Halloween Horror Picture Show



Last night Chris and I went to the Halloween Horror Picture Show, a festival of indie horror movies that was held next to the haunted house attraction in the cavernous Pinellas Expo Center in Pinellas Park. It made for interesting watching, because the haunted house was pretty loud and we could hear everything going on in there while we were trying to watch the movies, including what sounded like people being attacked by a xylophone.



The first movie of the night was Biohazardous, a low budget zombie film that I'm guessing was shot in New Jersey. The plot is that four kids and two cops get trapped in the offices of a company named Gentech that has been experimenting with a serum called ROTD (ha ha) in an attempt to make undead soldiers. Needless to say the test subjects escape and now there are dozens of the undead wandering the halls, chomping on whatever community theater actors they can find. The best thing about the movie is that the characters are constantly talking about how they are trapped in the building, yet the office building where the movie was filmed features copious "exit" signs, visible in nearly every shot. The cast of actors, especially the two teenage women, are more attractive than you would expect in a film this cheap. Beyond that, the movie is a slavish homage to the work of Lucio Fulci, complete with fake gore and unrealistic character motivations.

Next up was Batman: Dead End. This short is easily available online. If you haven't seen it, check it out. Visually it's very impressive.

Then three movies that will be appearing on the upcoming DVD The Nightmare Collection Volume 1 were screened. the films were introduced by Necro Nancy, the horror-hottie (or terror-tart) seen in the cover art.



The first of short from The Nightmare Collection was My Skin, a confusing little story about a strange man fabricating evidence that will put another man away as a serial killer. Apparently the victim really is a serial killer, but underneath the barrage of twitchy editing and spinning camera moves it was tough to tell what was going on. The second was The Wretched, a neat little story where we follow two stories about the same man. In one he's waking up in dungeon cell, in the other he awakes in a luxurious bedroom. The connection between the two is not apparent until the last shot. The third short was Bad Company, an Australian piece that plays like a much compressed version of Mario Bava's lost film Rabid Dogs.

After this point in the evening MC-ing duties were handed over to Uncle Creepy, whose claim to fame is that he moderates some of Fangoria.com's message boards. The creepy in his name doesn't come from the fact that he knows anything about about horror films (as far as I can tell, he doesn't), but because every other sentence out of his mouth is a joke about masturbation.

The Pledge and Bloody Mary were shown next. Both are from a local film production company, and both were strictly amateur in nature. In The Pledge five high school students (played by actors who look to have about a ten year spread in their ages) perform a fake ritual to call up Satan -- who actually shows up and kills them. Satan does this with cheesy Doctor Who style video effects. Bloody Mary is an elaboration on the party dare of the same name, again with Bloody Mary actually showing up.

The next short was Run, another micro-budget quickie about a woman who goes jogging at night. Then came Black Gulch, a fairly well made story about five robbers who target a bank in a remote desert town only to find that all the people in town have disappeared, and the grim reaper is stalking them. Unfortunately the filmmakers decided to make their hero look exactly like Ash in Army of Darkness, which is just distracting.



After Life, which if I remember correctly was filmed around Tampa somewhere, is another very amateurish film. This half hour is about people holed up in house surrounded by zombies, with ammo running out. The actors repeat themselves and use the f-word so often that I can only assume they were improvising. There is a hilarious bit where one character is yelling at another to not give up. "FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!"

Shadow of a Victim was next, a film school project about a guy getting strangled by a shadow.

And then came Filthy, a movie made by one of the event's organizers. This movie has some degree of hype, which is incredible. Filthy is a rip-off of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, beat for beat, only it's set in an urban area instead of rural one. A TV reporter trying to cover some unexplained riots (part of a complicated and unneeded set-up) is kidnapped by an inbreed family living in a house full of garbage. They then mutilate and humiliate her in various disgusting ways for 20 minutes. The whole exercise is pointless. TCM at least has a gritty reality to it, like it could really happen. Filthy has bizarre and surreal things happening, so it doesn't really apply to the real world.

The last movie of the night was the Japanese zombie film Junk. It's a fun film. Four armed robbers, four yakuza, two U.S. military advisers and a partridge in a pear tree all end up in the same abandoned factory that the U.S. military was using DNX (ha ha) to bring corpses back to life. Everybody fights the zombies, including the beautiful queen zombie, who is topless for the first half of the movie but later makes a mini-dress and thigh boots out of some guy's leather jacket. No really, I'm not kidding. A lot of stuff is going on, and it's quite enjoyable. It's not a perfect film by any means. The tone is all over the place, going from Night of the Living Dead intestine munching to Evil Dead kinetics to Re-Animator silliness without any warning. The happy ending also seems like a stretch. But if you have a chance to see this obscure film, take it.

Posted: Sat - November 1, 2003 at      

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