Saturday, April 7, 2012

Exploitation/B-Movie Challenge Day 5-6

Day 5 was dedicated to the Herschell Gordon Lewis Blood Trilogy. Surprisingly I'd never seen any of these films in their entirety, though I have seen various clips. Something Weird Video did a pretty nice job releasing these 3 films on Blu-Ray and that is how I got to view them.



First up was Blood Feast. These films were made in successive years from 1963-1965, but Blood Feast had a sequel made far more recently which I have seen and was just not impressed by. Luckily for me I had a better time with the original. HGL is known as the godfather of gore, an appropriate title. His levels of gore were extremely high for the times, and even to this day can stand up with any shitty Saw sequel. This movie is fairly light on plot but is short enough so that it doesn't matter too much. Just know that there is a lot of butchering for an Egyptian feast, and woman are on the menu.




Next up was Two Thousand Maniacs. This was my favorite of the 3. The plot is that a small souther hick town is celebrating their centennial from the Civil War and they lure a half dozen yanks to the town as their "guests of honor" and find horrific ways to kill them. The red stuff flows as you'd expect after watching Blood Feast and there is quite a bit of humor. A remake happened in the last several years that starred Robert Englund called 2001 Maniacs (it had a sequel too, which was apparently and not surprisingly total shit). I'll take the original over the remake.




Finally for this day, and the trilogy, there was Color Me Blood Red. An artist finds himself inspired by painting in blood and has to come up with the supply to paint his masterpieces. That is all there is too this one. The plot is simple but well executed and the actor portraying the artist does a fine job, probably the best acting in any of the 3 films.

Day 6 started really slow but finished with a respectable 3 movies. First up was True Story Of A Woman In Jail: Sex Hell. This film has a dvd coming out on April 10th which I reviewed. You can check out that review here




Then a friend invited me over for some beers and hanging out and we checked out a couple of movies. Fire & Ice is an animated fantasy/adventure movie that I've wanted to see for a long time. It was on his Netflix so I finally had the chance. It's directed by Ralph Bakshi of Fritz The Cat fame and it was okay. The story lacked and the pacing dragged but there was some fun fantasy battles and enough entertainment to keep positive thoughts about it. Had it been a more adult themed animated adventure movie it probably would have been better.



Finally the day was wrapped up with some zombie action from the infamous The Asylum. The studio that has often released rip offs of giant blockbusters before the movie they're ripping off is even out. This was called 2012: Zombie Apocalypse and co-starred Ving Rhames. It's essentially a whole lot of walking with some random zombie action thrown in and it's worth some cheap laughs. There's a lot of moments that don't make much sense but they're fun to heckle. The real winning moment of this movie, and I don't feel bad spoiling it for you since you won't watch it anyways, is when they reach their destination and for no fucking reason at all a zombie sabretooth tiger is waiting for them and mauls the group in a final showdown. Some survive, some don't but its fucking hilarious.

4 comments:

DethRabbit3K said...

Anything involving Ralph Bakshi is good in my book. Even if it sucks. Also, was the sequel Blood Feast 2 or the unofficial sequel Blood Diner? Cause Blood Diner is awesome, but I only made it halfway through and have long since sold my copy of Blood Feast 2.

Celluloid Terror (Seth Poulin) said...

Blood Feast 2. It was crap. I've seen Blood Diner once and wasn't too high on it either. I'd like to give that one another shot sometime though.

DethRabbit3K said...

Well Blood Diner is not awesome in the way a good movie is, it's more awesome in the way a dumb movie on basic cable is when you're drunk.

Celluloid Terror (Seth Poulin) said...

I remember the night I was going to watch it, I was excited I found it on Fearnet but I really wasn't in the mood for a movie but tried anyways and wasn't a big fan. I haven't closed the book on it though for that reason.