A film that Roger Ebert once memorably called “A vile bag of garbage” there’s nothing funny about the sadistic exploitative pile that is I Spit on Your Grave. Showing rape is always a controversial move in any kind of film but I think it can be justified if done with artistic integrity, this on the other hand is just sick. I think you can tell I’m offended considering that I’m acting Sto (intentional typo) serious right now. This film has divided horror fans for years but to anyone who actually likes this film all I can say is “You are fucked up.”
I Spit on You Grave is probably the most infamous of the nasty “revenge/rape” sub-genre that somehow materialized out of the late 70s, mostly because of this film. In this case it’s a young woman named Jennifer (Camille Keaton, the grand-niece of Buster Keaton) who travels out to a cabin in the woods to work on her novel but instead gets humiliated and raped by a gang of blue collar bozos. I don’t know what Director/Writer (yeah right) Meir Zarchi (who was later married to his rape star Keaton, eww) was trying to accomplish, but if this is supposed to be some artistic statement then it’s been long lost in a sea of senseless violence. This may as well be a porno with all the sex scenes but it’s even lower on the food chain considering how cruel and disgusting a film it is. Even when the main character gets her murderous revenge on the men it’s in such a demeaning way, engaging in sex with them again to get her grizzly vengeance.
I have trouble putting it into words so I recommend you just check this link to this old Roger Ebert review, he sums up this sadistic shlock just right. Ebert’s Review
And you can believe this film has already been remade! See you next time for hopefully a more uplifting review.
I’ve learned a many a useless fact from watching all these bad movies but one that never fails to amaze me is whenever I discover a new horror sub-genre. For instance, the film in question is apparently categorized under the quite appropriate sub-genre of “Melt Movies” which is exactly what it sounds like. Can you think of many movies where human bodies melt into a big goopy mess? Me neither, but apparently there’s enough to have a genre and along with the 1987 film Street Trash this is one of the more notable films of that slimy variety.
The film begins with Steve West (Alex Reber), an astronaut on a deep space mission who upon his return is severely affected by radiation and slowly begins to turn into a murderous mass of oozing flesh. Why does Steve start murdering people? That’s a good question and yet it’s never explained. Steve wakes up in the hospital to find himself horribly deformed and all melty but instead of handling the situation like any normal person would he decides he’s gonna go on a killing spree. The idea that audiences are supposed to accept this is absolutely insane. Doesn’t Steve wanna know if he can get better with ya know, skin grafts or something? Doesn’t he care about his own well being? Apparently not, because being ugly makes him mad and being mad makes Steve want to kill!
This whole “melting murdering man” thing also begs the question “How can someone who’s literally falling apart overpower anyone?” This guy just got out of the hospital and he’s strangling people, scaring kids, and terrorizing the elderly? Why and How? I DON’T KNOW it doesn’t make sense! And this spree of sorts is in the first seven minutes! But what’s almost the most infuriating is we really don’t know anything about Steve. We don’t know what he’s feeling, we don’t know his pain, we don’t know anything, so why should we care?
Even though The Incredible Melting Man is a logical nightmare there is one diamond in the rough in Rick Baker. Yes Rick Baker, the seven time Oscar winning makeup effects artist famous for such classics as Star Wars and An American Werewolf in London doing the makeup for the Steve “The Melting Man” West. It’s a phenomenal job too, so much so that I eventually found myself skipping through all the boring government/scientist people shit to all the scenes where we really get to see Steve sweatin’ off his skin, M’FN killer!
Though as amazing as the effects are they can’t alone save this movie. When you get down to it The Incredibly Melting Man is a real bore with stale characters and a mess of a story, yes a real sticky, messy, failure pile that no one should ever have to deal with, EVER!
Skip ahead to about the 5:20 mark if you wanna see the Melting Man’s first scene, followed by the greatest reaction to a monster ever captured on film.
This doesn’t really have much to with anything, but it’s horror related so I’m calling it a very special Shocktober retrospective. I know there’s a lot spinoff games and Resident Evil on-rails shooters, but I’m going to try to stick to the main series. Hopefully I can recall most of my life and experiences correctly, so enjoy!
My progression from 16 bit games to 64 or whatever Playstation may of been was a slow progression. It wasn’t until 1998 when I even saw an actual playstation. One of my sister’s friends had let us borrow it for who knows what reason and left two games, Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil 2. I had a blast playing FFVII but the other one I just couldn’t. Going from years of playing Sega Genesis to playing RE2? Not only was it a leap in virtually every aspect of gaming I could think of, but it was also the most terrifying game I’d ever seen. A few years later my family actually bought a Playstation, so I got to revisit RE2 but could never play it for more than about fifteen minutes. The game was such an attack on the senses with it’s grisly images and atmospheric soundtrack, those games didn’t lie when that opening text would come up, “This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore.” Yes those are the things that nightmares are made of and I’ve been a fan ever since.
Resident Evil (1996)
I suppose I did play the second game first but as I previously stated I never could build up the nerves to get very far in my younger years. So I may of got this game later but probably beat it before RE2. So this is where it all started, but instead of simply telling you what it’s all about how about I show you with this “awesome” uncut video that opened the original game?
I swear that video just gets more and more awesome as time goes by. So once the STARS team enters the mansion you take control of either Jill or Chris investigating a mystery that continually gets more and more ridiculous. If you choose Jill you’ll get a gun, ammo and occasional help from Barry Burton who kind of looks like Cliff from Cheers, but if you play as Chris all you’ll start with is a knife because men are tough! Throughout the game you encounter both injured and brutally murdered members of the previous stars team, solve puzzles, and fight everything from zombies to giant sharks, spiders, mutants, and of course dogs. It’s chilling, it’s atmospheric, and a pitch perfect start to one of the gaming industries most enduring horror franchises.
Resident Evil 2 (1998)
Here we go, this is the shit. I have so many memories of trying to build up the courage to play through this and then eventually beating the shit out of it (by which I mean completing the game.) This game basically does what any good sequel does, it improves on previous downfalls and kicks up the excitement, suspense, and overall gameplay. The game is no longer set in a creepy mansion but the dark underbelly of Raccoon City. This time around you control Leon S. Kennedy (clearly modeled after the then very popular Leonardo DiCaprio) and Claire Redfield, looking for her brother Chris (from the first game) for some reason.
Most of the game is set inside the Raccoon City Police department where you then head into the sewers to some underground research facility, trying to escape from all the darn zombie madness. The main antagonist of the game is William Birkin a scientist for the Umbrella company (the guys that created the zombie virus) who has now created the G-virus which he has injected into himself in an attempt to protect his life’s work from special agents. This means Birkin is the majority of your boss battles as you fight him in all of his grotesque and increasingly complex stages throughout the game.
This may be one of the only games where I almost enjoy the cutscenes more than the actual game. Sure it’s cheesy as hell but the gore is great and the scares are inventive and effective. This may not be the best in the franchise in terms of fluid gameplay but many RE fans consider it the best just for it’s atmosphere. This is easily one of the best playstation games ever made and of course one of the best zombie games.
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999)
Just when I thought the series couldn’t get any creepier Capcom hit back hard with Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. For the most part it’s fairly similar to RE2 with one big, nasty, exception and his name is Nemesis. Who is Nemesis? In my opinion he’s the most terrifying boss in any game ever. What makes him so scary? Well not only is he huge, hideous, and practically invincible but you’re practically running from him for the entire game. He can easily kill you in one hit at almost any given time and yet he also gets a rocket launcher, why not?
The game takes place simultaneously during the events of RE2 but this time you play as fan favorite Jill Valentine. Where the second games takes place under Raccoon City this one pits you right in the shit and I gotta tell ya, there’s nothing more satisfying then killing zombies in the big city. So why is RE2 better? Because as much I like the idea of Nemesis you just can’t play this game comfortably. There’s something a little disappointing about constantly running from such a difficult enemy and it kind of gives the game a disjointed rhythm.
Another new feature of RE3 is “Live Selection Mode” where the player must select between two possible actions that flash on the screen. Whatever you choose will affect what happens in the game and how it will all end, and of course it usually appears in high pressure moments, I like this feature. So it’s a little harder and Nemesis may annoy me a little but it’s still a great zombie game and a must play for survival horror fans.
Just to give you an idea of what Nemesis is like here’s a clip of a guy playing and actually beating Nemesis in his first encounter. Whatever, that’s not how you really play the game, it’s all about the chase!
Resident Evil Code: Veronica (2000)
Ah, one of the first games I owned for the Dreamcast, so many memories. The graphics were stylin’, the gameplay a little smoother, and the scares as good as ever. Though with the exception of 3D backgrounds apposed to pre-rendered ones this was essentially the same game we’d seen in the last two installments. I feel like it had more weapons (including dual wield pistols) but really it was just typical Resident Evil. For whatever reason I’ve never beat this one, probably do to the amount of new and stronger enemies (not mention it’s hella long) but I’ve gotten a lot farther in recent years so it’s only a matter of time.
In REC:V you take control of Claire Redfield (from RE2) who is looking for her brother Chris AGAIN (Why is he always missing?) and is arrested in her search at an Umbrella research facility. So she’s taken to and imprisoned on Rockfort Island a contaminated island controlled by an arrogant commander named Alfred Ashford. I’d go on but I feel like since I’ve never gotten far enough to know what it’s all about then what’s the point?
So I can take the difficulty, I mean the last one was kind of hard but I do have one big beef with Code: Veronica it ruined the story! Not that the story to Resident Evil was ever that good but the cutscenes to this game are just over the top. The characters are more cartoonish then ever and the fact that they brought back the seemingly normal Wesker (a S.T.A.R.S member who double crossed you in the first game) and made him some kind of inhuman karate master? What the hell is going on here? This is basically the game that marked the series’ departure from just cops killing zombies to stupid conspiracies and ridiculous characters obsessed with world domination. But hey, even with all that it’s enjoyable and really showed off the capabilities of the Dreamcast.
Resident Evil (2002)
It had only been about six years since the firs game when Capcom decided to join the remake bandwagon in a move that no one really cared about. I don’t mind when games get remade so whatever, of course I’d give it a whirl and there are some nice features in the remake but also some annoying new details. So the story is the same, characters, enemies the same (mostly), blah, blah, probably the first big difference is the look of the game. These graphics blow my mind even to this day, I even remember thinking back then that graphics couldn’t possibly ever get better than this. It had a very creepy photorealistic feel to it and is probably still one of the best looking games that was ever made for the Gamecube.
I also enjoy that the remake toned down some of the cheese factor in the cutscenes, it’s just too bad that corniness would return in later games. So it’s basically the look of the newer RE games with most of the feel of the old ones. One problem I have it that the zombies in this game are too hard too kill! Think about the recent RE games and how you just mow down enemies and then imagine if each and every zombie in itself was a big struggle. All the zombies in this game not only take way too many shots to take down but then you have to find gas and fire to burn the body so that they won’t come back as a super zombies. Sometimes I’d just try and avoid the zombies altogether seeing as how little ammo you get. I suppose in a way this is the epitome of survival horror, but it was a little too hard for my comfort zone back then and I haven’t played it since.
My brother tells me that you get used to it after awhile and that in the end it’s a respectable re-imagining. I suppose it needed to be different in some ways I just wish they weren’t aspects that drew attention to the fact that I suck.
Resident Evil Zero (2002)
Though released in the same year as the RE remake RE0 is completely different game. It wasn’t just a quick cash out game either, it was in development for a longtime. Why I remember reading about in 2000 when it was being developed for the N64, there were screenshots and everything. Though you know how complicated things can get in the gaming world so it was saved for the Gamecube which was a smart move. Go and look up some pictures of this game for the N64 and then some compare it to the Gamecube and I think you’ll find there’s really no contest. REO looked amazing on Gamecube and in addition it was a lot of fun.
If you don’t already know or haven’t already guessed, RE0 is a prequel to the first game. Remember how in the first game your team was only sent in to the zombie mansion because the first team disappeared? Now you get to play as Rebecca Chambers, one of the members of the first team. You encounter Rebecca a handful of times in RE1 but this game is set a few hours before until it eventually intertwines. Along with Rebecca you’re partnered with Billy a hot tempered escaped convict that you get to switch off with. This leads to one of the new features of RE0 “Partner Zapping” where you can switch off between the two characters even if they are not together, it’s a unique feature but naturally I longed for it to just be two player. So that has it’s ups and downs but what really annoys me is the fact that they got rid of item boxes in this game. I guess they figured two characters worth of inventory space was enough but constantly I find myself dropping things only to go back and pick them up later.
Eventually this partner zapping stuff just got to me and I couldn’t keep playing it. It was just too annoying to go back and forth, back and forth and I never finished the game. It’s definitely more accessible than the remake but it’s still a little too unusual to be considered anything more than just average.
Resident Evil 4 (2005)
Though the series continued to keep fans mildly content with a new game every few years the franchise hadn’t been doing much to attract any new fans and was even in danger of growing stale with it’s predictable gameplay. So RE4 was the game that wasn’t just a breath of fresh air for RE fans but for all fans of horror themed games. It had good controls, great graphics, solid gameplay, and great scares with the series new threat “Las Plagas”.
Leon from RE2 returns as a special agent for the U.S. government on a mission to rescue the president’s daughter. Leon’s search eventually leads him a European village that appears to be somewhere in Spain and is infected with a some kind of virus called “Plagas”. This makes the enemies faster, smarter, and sometimes when you shoot them in the head big squiggly wigglies pop out. It turns out this all some scheme concocted by Osmund Saddler leader of the cult Los Illuminados. I guess they’re going to infect the president’s daughter and like send her back and infect people? Actually it’s probably one of the more basic RE storylines, but that doesn’t stop it from being cheesy. I’ve learned to deal with the fact that this series has now moved on from zombies and gotten pretty silly with ridiculous characters and plot-lines, this is probably because the gameplay is just so good it’s like who cares?
RE4 only vaguely resembles the same kind of gameplay featured in the original games opting for more action but it still has the same eerie atmosphere and for that it’s may be the most entertaining game in the franchise yet.
Resident Evil 5 (2009)
I’ve been kind of in and out of video games these days, though a sure fire way to draw me in will always be nostalgia. This game had that nostalgic effect on me in two ways; 1. It seemed like it had been an eternity since I’d played a new RE and 2. It had been awhile since I’d played a good multiplayer game. Growing up with a younger brother I very rarely played one player games “back in the day”, we were always looking for solid two player games cause ya know, sharing is caring. So it was a rare treat for me and Paul to join forces once again and play through a whole game together, a Resident Evil game at that. In an age where online gameplay reigns supreme it’s a nice change of pace to actually play with someone who is in the same room as you.
I reviewed this awhile back on the blog so I’ll be brief. So you play as Chris Redfield and his partner Sheva Alomar and they gotta go to Africa cause everyone is infected with a virus yadda, yadda Wesker shows up and is stupider than ever with his plot to destroy mankind and show off his Matrix powers. Aside from that this game has some exhilarating two player gameplay (the only way to play it as far as I’m concerned), slick graphics, good blah, blah, it’s awesome!
Seeing as I’m crapping out at the end here as I usually do on long posts, let me just say this has been one of my favorite game franchises and even though I am a very casual gamer these days I’ll probably always keep on eye on this scary little series.
Thirty-four years ago there was a man with a dream. A man who just wanted to tell a story about a bed, a bed that eats people. Tragically director George Barry simply flew too close to the sun for the film Death Bed the Bed That Eats was lost for many years. Eventually the film was rediscovered in the early 2000s and released on dvd in 2003. Since then it has achieved cult status thanks to word of mouth from fans and from a classic bit by comedian Patton Oswalt, this is some serious shit.
What can one really imagine after hearing a title like “Death Bed”? First of all you’ll probably think, “There’s no way in hell that’s actually a movie.” Once this barrier has been broken down you’d probably assume it’s just a really bad monster/slasher kind of movie, but then you’d only be half right. Death Bed is no more a movie than an avant garde experiment. It’s kind of like the ultimate bad student art film in that it tries to be deep with perhaps the worst premise ever conceived by man. Death Bed is closer to being a documentary than your typical b-horror movie which lets it inhabit this bizarre mid-ground between two genres.
The film details the narrated history of the death bed through the use of out of sequence events from different points in time. We see it kill people in the past and present while learning of it’s unspeakable evil from a man trapped behind a painting in the same room as the bed? Yes this man or ghost or whatever tells the story of the death bed and all it’s victims (including himself) in some sort of extra dimensional limbo but can also communicate to individuals when the bed sleeps… Yeah that’s right when the bed sleeps. What we learn from this man is that the death bed was once a demon, but wait the demon was also once a tree. So the tree demon became a wind demon and then fell in love with a woman he blew past. The demon then became a human demon and made a bed. The demon-man made love to the woman on the bed but she died which then made the demon-man’s eyes bleed onto the bed and it became possessed, did you get all that?
So being that a bed is an immobile antagonist all the scenes must depict events that have taken place near, around, or in the bed. I assume the heavy narration is due to the low budget as most of the actual dialogue is clearly dubbed but they needed something to make the film at least semi-comprehensible. So the only entertainment value in this film comes from the death bed’s kills. How does one get killed by a death bed? Well you see the death bed secretes a kind of stomach acid that sucks people down inside and then digests them. This has some great comic value as various people die and are injured in an overly comedic fashion, including a man who has his hand’s turned into skeleton hands.
This is another film that could of been a great comedy but instead took itself far too serious. If you want to see a good “bed death”, you should probably check out Nightmare on Elm Street because this one will really put you to sleep.
Skip ahead to about the 3:50 mark to see one of the death bed’s finest moments.
Just something I was thinking about. I’ll be brief, because these songs sure are… Less than 90 seconds to be exact.
10. The Pixies – “Crackity Jones”
You’ve got to admit, this song moves.
9. The Stone Roses – Elizabeth My Dear
This is what it would be like if the Stone Roses were more like Simon and Garfunkel. I wanted to include a Bob Dylan song, but I couldn’t find a YouTube of the one I was looking for, so… substitution.
8. Foo Fighters – “Doll”
An auspicious start to what is probably their best album.
7. Red Hot Chili Peppers – “They’re Red Hot”
What a way to end an album. Demon heads!
6. The White Stripes – “Little Room”
This is the first time in my life I wished “Fell in Love with a Girl” was shorter.
5. The Who – “It’s a Boy”
Sorry about posting Tommy spoilers. It’s not even Whovember yet.
4. Coldplay – “Parachutes”
Hurr durr herp derp Coldplay.
3. Scott Walker – “30 Century Man”
This song is featured in both The Life Aquatic and one of the Futurama movies.
2. The Beatles – “Her Majesty”
The original hidden track? I very much doubt it. But it’s fun to wildly speculate.
1. Cat Stevens – “Tea for the Tillerman”
In conclusion, 90 seconds was a pretty arbitrary limit that stopped me from listing many great songs that are shorter than two minutes. I guess the lesson here is you don’t have to spend a lot of time to make something great.
Ever since Hitchcock’s The Birds there’s been no shortage of killer animal movies just about every year. This fascination with creepy critters seemed to culminate in the 70s when these films were a dime a dozen. You had films like; Frogs, Kingdom of the Spiders, Grizzly, Squirm, Day of the Animals, Empire of the Ants, Dracula’s Dog that came out like clockwork, but Night of the Lepus, there was something special about that one. Sure most of these films were stupid, but at least the animals featured in most of them had some potential to be deadly. Ants, spiders, bears, hell even some frogs can secrete toxins, but rabbits? Cute, cuddly, innocent, little rabbits? The fact that anyone thought an audience would be afraid of rabbits boggles the mind but really you can’t believe it till you see it.
So the setup is that thousands of rabbits have invaded a southwestern town after all their natural predators (coyotes) were somehow eliminated. So this rancher (Rory Calhoun) wants a very seventies looking Deforest “Bones” Kelley playing a college president to find a way to thin the rabbit population along with two other researchers (Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh.) So they experiment with a test rabbit, a little girl falls in love with it, the rabbit escapes and the next thing you know there’s giant killer rabbits I guess. What’s a surprise about all this is the first half of the film actually seems pretty competent. This film follows a ridiculous premise yes, but the acting is good and the campiness is kept to a minimum. Then you have the reveal of the giant rabbits and all hope is lost.
It’s the fact that this film takes itself so seriously that hampers it the most. This solemn tone works okay in the first half but by the time the giant rabbits show up it’s embarrassing. Maybe it could have passed it the rabbits were even remotely scary but they’re just regular rabbits that only look big due to some not so impressive camera techniques. The rabbits rarely seem to interact with the other actors on screen, rather we only see them constantly running towards the camera in slow motion. So from their reveal to their fateful demise (they eventually get electrocuted on some train tracks) this is a total suck fest, oh yes and of course it ends on an ambiguous note. “Some of them survived?” ugh, that’s all folks.
Here’s a rabbit attack clip, it’s a little fuzzy but it’s there in all it’s glory.
Did you ever wonder what it would be like if they turned the movie version of The Road into a video game? It might be a little like Resistance 3. Except with way more aliens. Taking place some time after Resistance 2 (it’s hard to tell how much, since I never played the first two games) the world of this game is pretty bleak. Before WWII could start, a strange infection spread from a meteor, infecting people and turning them into alien monsters called chimera. So, when the aliens invaded with their futuristic technology, they simply could not be beaten. There’s numbers kept growing while humanity died off. Now the aliens are freezing the planet so that more of them can move in via wormhole. The few people that are left have a cure for the chimera virus, but there are so few of them. And the world is dying.
Pretty bleak, eh? Sure, it’s not The Road but that’s pretty dour for a video game, if you ask me. Maybe more like The Walking Dead or The Mist. And it gets worse. You play as Joseph Capelli, the guy who apparently mercy killed the hero from the first two games. As a result, he was dishonorably discharged and is hated the world over. He carved out a little life in a small town with his wife and child, but even that is taken away when a scientist comes to town, with the chimera in hot pursuit. Joseph’s family is forced to flee and Joseph has to leave them to accompany the scientist to New York, a certainly futile pursuit at stopping the chimera invasion. Along the way they’ll have to avoid massive chimera and bands of humans, because, as we all know about apocalyptic futures, the real enemy is always man.
A lot of Resistance 3 feels like it was designed in 2005. Joseph is very talkative in cinematics, clearly an opinionated dude. But during gameplay, he’s totally silent. Which is weird because people are always talking to him. They even ask questions, and Joseph doesn’t say a word. This problem is compounded in coop, when Joseph has a constant companion named John who no one ever acknowledges. What did John do that the whole world would give him the cold shoulder? Look Insomniac, you have a good story with quality characters. Don’t turn them off during gameplay! That’s supposed to be the best part!
Combat is a bit of a throwback too. The game uses health packs instead of regenerating health, which frankly felt weird for the first few minutes of combat, then stopped being a concern. Unlike most modern games, the guns are also perfectly fine when fired from the hip, which, once again, I’m fine with. It really helps that the game has a great variety of weapons and encourages you to use all of them. You get a bunch of guns, all of which you can hold at the same time, which level up by usage. So, for example, if you use that shotgun enough, its bullets turn into incendiary rounds. This gets really crazy with the alien guns, weapons that suck enemies into black holes and or cause them to puff up and explode. Insomniac has always had a knack for designing great weapons, and that’s probably the best part of this game.
Resistance 3‘s multiplayer suite is a step down from what Resistance 2 offered. Gone are the RPG-inspired 8 player coop missions that were, as far as I could tell, the best part of the last game. Instead there’s a very standard collection of modes that I’m sure you can already guess. The game also supports Move and 3D, which you probably guessed, since it was the game they used to market the PlayStation TV.
Resistance 3 looks great and has a story that’s pretty compelling, by first person shooter standards or otherwise. The impressive gun variety and pseudo-throwback gameplay really help it to stand out in a world of infinite Call of Duty clones. You have to admit, in a year where it seems that every single game has “3” in the title, it’s nice that this game is fairly self-contained as well. I might not have played the first two games in the series, but that didn’t stop me from having a great time with Resistance 3.
A film that Roger Ebert once memorably called “A vile bag of garbage” there’s nothing funny about the sadistic exploitative pile that is I Spit on Your Grave. Showing rape is always a controversial move in any kind of film but I think it can be justified if done with artistic integrity, this on the other hand is just sick. I think you can tell I’m offended considering that I’m acting Sto (intentional typo) serious right now. This film has divided horror fans for years but to anyone who actually likes this film all I can say is “You are fucked up.” 
