couple bringing their blind child to the parade. The kid, wheelchair-bound, has disfiguring scars on his face, and it's implied that his injuries were caused by something that some of the townspeople did in the past. Really? Really movie? We need yet another plot thread in this overstuffed turkey? What, are you trying to remake The Towering Inferno or something??? And what's a blind kid going to enjoy at a fireworks show and parade? "Gee, the smoke smells good this year!"

Anyway, the injured kid, Barry, was a kid who was friends with Jody, so Jody walks over to talk with him. Barry doesn't acknowledge him at all, at least at first. When he finally does speak to Jody, Barry's mother breaks up the reunion, and pushes her son's chair away from Jody. Apparently, Barry had some kind of accident with fireworks, and his mother blames all of his friends for the accident, whether they were there or not.

The mayor tells the crowd that a local teen will sing them the national anthem, and we get a quick glimpse of Uncle Sam killing someone for some reason. Then the teen gets on stage, and starts doing a thrash metal version of the anthem, screaming the lyrics like a castrated bull. He finishes by mooning the audience, and Uncle Sam is watching from a distance. I think he found his next victim. Either that, or he's an ass man.

The mayor tries to salvage the proceedings by leading the audience in a real version of the song, and there's an extreme closeup of Barry for some reason. Uncle Sam suddenly cradles the blind boy's face with one hand, and Barry is understandably freaked out. Uncle Sam then tells Barry that he will punish the crowd for him. Barry asks who he is, and Uncle Sam responds that Barry knows the answer to the question already. Freaky stuff.

Jody, who was busy getting something to eat, turns around and spots Uncle Sam speaking with Barry. Uncle Sam moves through the crowd, waving and interacting with children, and Jody keeps watching him. Then Barry's parents bring him a plate of food, and he asks them who the man was. The folks don't seem overly concerned. Dumbasses.

A black car shows up, carrying a politician and his bodyguards. Jed makes a comment about the politician, and Abe Lincoln(Ralph) tells him that not everyone who marches in the parade can be a war hero. Then Jed complains about the kid who screamed the national anthem, and Ralph replies that it's a dumb song that no one ever remembers.

Jed gets angry and limps away, straight into the path of Uncle Sam. their eyes meet(Sam's are glowing yellow), and Jed gets a serious case of the willies. Sam stares him down, then walks away.

At a barbecue grill, a young woman uses a meat cleaver to cut a rack of ribs into sections. She puts down the cleaver to go take a smoke break, and lights up a joint. another deputy surprises her, and confiscates the drugs. When she returns to the grill, the cleaver has gone missing. Big surprise, huh?

Did Uncle Sam become a pacifist? Where are all of the killings? Believe it or not, we have to sit through a freaking potato sack race next. Swear on a stack of bibles, a potato sack race! One teenager cheats by running behind other contestants, then tackling them to the ground, Jody included. Is a sack race actually that important to the youth of today?

The stupid teen eventually stumbles down a hill, into what looks like the local junkyard. He hops past a few rusty vehicles, and a couple is seen making out in one of them. Then the kid finds himself facing Uncle Sam. Finally!

the kid compliments the costume, then hops away. Past the next set of trees, he sees Uncle Sam reappear in front of him. Neat trick. The teen gets scared, and hops away a bit faster, this time into the waiting arms of the killer. Sam grabs the boy with one hand, then raises the cleaver with his free hand. With one swift chop, he decapitates the kid. He was sacked!

Back at the festivities, Ralph and Louise are talking about their relationship. *yawn* Ralph offers to buy her an ice cream cone, and Sam is seen lingering behind them. Ralph even guesses that Louise is uncomfortable dating him because of all of the recent news about Sam's body being discovered. To cap off the scene, Louise gets a popsicle instead of ice cream. Ice cream, popsicle, same diff....like crap movies and classic films. Same diff, right? Or aspirin and rat poison. Or chickens and humpback whales.

Uncle Sam tries his hand at a shooting gallery game, then steals the gun when the guy in the booth turns his back for a few seconds. Louise finds Ralph at a dunking booth, sitting in the dunking chair, and discovers that he's been shot. Hmmmm....who did we just see get his hands on a rifle?

The scene of the crime is blocked off, and Louise asks why anyone would want to murder Ralph. Jody suggests that it was because Ralph was a crrook, which revives my earlier theory that Jody could be doing these killings. We'll just have to see....

At the urging of the mayor, the celebration resumes. Wow, an homage to Jaws? The body is carted away by paramedics, and Uncle Sam watches them without being noticed. Apparently, an outlandish costume and mask give you stealth abilities. And, given that Sam is undead, wouldn't the smell of his rotting flesh be kind of hard to ignore?

Jody tells his mother and aunt that Uncle Sam would have caught the killer faster than the police could, and they both respond that his uncle was a lot less heroic than he assumes. They tell Jody that Sam was physically abusive, and that he wanted people to fear him, on an extreme level. Jody's mother verifies the story, even saying that she was relieved when he got married and moved out of her house.

She goes into some of the details about the abuse they all suffered under Sam's dominance, and Jody begins to realize that there was a side to his uncle that he never let himself see. Then he asks both women why they took the chest of war medals from his bedroom, and they don't know what he's talking about. A police officer interrupts, and asks Jody to go play for a few minutes, so that the adults have a private discussion.

After Jody leaves, the officer announces that the decapitated kid's corpse was discovered. then we abruptly shift the action back to the pot smoker at the grill. She hears something sizzling under the hood of the barbecue, and finds a severed head cooking. Uncle Sam suddenly grabs the back of her head, and makes the girl part of the main course.

The mayor interrupts the live music to announce that the dead body is taken care of. That leads to Barry telling his father that there are more bodies waiting to be found, and of course dad doesn't believe him.

The mayor tries to calm the crowd down, but he seems to have the opposite effect on people. He tells them that the politician who arrived, a congressman, will be making a speech, but no one can find the congressman. That's because Uncle Sam is busy preparing the politician to be murdered.

The mayor refers to the tragedy that happened the previous year, and people in the crowd stare uncomfortably at poor Barry. Then a spotlight turns on, and the crowd gasps when they see the congressman tied to the fireworks display. Ooh, this is gonna hurt...

The politician tries to scream, but he can only make muffled noises. Uncle Sam hits a switch on a control panel, and some sparklers placed in the congressman's chest light up. The investigating officer moves in for a closer look, and is thrown off his feet by a barrage of fireworks that surround the congressman. The lawman rolls down the same hill that the teen did in the sack race, and Uncle Sam impales him when he lands.

Blind Barry asks for a description of what's happening, and his folks prepare to run back to their car without him. Good parenting. Jody shows up to help Barry, and is told that the guy in the costume is his dead uncle. As they debate whether it is him or not, Jed arrives to bring them both someplace safe.

The boys tell him about Sam's return from the dead, and Jed at first remains a skeptic. But when he remembers the feeling he had when he locked eyes with Sam, he knows that the story is somehow true. They encounter Barry's folks, and the folks let Jed take their son with him and Jody. Yup, great parenting.

The trio go to Jody's house, to see if Sam is in his coffin. When they open the lid, they discover Twining's body instead of Sam in there. That convinces Jed that the kids were telling the truth.

Jody's mom comes home, and demands to know why Jed was in the house. After Barry suggests that Sam will likely go after his wife next, Jed leaves the children with the frightened mother, and decides to stop Sam by himself. The mother enters the house to get something, and the kids take off after Jed the second she leaves.

The kids meet up with Jed, who has managed to grab a pistol. They tell him that Uncle Sam won't harm them, and that they would ensure Jed's safety by going with him. Oh yeah? Well what about Mom, you little dipwads? who's going to protect her from Sam?

They enter the house again, only to nearly die at the hands of Louise, who has a huge kitchen knife. Jed gives her his gun, then wanders into the kitchen to call the police. As he dials the number(on a rotary phone! Do people even still have these anymore?), Jed spots the Sam mask nearby. He turns to face the undead killer, and they accuse each other of being bad soldiers.

As Louise and the kids wait for Jed to finish his call, his body comes flying into the living room. He's still alive, and Jed gets out of the way to watch as Sam confronts Louise. After he tries to get her to admit to infidelity, she shoots the zombie several times to no avail.

Jody urges Jed to get the cannon, and Jed leaves to set it up. Before he leaves, though, he suggests that they get to safety and find "Sally". Who is Sally? Wait, is she Louise's sister? With about 10 minutes of film left, did we finally discover her name? Wow.

Jody is left alone in the house to confront his uncle. Sam tells the boy that he came back from the dead to be with him, but that Jody would need to die to be like him. As Jody continues to talk to him, the scene shifts back to Jed, who attaches the cannon to the back of his pickup, and speeds back to the house with it.

Jody tells Sam that he worshipped him as a hero, but that was before Sam started murdering other Americans. The zombie replies that they all needed to pay for his untimely death, and that his cause is just. Blah, blah, blah. This dialogue is just as bad as the melodramatic motives that the killer had in Scream 3.

When Jed and Barry return with the cannon, Jody lures his undead uncle out of the house. He tells Jed and Barry that he wants to be with Sam, and Barry encourages Jed to light the cannon's fuse. At the last moment, Jody leaps out of the way, and is knocked off of his feet by the fiery explosion caused by the impact of the cannonball hitting Sam.

They all look back at the flames and wreckage(from 1 cannonball?!?), and Sam keeps on coming their way. Jody tries to crawl to safety while Jed loads the cannon again. The fuse refuses to light at first, but he eventually gets it working, just as a charred and blazing Sam reaches for his nephew.

The second blast from the cannon takes Sam completely off of his feet. He flies backward into the house, and a series of explosions catch the place on fire. Great. Jody went from being stalked by a zombie, to being homeless. Great plan! Barry and Jed both celebrate their victory, but Jody doesn't seem so sure that they finished Sam off.

In the aftermath of the fire, Jody throws out most of his army toys, into a burning trash can. His mother watches from the porch. He burns the last of the war toys, then turns and stares at his mother with an odd expression. As he gives her an evil smile, the image shatters like glass. During the credits, a creepy poem is read, then the credits end with the guy on stilts in a blooper scene. THE END

Well, I've seen worse....that's damning it with faint praise, huh? It would have been interesting to see what they could have done in a sequel. Maybe a female in the military could have been killed, and Uncle Sam could have made her his own "Betsy Ross" or something. Like the suggestion for a sequel to Dr. Giggles would have been "Nurse Giggles". Come on Hollywood writers! Start getting those scripts written!

Also,they should have had Sam use more military- and holiday-themed one-liners when killing his targets. Stuff like, "Drop dead, and give me 20!", or "War isn't Hell, I am!" would have given the film much more personality. Oh and 2 trees out of 5, mostly for the late kills, which were fairly decent. But it was....so....sloooooow.



And what did I learn from Uncle Sam?

-Zombies breathe a lot, especially when chasing their victims.

-Zombies can mingle with crowds of people, and only children will notice. Especially blind kids.

-Cannons are a zombie's only weakness. Well, that and the thought of banging their widows.

My next movie is one that scared the crap out of me as a kid, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, See you next week!