Retro-Puppet Master (USA, 1999)

Yet another film by David DeCoteau (as Joseph Tennent), today's heir apparent to William 'One-Shot' Beaudine's famed nickname. Why this film got a PG-13 rating is less than easy to understand, as it is hardly any more frightening than any of the numerous no-budget horror quickies Beaudine directed, and probably not much more violent. True, Retro Puppet Master is in color, but the pace and action and general feel of the film is much more closely related to the cheapies of the poverty row era than to contemporary horror. Indeed, the deaths in this film are spectacularly bloodless, much like the deaths in any given cheapie of yesteryear.
The seventh in the popular (?) series, were it not for the prologue and epilogue and the fact that it's told as a flashback, Retro Puppet Master could stand on its own as a dull, sleep-inducing singular film, perfect for some daytime creature feature television presentation watched by kiddy couch-potatoes after school. Giving credit where credit is due, some money does seem to have been spent on costumes, but good costumes don't make a good film. None of the actors are particularly good and they all sport abominably laughable accents, but the "nice" characters do mostly have a visual appeal that it least makes them pleasant to look at.... too bad none get keddid.
The story has so many holes that if viewed in the winter the heating should probably be turned up, but young viewers won't notice them. (Biggest holes: A god strong enough to raise the dead probably can kill without the help of the dead, and if a magic sign simply drawn on a piece of paper hides the location of the hunted, why doesn't the hunted ever get the sign tattooed onto his arm?) The film tells how the puppet master Andre Toulon (Greg Sestero) got the power of giving life to puppets and manages, within its brief running time, to span from the 40s to ancient Egypt to the end of the 19^th century and back to the 40s. As a horror film, Retro Puppet Master fails on every level, as it lacks suspense or anything remotely scary, but as a harmless way to introduce your kiddies to "horror" films it's an OK way to spend a rainy afternoon if you have already done the dishes and vacuuming.

Dial: Help/Minaccia d'amore (1988)

Dial: Help/Minaccia d'amore is a laughable remnant from the vaults of bad 1980s Italian cinema which has no redeeming aspect other than a highly-limited laugh factor and a nice scene with garters. Ruggero Deodato may have made some memorable films in his past – the two most famous being Cannibal Holocaust and La Casa sperduta nel parco / The House on the Edge of the Park (both 1980) – but this film is far from being even one of his second-best. The only thing the film really has going for it, aside from a few moments of unintentional hilarity, is the lead female Charlotte Lewis. She cannot act her way out of a paper bag but is a truly delicious piece of eye-candy. She not only has curves where a woman should, but they are real. Sadly, though we do get to see her deliciously decked out in straps and sexy undergarments, she never really shows any skin and thus greatly reduces the viewing value of the film (the nipple-flash is too short to write home about). 
As a whole, Dial: Help is a waste of time for although it is bad, it never even gets close to getting as unbelievably bad as is required for a film to gain the sort a camp value that truly horrendous films gain through the passage of time; in another ten years, like now, Dial: Help will still just be boringly blah and not surrealistically horrendous.

Sexy Lewis is Jenny Cooper, a model haunted by a murderous entity that can control subway cars, kill people (and fish) over the phone and has the hots for Jenny. When Jenny isn't having orgasms brought about by windy telephone sex, she runs around from one telephone-induced death to another desperately trying to find a solution to her orgasms. 
There is no aspect to this film which either makes sense or holds water, and the deaths – with the exception of an exploding pacemaker and a would-be rapist killed by a coin-ejaculating payphone – are relatively bloodless. Dial: Help is good for a few laughs, due mostly to the overall ridiculousness and badly-dated 80s style and the hilarious killer-telephone point-of-view shots, but a few laughs do not make for a worthwhile film experience. The resolution is as illogical as the film's beginning and, likewise, is in line with ineptness of the movie as a whole: any sympathy the viewer might have developed for Jenny Cooper as a character is suddenly and totally destroyed in the last scene when she spitefully and laughingly gives the cursed telephone number – and, one imagines, the curse itself – to her ex-boyfriend.

Crappy song to the movie by Claudio Simonetti (song : Baby Don't Answer):

Dead & Breakfast (2004)

While the debt Dead & Breakfast (2004) has to Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992 / trailer) is obvious, Matthew Leutwyler's film doesn't really reach the same level as the New Zealand masterpiece... but damn, it sure does a good job trying. Twenty-nine gallons of blood were used while making the film and it shows... and, as a result, despite the lamentable lack of naked female flesh that trash films like this should by law be required to have, the film is indeed perfect DVD-fodder for a bad-film get together with the guys. Leutwyler is obviously an unapologetic fan of splatter and comic books, and he lets his love show, and while many of the jokes are predictable, don't work or fall flat, enough fun hits the mark to make the film a highly enjoyable 85 minutes.
The plot is that of 1,000 other films: a group of twenty-somethings on the way somewhere (a marriage) get lost and end up spending the night at a B&D in the middle of nowhere when the shit hits the fan and the blood blows fountains. Suddenly the "dead" walk and the last survivors take retreat in the boarded-up B&D as the dead shuffle and dance their way to the final showdown... Of course, a lot more stuff does happen, but watch the film to find out what.
In regard to the oddly familiar faces that populate the flick, the group of twenty-somethings do rather a lot with the little that roles like this tend to have. (David Carradine has a short guest appearance as the owner of the B&D, but his casting is less good than mandatory.) Oz Perkins is properly strange both before and after his transformation – as might be expected from a guy who not only had his acting debut as the child Norman Bates in Psycho II (1983 / trailer) but is actually a son of that great weirdo Anthony Perkins. Jeremy Sisto (May 2002 / trailer) is laid back like always – at least until he loses his head, after which he becomes a rather funny guy. Ever Carradine does a fine job as the babe-with-balls, Erik Palladino manages to make his asshole of a character become likeable and even gets the most laughs in variety of his scenes... hell, everyone does good in the film. About the only thing that grows old rather quick is the country-singing narrator who really should've remained a one-or-two-scene joke instead of a running gag.
On a whole, self-referential zombie-Hicksville comedy went further and was done better two years later in Slither (2006 / trailer), but Slither obviously had a larger budget than this labor of love, and even if Slither has a lot more zombies and goo, it doesn't bathe in the cheap gore to the hilarious excesses of this Dead & Breakfast.

Devil Species (2004)

 

Devil Species (2004) – equally unknown under its Thai name Phantugram ammahit – is a direct-to-and-on-video Thai "horror" film directed by Poom Opium. Probably the only thing that really separates Devil Species from the acknowledged masterpieces of surrealistically inept flotsam (such as the films of Ed Wood and Jess Franco or certain cinematic singular filmic mistakes like Fritz Böttger's Horror of Spider Island/Tote hing im Netz (1960)) is the patina of age, for this cinematic and narrative car wreck is so excruciatingly, hilariously and horrendously bad from the first scene to the last that you can only either laugh and enjoy its ineptitude or pull your hair out by the roots. One can't help but think the director lived up to his name (Opium) and was on drugs while making this thing, for no normal person with any taste or talent or common sense could make a film like Devil Species without being under the influence of something. Pull your friends together, rent a video camera, take some drugs, and buy some ketchup and you could probably make a film just like this one… 
But then, again, maybe not. This film defies description in its ineptitude, lacking anything that resembles good acting, professional direction or editing, decent costumes or effects, logical story line – in other words, the film is all that an Ed Wood film might have been if he were alive today and Thai. The plot is a riff on the classic plot of bad cinema ala The Alligator People (1959 / trailer) in which a serum goes wrong and suddenly a monster is on the loose. This time around, it's a killer snake on legs and wearing a lab coat that likes to splash buckets of ketchup on the wall. 
Actually, there are two monsters, sorta. The film opens with a bunch of Caucasian actors (none of whom seemingly normally speak English, for they sure have odd sentence structure and conjugation) who get decimated when one of their own turns all snakey, but this whole intro is more-or-less forgotten during the rest of the film (the killer snake-lady can be seen preserved in a tank in the background of a couple of scenes, but no explanation is given on how she got there). The next one to go snakey is an old doctor who then goes on a rampage in the lab building where they are producing snake serum. Usually he simply kills his victims, their blood splashing everywhere, but one victim inexplicably remains alive to become a loyal servant ala Renfield in Dracula (choose a year, choose a version) while another briefly becomes a vampiric-looking snake-woman of her own before being fed lead by the male hero.
The subtitles do wonders for the cinematic experience, adding a level of poetic surrealism to the inanity of the events. At any given time, some character is apt to say something as meaningful and deeply moving as the following: "Trust me, he is never mind"; "It smells very bad and hot"; "I feel something bad"; "It is full of blood stain"; "What is sound?"; "We should move away... you go left"; and "How long it follow me up to haunt no body know." Yes, it is poetry… I think.
Is it a good film? No fucking way. Did I enjoy watching it? You bet I did! Turds like this are the reason we sit through so many not-bad-enough films in the first place. It is a shame – but hardly surprising – that Mr. Opium has seemingly never made another movie… but then, even if he did, it seems highly unlikely that anyone could achieve this level of badness a second time around.