SCHLOCK VALUE: DECEMBER 2009 EDITION
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SCHLOCK VALUE
December 2009
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JACK O'LANTERN was spawned in 2004 by Ron McLellan
I walked into the video store knowing what was in store for me; when putting together a Schlock Value I know full well that the night ahead is probably going to be a painful one, especially when I feel like looking for fresh fodder I haven’t fed on before hand. This is where JACK O'LANTERN comes into the story. My schlock senses should have kicked into gear and forewarned me to put it back on the shelf but fuck it I said, as bad as it is it could still hold a nugget of gold and wouldn’t you know it… it fucking didn’t!The plot of JACK O'LANTERN is a befuddling one; I defy anybody to be able to explain it to me in a coherent fashion. After we see some pumpkin creature slice and dice a bunch of cannibals for no reason we meet Jack, the mentally damaged, coincidently named main guy who lapses in and out of some trance-like state, and appears to have some connection to the pumpkin creature; a connection that has no discernable explanation. Oh, by the way, several years ago Jack was in a car accident which resulted in his head's current state. Oh and also, all the victims are being offed because they are the ones responsible for the car accident. Oh, oh, and also, also this movie is shit!
JACK O'LANTERN is no doubt the director's first attempt at making a film. Hell, I’d be surprised if he even went to film school. It looks, feels, smells, walks, talks, and sounds like a bad student film. It absolutely reeks of that time you sat down with a bunch of friends, watching horror movies one night, and started talking about making your own one. Only instead of being smart and realizing maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, and just resuming your movie-fest, these guys went one step further, grabbed their parents $200 video camera and actually made it. And whilst I commend them for having the drive, I just wish they’d have kept the end result to themselves.
MOTOCROSS ZOMBIES FROM HELL was spawned in 2007 by G.R
MOTOCROSS ZOMBIES FROM HELL is a movie which proves that bad movies can have awesome titles. With a title like that, what man could deny himself of it? But if B-Grade (or in this case Z-Grade) history has taught us anything, it’s that covers can be deceiving, and in no place is that more evident then here.I went in hoping, and expecting (just a little) something along the lines of a cheesy Troma flick and came out owning something tasting more like a film put out by Brain Damage Films. Shot entirely on digital video without the slightest sense of creative filmmaking, it achieves little more than being a metal music and motocross fan video. No doubt it was a case of the filmmakers liking zombie movies and having access to a bunch of dirt bikes and then wha-hey… *ding* IDEA!The whole ‘plot’ revolves around the man downstairs wanting to raise an unholy army to overthrow the cloudy city above, so what does he do? He turns to zombified dirt bikers, and created Team Skullz – wow isn’t that a snappy name? A cool idea only in theory, because I’ll be damned if there was anything interesting going on screen, the motocross action is overwhelming in both its blandness and abundance. Do yourself a favor and steer clear. There are much catchier titled pieces of schlock to check out.
SICKLE was spawned in 2005 by Paul Gagne
I’m pretty sure I know how this movie came to be in my hands; by the looks of the DVD jacket, I think it was printed off on the producer's $49 printer, slipped into a case, and bought in bulk from the local groceries store, the type that is just a little too small for the jacket and ends up looking warped. That DVD was then slipped into the $4.99 bin and promptly marked down too a deserving $2 where it stayed unpurchased for a good length of time… that was, until I came!The flick opens with a couple making out in a car parked out the front of this abattoir (five minutes in and I’m already confused) when the girl (played by - and I can almost guarantee - a porn star) announces that she wants to get off by fucking in the slaughter room of the abattoir. So they wind up breaking in, whereupon they’re sliced and diced by some psycho with a sickle. An oddly performed transition lets us know that all that took place a couple of years back and we learn by way of a bunch of really stupid characters that said sickle- welding psycho is some guy named Marty Sickle who was subsequently strung up by pissed off locals in the very same abattoir, but his body fell into a pool of boiling water and vanished… it’s your basic low budget Freddy Krueger origin story done without a budget or any hint of originality. Then again, this film is so lacking in the originality department that it’s almost working as a black hole of originality. This would be the part where I’d show my literary wit and claim that it’s even making me feel unoriginal, whereupon I’d begin quoting other people's reviews. But… surprise, surprise, it seems that nobody else out there has bothered with this piece of cinematic dung, or at the very least they’re smart enough to have kept it quiet. The cardboard, cliché characters should come as no big surprise. They’re pretty, they’re stupid, and they’re curious. Our own low budget, no personality, version of the Scooby gang who decide that it would just be so swell to check out the now-decommissioned abattoir and try to rouse the spirit of Marty Sickle by reciting some shitty children’s jingle about the man; Sickle once, sickle twice, sickle came too take a life. Again, it’s yet more evidence that someone has been watching a little too many Freddy movies.Idiots 1 through 4 - not including the ever-present stoner, whose very existence in the movie is a fucking mystery as he has no reason to exist! – manage to bring Marty Sickle back to life (despite acknowledging the fact that they fucked up the ritual!) and the rest of the movie ensues. There’s no reason to describe any more, because it consists of little more than them running around the big ol’ place and doing very little more then that. They run from one room into another into another into another into another into… well, you get the point.By this point you’ve either; sentenced yourself to wasting a good 90 minute chunk of your life by exclaiming “this I have to see” or making the right choice and steering well clear because let’s face it, we all have better things to do then watch SICKLE.
--Mad Man Dan Price