Dead Birds (USA, 2004)

(Trailer) During the American Civil War, a group of six robbers and a dog rob a bank in Alabama and set out for Mexico. Along the way, they take refuge for the night at the isolated and deserted plantation of a dead fellow soldier they once knew. A storm rolls in and as the night continues it becomes obvious that they are neither alone nor safe, but that which threatens them is most definitely not human. One by one their numbers dwindle—but is it too late to escape?
Dead Birds, the first feature-length film of Alex Turner, is an odd and uneven little film that manages to surprise and please even as it uses so many staples of the genres that too much of the film is predictable and, far more unforgivable, serves up a sextet of characters that are, in the end, little more than cold-blooded killers, no matter how sympathetic the one or the other might seem within the course of the film. Indeed, the bloodbath that they instigate during the opening moments of the film is so excessive and cold-hearted that one is hard put to understand why one should even root for the characters later in the film when they enter the house of hell. In this regard, even the later admission of remorse (for having shot and killed a child during the robbery) by the group’s leader William (Henry Thomas, best remembered as Elliott in Spielberg's E.T. (1982)) does little to assuage the fact that the gang—by choice—has caused the violent death of many a fellow human being. (In the end, the four better “good guys” of the six are differentiated from the two not-so-good guys simply by having the two worse guys being obvious racists—they use the N-word.)
The film's initial 15 (and the last 5) minutes are perhaps the best of the film and, along with the movie's unique period setting, are the saving graces of the entire production (the acting, with the exception of Isaiah Washington as Todd, the only black man riding with 5 Confederate deserters, is strangely less than convincing). The location shots are exceptionally successful—the town scenes were shot on the sets left over from Tim Burton's pleasant fantasy Big Fish (2003/trailer)—and everything leading up to the set-bound events within the plantation house firmly entrench the film with a depressing atmosphere that is truly palpable. Regrettably, after the six “heroes” cross the field of dead corn—and explain away a skinless creature they shoot dead as a “hairless hog”—the film loses its momentum in the overly long scenes of the various characters wandering the ghostly hallways and rooms of the plantation house. Both the director and the film's scriptwriter Simon Barrett (who co-wrote that same year a much better paced script for the dumb but fun Frankenfish (2004/trailer)) desperately need to learn a bit more when it comes to pacing, for Dead Birds truly loses its force at this point and never effectively regains it despite a few decent scares and a particularly horrendous scene of a creature cutting its way out of a woman’s stomach. Had less time been spent building the suspense, the suspense (and the individual pay-off scenes) would have been far more effective; as it, the viewer often has the feeling of “get on with it,” a feeling that detracts from the money shots (to use the vernacular of another genre of film making). Much of what happens is too easy to predict to be forgiven, but the true faux pas of the film is Todd’s sudden death in an explosion of CGI light, an unsatisfying groan-inducing scene that is so lame and left-field that it defies comprehension that it wasn't rewritten. That said, the last 5 minutes careen wildly from expectable to truly unexpected, and combined with the last line uttered in the film, become truly memorable.
Dead Birds could have been and should have been a much better film than it is, but thanks to its genre setting, overall atmosphere of dread, occasionally effective scares and fatalistic ending, the film at least remains both interesting and watchable. But viewers with a forgiving attitude will probably enjoy it more than those with high expectations.

Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town (USA, 1991)

(Trailer) What self-respecting fan of bad films could possibly ignore the Circe-call of a title like Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town? Remember, though, for all the desirability of Circe's song, in the end she did turn those who responded to it into pigs. Needless to say, this film won't change you into a pig for watching it, but it could cause you to die of boredom; more than anything else, however, the film simply makes other lousy zombie comedies such as Corpses (2004/trailer) come across like cinematic masterpieces. Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town tries hard to be so-bad-its-good, but like so many films that try to do so, it only manages to be bad enough to really be bad.

Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town features a female motorcycle gang called the Cycle Sluts that rumble into the desert hick-town of Zariah in search of wicks to dip—or, as they call it, "meat"—and are met with the predictable hostility. The town suffers from a high mortality rate for, unknown to the residents, the local mortician (Dan Calfa, who also played a mortician in the far more superior zombie comedy The Return of the Living Dead (1985/trailer)) is killing and turning the locals into zombies which he then puts to work in a nearby deserted and radioactive mine (a concept—minus the radioactivity—taken from the immeasurably superior Hammer flick Plague of the Zombies (1996/trailer)). Why exactly he is doing this and what he is does with the radioactive substance is never fully explained, but then, such oversights abound in this flick—in one scene, for example, two Cycle Sluts seemingly die in an explosion, but are then back up and running (un-singed) in the next scene. Some Sluts get laid, some die, one does a Joan Jett imitation in a sleazy café and then they get driven out of town by the angry townsfolk, only to return to save a bus load full of blind orphans and the rest of the town from the gang of zombies that, having escaped from the mine, are now in search of dinner. Somewhere along the way Billy Bob Thornton makes one of his first movie appearances as the husband left-behind by one of the Cycle Sluts, but he doesn't really have enough to do to be able to give any indication of the career he would soon have.
A Troma release, Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town is less an actual Troma production than an independent no-budgeter picked-up by Kaufmann & Co. and, as such, lacks the only two redeeming aspects normally found in the typically adolescent Troma exploitation film: Tits and blood. Which is not to say the film doesn't have a good line of dialog or two, or that some of the ideas aren't mildly entertaining, but as a whole the film is disjointed, badly acted, narratively uncreative and excruciatingly painful to watch for a film with only a 86-minute running time. T'is hardly surprising that Dan Hoskins, the credited director and author of this cinematic abortion, has seemingly never followed-up this anemic fetus with another cinematic mistake. If ever there was a trailer that truly misrepresents the film it's advertising, then the trailer to this flick does just that, for it really makes the flick look like it could be fun.
Things have really gone downhill since the days of other killer-slut films like Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965/trailer) or The Female Bunch (1969/trailer). And seriously, folks: a film featuring "chopper chicks" without a single breast-shot?

Army of Darkness (USA, 1992)

Oh woe is the evil called Hollywood. So much creativity has died in its shadow—given a chance, it seems that the favorite pastime of those that pull the strings in Tinsel Town is to suck the imaginative talent out of the brains of the truly inspired and replace it with spam. Director Sam Rami is a good example of this: Long before he got stuck in Marvel's increasingly inconsequential Spiderman franchise, he actually displayed a seemingly endless and exuberant creative vision... But then, nothing good lasts forever.
As an unknown low-budget horror filmmaker from the state of Michigan, Rami initially caused some big waves amongst horror fans (and attentive critics) with a flick entitled The Evil Dead (1981/trailer), a brilliant, supper-low-budget gore masterpiece that featured trees that rape and mashed-corn ooze and a lot of humor and carnage and some of the best camera work ever to be seen in the sordid movie theaters where the film initially ran. By the time he decided, for reasons unknown, to become a "serious" filmmaker and Hollywood-game-player with A Simple Plan (1998) and the embarrassingly crappy (gag, puke) For the Love of the Game (1999), Rami had done a whole slew of imaginatively fun and surprising films—namely: Crimewave (1985/trailer), a uniquely weird comedy (written by the Coen Brothers) with a few second-rate and forgotten names (Bryon James and Louie Lasser, for example); Evil Dead II (1987/trailer), which was less a sequel than an inspired and bloodily hilarious remake; Darkman (1990/trailer), a fun but relatively inconsequential filmic comic book; The Quick & The Dead (1995/ trailer), a star-studded and campy homage to Spaghetti Westerns; and, three years prior to the last-mentioned film, Army of Darkness (1992/trailer), the third installment of his Evil Dead trilogy and an unabashed horror slapstick and paean of love to an uncountable number of popular films and film genres.

Army of Darkness more-or-less takes up where Evil Dead II ends. (Due to legal reasons, however, the prologue shown consists of re-shot footage instead of re-edited original scenes.) In short, having successfully defended himself against the evil dead in a back-woods log cabin, ordinary-Joe Ash (Bruce Campbell, in what should have been a career-making turn¹) gets vortexed back through time and stuck in some Pre-Medieval demon-plagued desert that looks surprisingly like Californian dry-lands. With the help of a chainsaw and his "boom-stick," a magical shotgun that never needs reloading, Ash moves up the corporate ladder from hated slave to prophesized savior, but in his clumsy search for a way to return to his own time he inadvertently raises the army of darkness—imagine the skeletons of Jason and the Argonauts (1963/trailer) times a couple of thousand—which, led by his resurrected evil alter-ego, now threatens to destroy the realm. A coward at heart, Ash couldn't give a flying fuck, but when the "Deadites"—the evil dead to those of us in the know—steal Sheila, the gal putting the sugar in his coffee (a young and, for most of the film, attractive Embeth Davidtz), he has a change of heart and takes up the sword and steam-powered Oldsmobile to help fight the battle...

Badly marketed by Universal pictures as a stand-alone feature when it was originally released and hampered by both the general masses' inability to appreciate unbridled uniqueness as well as the humorless inflexibility of the horror-film fans of the time, Army of Darkness inexplicitly tanked at the box office when originally released. To say that time has been good to the film is wrong: The film was already excellent when it was released, time has simply enabled it to stand on its own two feet and not promptly be seen as a horror film that didn't happen. For, despite the expectations of the Evil Dead fans back then, Army of Darkness was not a horror film, but an inane, over-the-top farce that resolutely (but lovingly) takes the piss out of every film convention the filmmakers ever saw and liked. Viewed stoned or straight, this flick continually blows the viewer away with a non-stop stream of hilarious scenes and dialog and entertaining special effects, and despite the monsters and gore remains oddly innocent and guileless.

Most current DVDs of Army of Darkness include two endings: The campier S-Mart ending of the theatrical release in which Ash proves himself the man to fight Deadites even in the 20th Century, and the originally filmed but replaced ending of Ash awakening 100 years too late to a war-destroyed world. Regardless of the ending one chooses to watch, Army of Darkness—along with the first two installments of the series—is without a doubt an un-arguable must-see for any fan of "trash" films.

¹OK, it did help cement his reputation amongst genre enthusiasts, and it can hardly be said that he hasn’t had a viable career since then, but damn, the way he steals the film should have opened more doors than it obviously did at the time.

Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (USA, 1995)

Neither half as good as the first Candyman (1992 / trailer) and supposedly even worse than the direct-to-video third instalment, Turi Meyer's Candyman: Day of the Dead (1999 / trailer). Not that the people behind the camera and production of Farewell to the Flesh would lead one to expect this: Clive Barker is still there, as producer and for the story, and director Bill Condon—who has since gone on to direct a variety of popular critic's favorites—not only did his Hollywood teething by scripting two cult favorites, Strange Behavior (1981 / trailer) and Strange Invaders (1983 / trailer), but his 1988 directorial debut Sister, Sister (trailer) is not the worst Louisiana Gothic gathering dust on your local video store's shelves. True, the credited scriptwriter of this dull-a-thon, Rand Ravich, did go on to write and direct something worse in 1999, The Astronaut's Wife (trailer), but can he alone be the blame for Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh?
So what is so terribly wrong here? Everything, actually. The worst is already to be expected within the first five minutes of the film, when after a few cheap false scares and before the first real attack of the Candyman, the viewer is treated to the sight of the sound boom trailing behind a pompous victim-to-be as he strolls down a deserted New Orleans street. Unlike in the first film, the acting in Candyman 2 is uniformly abysmal, with only the returning Tony Todd as the title character managing to put any conviction or presence in his roll. Seldom has there been a film as uniformly miscast as this turkey, especially in the most important parts. Kelly Rowan, as Annie Tarrant, the obscure object of Candyman's bloody desire, sleepwalks through the entire film, seemingly suffering from an overdose of Quaaludes. William O'Leary as her brother Ethan comes across a little better since he now and then has the chance to look beady-eyed and sweaty, but he hardly impresses. Timothy Carhart as Paul McKeever is a bit more likeable in this film than he was as Harlan, the rapist Thelma blows away in Thelma & Louise (1991/trailer), but he hardly makes a lasting impression before he gets a hook through his chest. Veronica Cartwright plays another nerve-strung alcoholic, but the impression is less that she is acting then just being herself. At least Philip Glass' score is still pleasant to hear, even if, for some inexplicable reason, it seems oddly out of place this time around; postmodernist music is not the first thing that comes to mind when one talks about New Orleans. 
To say a sequel is unnecessary is actually too easy a put down, for as James Cameron's Aliens (1986 / trailer) proved, a sequel can often stand on its own as a film. But Aliens and Farewell to Flesh are miles apart in quality or artistic worth. Farewell to Flesh is a predictable and badly acted farce with less real scares than the first film despite a substantially heightened gore and gush level. Farewell to the Flesh is much more closely related to A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2; Freddy's Revenge (1985), in that it is a misfired, incompetently made attempt to create a serial horror figure that somehow fails to catch the secret ingredient that made the horror figure so effective in the first film. In Freddy's case, he did indeed go on to serialization success, but less due to the second film than the lasting strength of the first installment and the increased use of special effects and black humor as of the third film. In Farewell to the Flesh, the filmmakers take the strange approach of trying to give a kill-happy supernatural serial murderer some pathos by introducing an absurd, badly filmed costume drama background story, failing to realize that the Candyman is much too brutal a killer to be able to be given any poignancy at all.
Not that pathos is needed to make a good anti-hero, as both Freddy and Jason prove. But Freddy has humor and a highly surreal sense of style, while Jason is popular less as a character than simply as a forum of vicarious thrills. Candyman's method is relatively redundant and hardly laden with style. Likewise, his supposed justification of revenge is immaterial and false, for there is no valid justification in the selection of his victims other than the simple need on part of the filmmakers to have a continuous body count—indeed, it seems that would-be victims no longer even have to repeat his name five times to become meat-hook fodder. Candyman is much more an effective personification of horror when he simply exists as a supernatural creation, as in part one, and the attempt to give him depth simply does not work.
In Farewell to the Flesh, the viewer gets to watch as Candyman bloodily slaughters everyone the young school teacher Annie Tarrant comes into contact with. The descendent of the aristocratic family that originally owned "Daniel Robitaille," the uppity slave that went on to become the Candyman, she is also both pregnant and his great-granddaughter. Well, they do say incest is best, but slaughtering all family members is hardly an effective way to woo. At the end of the film, with the help of a bunch of her pre-teen ghetto students, she manages to get rid of her unwanted suitor, the action taking place in some old, collapsing slave quarters literally full of skeletons.
 Final verdict: Cheap scares, bad acting, perfunctory direction, illogical story development and uninteresting characters do not a good film make.