Detour – Hell’s Highway

Lesbo 1 and Lesbo 2 are driving across the desert on their way to some sort of "killer" rave when from out of nowhere a huge gloppy bloody mass splatters their windshield and causes them to mildly "crash" into a tumbleweed. In a feeble attempt to assess the problem, Lesbo 1 exits the car only to notice some sort of a Hellboy lookalike with a dual-hooked contraption strapped to his hand come stumbling along. Lesbo 1 thinks she can intimidate him into leaving them alone by wielding her Club Steering Wheel Lock but instead she is swiftly gashed open repeatedly by Hellboy wannabe's pointy hooks. In her last dying breath she tells her lover to "run" rather than "drive" so Lesbo 2 opts to run rather than drive and you don't have to have much imagination to figure out what happens next.

So beings "Detour" (aka "Cannibal Detour: Hell's Highway" by director Steve Taylor who apparently also directed a gem by the name of "Sludge" which I am sad to say I am somewhat salivating to see. Please don't tell my husband. He might divorce me.)

We then find a group of seven 20-somethings (all more or less no-name actors except for maybe B-queen Tiffany Shepis) driving cross country in a motor home when they decide to take a detour in the desert to score some killer peyote rumored to be in an isolated mine near an old military fort. They stop at a gas station to fuel up and although the owner of the station strongly urges them not to go, Neil, Tara, Harmony, Loopz, Michelle, Lee and Cashie have their own ideas about what a good time is and drive on anyway. In a matter of minutes (about 6 miles or so) they crash into a tree stump while trying to avoid hitting a little girl standing in the middle of their desert oasis. It's all downhill from here as one by one the kids are picked off and picked apart by a group of crazed, doped up sadistic cannibals.

"This place kinda grows on you..... like leprosy."

Fans of Wrong Turn and The Hills Have Eyes will enjoy the brutality of this one, even though you don't actually see faces ripped off or ingested. There is a rather non-titillating sex scene offering minor boobage but its fitting for the flick, and there are some pretty disgusting usages of feces, as well as a sufficient level of gore. Saw fans may not be entertained, but we all know I am not a huge Saw fan, so it makes sense I would like this one. And with the exception of Vanilla Ice rapper wannabe Loopz, the characters seem believable enough, even though they are somewhat challenged in the competent acting department.

I say YES to Detour with 2 hooks up. After all, if I can't have zombies, at least I have flesh eaters, and that is always a plus in my book.

Detour

Overall Rating:

Retail Price: $9.98

Amazon Price: $8.47

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A Raw Slice From the Delicatessen, Please

I'm couch ridden today. It would seem some really nasty snot gremlins have taken up residence in my nasal passages and are doing everything possible to make me feel utterly miserable. You'd think they'd be satisfied with just cramming all their buddies and their buddies buddies into my nostrils to the point where my head feels like its about to explode but they aren't. No, they feel the need to bungee jump down my throat and sometimes the bastards break the cord so the coughing fits that ensue really wreck havoc on my already throbbing head. If only Uncle Fester were around, I could borrow his head vice and pop those annoying little buggers out of my system altogether.

But I have no idea where Fester is, so in my weakened state I subjected myself to even more torture, compliments of NetFlix. Although I use the term "torture" loosely as actually one of today's choices was pretty good.

My .02 Cents

Horror fans far and wide give me shit because I do not like to watch Foreign films. Some drivel about how I am really missing out on great, quality horror (I usually filter them out at this point but I'm pretty sure what they are saying is drivel.)

Here's my problem with foreign horror: For starters, I tend to multitask when I watch movies at home, and having to keep my eyes constantly on the boobtube to read the subtitling (since I speak very little foreign languages) is a bit tedious. Secondly, the foreign horror flicks I wind up watching are usually.... well..... lame if you want to know the truth. And coming from me, that's pretty bad considering I usually like some pretty lame stuff!

So I thought I would try Marc Caro's & Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 1991 direction of Delicatessen (judging by the directors' names, you would be safe in presuming its a French treat.)

Starting out we see a barren town with run down buildings and beat up cars. It's filthy, as are the people, and money is basically obsolete. We learn from the word go that payment is usually in the form of bartering for grains, or shoes, etc. I'm not really sure if the setting is post apocalyptic, or perhaps set in the past after some war-torn era; judging by the cars and clothing, I'd guess the 50's or so. First up we meet Clapet, the local butcher who seemingly takes great pride in his meat. We also see someone trying to flee Clapet's establishment (which doubles as a boardinghouse) only to meet his death at the end of our friendly butchers meat cleaver. Hence the set up.

It's quickly evident that the world is starving to death and forced to eat anything that walks, which seems to be humans (apparently all of the rodents and pet life has disappeared.) Clapet is one of the few who has little to no remorse about slicing and dicing people while people have little to no remorse about eating the very people sliced and diced. Survival of the fittest I guess.

So a new tenant, Louison, moves into the apartments above the Delicatessen and Clapet's daughter Julie takes an immediate fancy to him. The basis of this movie is Clapet wanting to kill Louison for food (as well as revenge for "taking his daughter away from him") and Julie trying to do whatever she can to prevent it from happening.

Delicatessen tries to be darkly humorous, with a few subtle scares thrown in for good measure. Dialogue is lacking and bloodshed is minimal, and more often than not cuts erratically from one scene to the next, which left me scratching my head as if I missed something important. I think the most effective parts of the movie were the setting, which was dank and dirty and ominous; and the character's development of their expressions and mannerisms (trust me when I say there are no beauty queens in this one!) The actors are what kept me involved all the way to the end. The prolonged annoying sound effects were definitely not.

Although I can't say I did not enjoy Delicatessen, I also can't say that I did. I kind of enjoyed it. Who knows? Maybe I should watch it again when I am not doped up on Sudafed and Robitussin. Maybe then I would enjoy it more.

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C.H.U.D

B-movies. Who doesn’t love them? With their D-list actors delivering solid B characters, and a cheese factor that would make any wine lover drool…. Who cares if the story line is unrealistic and downright ridiculous? I for one don’t; I enjoy the hell out of it!

C.H.U.D., a wonderful lil' gem considered a cult classic from 1984, starts out just almost like every other horror movie of the 70’s and 80’s, offering up a victim within the first five minutes. Here we see a woman walking her puppy through the desolate alleys of Manhattan, New York get pulled into a manhole by some unseen foe and whisked away to the city's underbelly below. And just as quickly as the attack happens, it’s over and the streets are once again seemingly deserted.

The key players we meet are:

• George Cooper (played by the not so unknown John Heard) a fashion photographer who ironically won an award for a photojournalism piece he wrote on the “Mole People” of New York, homeless people that reside in the city’s underground recesses. It seems the chick in the opening abduction was his wife, and now he is investigating her disappearance, as well as others.

• “The Reverend” aka A. J. Sheppard (Daniel Stern) a somewhat hippy-fied fellow who mans a soup kitchen out of his quickly deteriorating row house, where he feeds the Mole People on a regular basis.

• Murphy (J. C. Quinn) a freelance reporter that is starting to suspect “something strange is happening under our city streets.”

Individually these characters are kind of lame. Put them together however and they sort of feed off of each other (for lack of better verbiage) resulting in a pretty entertaining flick. Plus they become “smarter” (and I use that term loosely.)

Now see if you can follow along 'cuz it gets a little "complex" even for a B movie:
Cooper gets called down to the station by a Mole person, to bail her out for trying to steal a gun. It seems she wanted this gun for her brother Victor, who apparently needs the gun for protection against some "Ugly Fuckers." Wanting to talk to Victor about this, Cooper accompanies the sister to her underground paradise, only to find Victor definitely did need protection from the "Ugly Fuckers" when he was shown that a massive chunk of Victor's leg had been gnawed off by those same "ugly fuckers!" Being the professional photographer he was, Cooper wasted no time in taking a series of rather graphic impressive stills as evidence!

So for various reasons I won't divulge, Sheppard steals borrows these photos from Cooper's place and uses them, along with some other damning evidence he found underground, as leverage at a meeting he has arranged with the chief of the NYPD, the commissioner of NYPD, and another fellow by the name of Mr. Wilson from the NRC (the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.) It is at this meeting that he learns of a scandal where the NRC had tried to dispose of toxic waste by transporting it though Manhattan's sewer and subway tunnels. Unfortunately they were shut down by the city halfway through the process, which resulted in the underground being a giant dumping spot for this radioactive filth!

Well needless to say, the chief, the commissioner, and Wilson vehemently deny that this tonnage of filth has anything at all to do with the disappearances of so many homeless, and balk at the concept of the "ugly fuckers." In a snowball chain of events however, we learn of “C.H.U.D.” - a Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller, and the cops have just found one!! (Translation: C.H.U.D.'s are bums who have been severely mutated by the toxic filth and the cops just found a dead one! Ugh.)

Now you might be wondering what a C.H.U.D. looks like, and I'd have to tell you - pretty "fucking ugly!" Up close they look like Freddy Kruger would if he were oozing in between all those exposed tendons and veins. Plus they have these really creepy glowing eyes, and they bleed green gelatinous blood. Yuck! But from a distance, they look like some guy in a pretty lame Halloween costume. It's really rather sad how up close the graphics are pretty damned good but from far away, they are so laughable.

So anyway, with the underground running out of food for the C.H.U.D.'s, they begin to hunt above ground. This is a great scene because here we have a very young John Goodman and equally young Jay Thomas playing roles as goofy cops in a diner that end up being the meal instead of getting a meal.

The movie climaxes with a team from the NRC and a couple flame throwing cops, setting out to put a stop to the C.H.U.D.'s once and for all, but they prove to be rather ineffective. What will they do? Can the city be saved from the increasingly multiplying and carnivorous C.H.U.D's? Well... you are just gonna have to watch it to find out.

In true tradition of a classic B-movie, this one is really... well.... stupid. but admitted a classic in the B genre, therefore expected. The relatively no name actors perform remarkably well however, and even though you might find yourself occasionally shaking your head in utter disbelief (versus sheer disbelief) these moments are core criteria for B-films, and you would not be left with the same impression without them.

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“Go To” Movies…..

Any of you out there have what I call your "go to" movies? You know, movies that you have seen 100 times , can recite the lines word for word, but still watch over and over when nothing else in on? From a comedy standpoint, I love Adam Sandler. His movies are a riot. As well, Empire Records & Valley Girl are staples of my DVD selection. But inevitably, when my husband doesn't get a sayso, I go for the blood and gore and bugs.

One of my favorites that I have yet to get sick of is Wrong Turn. I love Eliza Dushku and think she does great in this film, altho not seeing her be a badass vampire slayer didn't seem quite right initially. She pulls it out though, and I get caught up in the characters fear each time I watch it. The cannibals are very convincing and realistic looking. It never ceases to amaze me how much cinema graphics have improved over the years.

One key feature a movie has to have in order to be in the running for my list of favs is that it needs to rope me in within the first 10-15 minutes and be able to maintain a pace that keeps me from getting bored. This movie does both. Needless to say I was pretty pumped to see they had released Wrong Turn 2 - Dead End (Unrated).
It took a different spin from the first in that it has much more of the typical B-movie criteria: boob shots and gratuitous sex; no name actors;  typical "chase" scenes; and the movie was released straight to DVD. No waiting 6months to a year for the movie release. All the criteria I love.

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