Crispin Glover was born to star as Willard. Yeah, I know it’s a remake, but still, this is the role he was born to play. Glover is—in every sense of the word—Willard, a friendless, henpecked only child caring for his decrepit mother and hating his miserable existence at both work and home.

So socially inept is Willard that he forges a deep, loving bond with a white rat he finds in his basement and dubs Socrates. He promises to never let anyone harm Socrates and invites him to share his bed. Willard’s kindness to rodents brings them out of the woodwork, literally, and he spends his nights training them to obey his every command ("Up!" “Down!” “In!” “Out!” “Tear!"). When his boss (R. Lee Ermey, effective in yet another insufferable ***censored*** part) humiliates him one too many times in front of co-workers, Willard exacts some rat revenge by ordering his tailed charges to gnaw on the tires of Ermey’s new Mercedes. Before long, Willard’s madness has escalated to the point that he forgets about tires and sics them on Ermey instead.

As the film begins, Glover makes Willard entirely sympathetic. By the end, you don’t love the character so much as his grip on sanity weakens, but all the while, Glover throws his entire manic energy into it, giving a true performance similar to the kind Nicolas Cage did before he sold out. The movie itself is well-made and fun to watch, funny instead of scary, but it does run out of ideas by the final 30 minutes. The digital rats don’t look too bad, and though there are hundreds of them, they could have attacked more people for my money. Still, why this failed at the box office while director James Wong’s earlier Final Destination hit paydirt is beyond me.

The DVD boasts a feature-length documentary on the yearlong process of bringing Willard to life, plus a “Rats: Friend or Foe?” segment and a music video of Glover reprising Ben, the treachly song The Jackson 5 sang for the original film. It’s the strangest three minutes you’ll see until David Lynch makes something else.

Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

In Wrong Turn, a few healthy bodied young people find themselves stranded in the woods of West Virginia after a highly unlikely car crash, and then find themselves picked off by a trio of inbred mongoloid redneck (stop me if I’m being redundant) mountain men, given the none-too-subtle monikers of Three-Finger, Saw-Tooth and One-Eye.

Yes, the plot is that simple: Run away from the monsters, get found, run away again. You’d think that in these vast woods that go on for miles, the kids would be able to make an easy escape, yet the deformed villains always find them. It doesn’t help matters that they linger far too long where they shouldn’t. (Helpful hint: If you’re ever in a remote cabin filled with barbed wire, bones, blood and a fridge full of body parts in Tupperware, don’t stay to use the restroom, no matter how strong the urge to pee.)

Among the chased are the never-smiling Eliza Dushku from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the equally unamused Desmond Harrington of Ghost Ship. Their inhuman pursuers are creations of Stan Winston, yet look like slightly above-average Halloween masks. Wrong Turn purports to be an homage to `70s horror, but even that decade’s run-of-the-mill fare wasn’t this telegraphed or repetitive, not to mention bereft of gratuituous nudity. Cabin Fever and House of 1000 Corpses paid tribute far better on every level.

Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

Director: Jon Olson
Cast: Clover Lutter, Chris Henry
Official Site

My first exposure Bigfoot, (more scientifically termed Sasquatch) was during a 1970’s television special. It may have been an episode of the Leonard Nimoy narrated “In Search Of” series. For a young child, the program was quite frightening. The grainy Super-8 images of a Bigfoot sighting are still seared into my subconscious. This early exposure was the beginning of a life-long fascination with North America’s hairy man-ape.

Needless to say, I was delighted to receive a copy of Ape Canyon to review. I had already heard quite a bit about this controversial comedy. The subtitle is “The Story of Bigfoot: North America’s Greatest Lover!!” I immediately recalled a late night Cinemax favorite from the mid-80’s entitled Tanya’s Island. This beautiful and erotic film dealt with the love story between a hot chick (Vanity) and an ape-beast.

Ape Canyon treats the subject matter differently—as a comedy. The film opens with a chick reading a magazine in a tent. Bigfoot appears and starts to have sex with (rape) her. However, since Bigfoot is such a good lover she falls in love with him. This is one element of the movie that I’m not quite comfortable with. After all, it seems to perpetuate the myth that women fantasize about rape which is not a good message to send. But, in this case, Bigfoot doesn’t even need to remove their pants to show them a good time.

After her monkey-love experience, Darcy, a Hooters waitress falls in love with Bigfoot. Her husband, Bill, is a redneck who wears fake goofy teeth and sits on the toilet a lot. He discovers a strange smell on his wife’s underwear and becomes suspicious. When he finds secret drawings that Darcy has made of Bigfoot , he goes into a jealous rage and decides to hunt down his rival. In the end, Bill is sodomized by Bigfoot in an extended Deliverance-style sequence. As with all of Bigfoot’ “victims,” Bill falls in love with Bigfoot.

The rest of the movie involves Bigfoot attack women and dry-humping them to orgasm. He also spears an effeminate runner in the butt with a stick and beats up a few guys. Some of his other victims involve a pair of environmentalists who have tied themselves to a tree. They believe that he is a nature spirit. The tied down chick only makes the monkey love easier for our hairy friend. Bigfoot also likes to urinate on people and masturbate a lot.

Another funny subplot involves a whiny young nerd who enjoys pleasuring himself to Britney Spears magazines. However, Bigfoot beats up the young man in order to get some masturbation material of his very own. The young man collapses into a quivering mess, crying “Why? Why?” Later, he gets another magazine and is pleasuring himself in his own room when Bigfoot reaches in through the window and steals the new magazine. “***censored*** Bigfoot!” the boy cries. This subplot is pure comic gold.

While this movie is very funny at times, in the end, it is really not very good. Perhaps, if it had been condensed into a short film, the poor quality of the film could be overlooked. However, the muddy hand-held video footage gets tiresome at feature-length. The video quality is lower than one would expect, even from a no-budget S.O.V. feature these days.

The Bigfoot suit is not convincing at all—in fact it seems to be a cheap gorilla suit picked up from a Halloween costume shop. Most importantly, for a B-movie there is a sad lack of nudity and gore. In a movie like this, I simply cannot excuse a lack of breasts. For a film that revels in being low-brow, ultimately Ape Canyon fails to deliver the goods.

Reviewed by Ed Donovan.

Director: Stephen Earnhardt
Cast: Beanie Andrew, Miss Jeannie, Larry Parrot
Buy it at Amazon!

Mule Skinner Blues proudly bills itself as a story about a man with a gorilla and a dream. The gorilla is actually a cheap costume and the dream is to make a horror film. As an avid fan of both “filmmaking” and “redneck” documentaries, I knew I had to check it out. How can you go wrong with a documentary about trailer park denizens making a horror movie with a ratty gorilla suit?

This project began when music video producer Stephen Earnhardt was in Jacksonville, Florida recruiting extras for a Jim White video. One of the extras was an eccentric old man named Beanie Andrews. Beanie was a singing, dancing, kazoo-playing kook who happened to have a cool old car.  He was glad to put his talents to use in the music video, but this small taste of show business made him want more.

After the film crew was long gone, Beanie got his hands on a video camera and began documenting the residents of his trailer park. He sent these tapes to Earnhardt and they established a correspondence. This correspondence resulted in Earnhardt returning to Jacksonville with a camera crew to help Beanie produce a no-budget horror flick called Turnabout is Fair Play. The film being produced is an E.C. Comics inspired piece of hokum about a murdered blues musician who turns into an ape on a quest to find his severed arm.

Beanie enlists the talents of several of his trailer park comrades who simply have to be seen to be believed. Beanie crew includes: a timid horror fanatic with a mail order bride; an elderly lounge singer who hopes her song “DUI Blues” will be her ticket to the big-time; a loony costume designer who keeps her dead dog on ice. There are also a couple of alcoholic guitar players and chicks with bad dental work involved in the production.

The first two thirds of the film that deal with the creation of the film are a lot of fun. Beanie’s strange charisma and obsession with bringing his vision of “a gorilla rising from the muck” are priceless. As strange and misguided as these people are, there’s something compelling about them. There’s also something about the filmmaking process and the way it throws very different people together in a high pressure situation that will always be interesting.

As the film enters it’s final third, it takes a sharp turn into much harsher and even poignant territory. Basically, a series of tragedies halt the production of the film and send Beanie spiralling into an alcoholic depression that leaves him living in a dirty mattress in the woods. The strange little group of people that he brought together have disbanded and found their own serious problems to deal with. When Earnhardt and his crew return, they find that a lot has changed since production shut down on the little horror film.

Finally, with much post-production help from Earnhardt, Turnabout Is Fair Play is completed. You won’t be surprised to learn that it sucks… however, it doesn’t matter. The screening brings together the friends and enemies that comprised the crew of the film. The finished project, has a powerful, maybe even healing impact on all of them.

Ultimately, Mule Skinner Blues rises about other classics of the redneck genre like Jessco the Dancing Outlaw and Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It becomes a lot more than an excuse to laugh at rednecks. Instead, it makes a powerful statement about the redemptive power of creativity. These people with all their weaknesses and flaws, just want to “rise out of the muck” and create something meaningful… and that’s nothing to laugh at.

Review by Christopher Sharpe.

Buy it at Amazon!
Rent it on-line at Netflix!

How do you remake one of the scariest movies of all time? Gus Van Sant tried it with Psycho failed miserably. On the other hand, Tom Savini did it with Night of the Living Dead and improved upon the original. Marcus Nispel’s (okay, let’s admit it—Michael Bay’s) remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of falls somewhere in-between. In some ways, it’s better than the original, but in many ways, it’s also kind of unnecessary.

Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the movies where the title inspires more memories than the actual film does. Sure everyone remembers Leatherface dancing around the morning sun at the climax, but few remember that the film has little to no gore. What made the original scary was it’s sweltering, Texas-summer atmosphere and it’s grainy, documentary amateur style that captured brutality at it’s most bizarre. Even the infamous sledge-hammer to the head is relatively tame compared by today’s standards.

This imagined swirl of memories seems to be the basis for the remake. Well, the film claims to be a remake, but it holds on to so little of the original, it might as well be called a “re-imagining”, much like what Tim Burton called his Planet of the Apes remake. Sure it still takes place in Texas, has a van load of irritating teens and Leatherface is still a monstrous, scary-as-hell beast, but it pretty much changes everything else.

The films opens with John Larroquette—Dan from Night Court!-- reprising his narrator role in a vocal cameo over archival footage of the crime scene. This opening sequence is quite good and sets a pretty atmospheric (or at least, an attempt to capture the atmosphere of the original), desolate Texas tone-you actually feel the sweat drip of your temples. To the strains of “Sweet Home Alabama” we meet our requisite annoying teens: the drug-dealing, uber-cool boyfriend; the strong female lead; the boyfriend’s dumb friend; a slutty hitchhiker and the nerd who is looks like Matt Stone, spits when he talks and is every bit as annoying as the wheelchair bound Franklin from the original.

The kids pick up a woman on the side of the road, who apparently has just been in the middle of some ordeal. An ordeal so bad that when they try to take her back to town, she pulls a gun out of her bloody vagina and blows her brains out-and the graphic gore starts! This is the source of much comedy as the kids drive back to town to find a place to report the body. They end up in this creepy-***censored*** diner (that looks like a set piece from a Nine inch Nails video) and are sent on a wild-goose chase to find the sheriff. Eventually, they’re split into to groups: the ones who stay at the van and the ones who go exploring.

The ones who go exploring wind up at the house of an invalid with a messy catheter. The ones who stay at the van meet with the sheriff (R. Lee Ermey, stealing the show as usual) who get the best lines of the film as he’s wraps the corpse in Saran Wrap. Meanwhile, the boyfriend gets his head smashed in by Leatherface.

At this point, the film becomes pretty much one long chase scene, as the remaining kids are offed one by one as they encounter one disturbingly bizarre inbred character after another. While there is one particularly nerve-wrackingly scary scene (where the sheriff corners the kids and forces one of them to recreate the crime scene), the film becomes pretty tedious, and almost interminably dull for the last 30 minutes. I was fighting as hard as Jessica Biel against Leatherface to stay awake. I nodded off twice.

The main problem with TCM is that it’s very easy to become desensitized and bored with all the carnage. Once you see one hacked off limb or fly-covered pig corpse, you’ve pretty much seen them all. This may be why the original film retains so much of it’s power. I know I may be sounding like an old man who says “movies were just better back then”, but perhaps what made the original so mind-bendingly horrifying was that it did leave more to the imagination. Sure modern audiences may disagree, but I just get sleepy.

With the exception of Ermey (who’s on a roll with this and the under-rated remake of Willard under his belt), the only other actor of note is 7th Heaven refugee Jessica Biel, who proves sure she can scream, but really she’s just all boob and no talent. The guy who plays Leatherface (does his name matter?) is huge, hulking, menacing and can run with a chainsaw through the woods. That’s all that character needs and it’s delivered in spades.

(On a sidenote, the TCM purists who were enraged that this guy could never replace Gunnar Hansen, the original Leatherface, reminds me of the fanboys who were upset when Kane Hodder was replaced as Jason in Freddy vs. Jason? Seriously guys-does it matter who plays Jason or Michael Myers or Leatherface? No acting is required. Just be some slightly fat hulk and wear a mask. Make sure you can sling a blade. I can do that… where’s my audition?)

After it was all said and done, I have to say I was kind of disappointed. I guess I was just expecting more. It’s not a bad film-it’s worth a look. It looks great and the first hour is excellent. It’s just those last 30-45 minutes where it becomes just like every other mainstream horror film of the past 15 years-screaming teens on the run.

I’ll tell you what: don’t go in there expecting a brilliant, post-modern revisualization of a classic, but an above-average teen horror film with a familiar (Leather)face, and I think you’ll be OK.

---

Louis Fowler is a frequent contributor to Cinema Eye and Hitch Magazine. He is also the publisher of Damaged Magazine, a new issue of which is coming soon.