Fourteen on the 14th at 14:14

"The Deli-very" is only 14 seconds long, but it tells a complete story and provides a twist ending! This is an amazing little film! How it came in 15th in the competition it was made for I'll never know--the other 14 must have been Platonic Ideals, each and every one!

The Deli-very (2018)

Starring: Anonymous Actors

Director: Jason Michael

Rating: Ten of Ten Stars

'Skinned Alive' will disappoint almost everyone

Skinned Alive (1990)
Starring: Scott Spiegel, Susan Rothacker, Mary Jackson, Floyd Ewing Jr., Lester Clark, and Barbara Katrz-Norrod
Director: John Killough
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

When a family of crazy cannibalistic taxidermists (Jackson, Rothacker, and Spiegel) are stranded over night in a small town, they see no reason to stop their ongoing killing spree.

"Skinned Alive" is a clumsily constructed horror comedy that features a talented cast doing their best with a weak script and a special effects crew that either didn't have enough money or enough skill to stretch the money for decent gore effects. There are only two instances in the film that will have you squirming in your seat due to the splatter/ick factor... and that's entirely too few for what this movie seems to want to be.

And the fact I say "seems to want to be" illustrates the biggest problem with "Skinned Alive", Watching it, I got the sense it wanted to be a cross between "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Spider Baby", but it lacks cohesion, so I'm really sure if that's what writer/director Killough was going for, or if that just my mind trying to bring order to the chaos.

If you're looking for a gory splatter-fest, "Skinned Alive" does not deliver. It doesn't even deliver on the promise of the title, as the only person who comes close to being "Skinned Alive" is a character who inexplicably kept coming back from the dead, in a manner that I couldn't determine whether it was supposed to be a joke or just a symptom of bad continuity. IF you looking for an intense and horrific viewing experience, "Skinned Alive" won't satisfy you either, because it unfolds in an entirely too random fashion, with too many characters being present for no good reason and the pace being too choppy and uneven for any tension to build in the film. The only possible audience for this film who will be satisfied are those looking for a Bad Movie Night experience; that this movie is perfect for.

With the horror falling flat, many of jokes being so lame they can't even be described as un-funny, the overall package of this film is pretty bad, despite the fact that most of the featured actors do a good job in the sense that they are hamming it up big time. Those over-the-top performances make the film more fun to watch than it otherwise might have been... and why it would be a nice addition to a Bad Movie Night. (Producer J.R. Bookwalter would have done everyone a favor if he had made this film part of the "Bad Movie Police" line-up from a few years ago. He might even have found that endeavor to be more successful than it was if he had.)

31 Nights of Halloween: The Rattler

During the 31 Nights of Halloween, it’s not safe for beautiful young ladies to answer their front doors, their cellphones, or even their VoIP, as the woman in tonight's tale learns. (This is another internet-based chiller from writer/director Deric Nunez that starts out strong but sort of falters at the end. I would have liked it far more if it had stayed black after the fade.)

The Rattler (2015)
Starring: Ana Valverde
Director: Deric Nunez
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

I'm not sure what's more hideous--the monster or the film itself

I am questioning the wisdom of deciding to do a Jess Franco Week here at Terror Titans.

Devil Hunter (aka "Sex Cannibal") (1980)
Starring: Ursula Fellner, Antonio Mayans, and Al Cliver
Director: Jess  Franco (as Clifford Brown)
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

When an actress (Fellner) is kidnapped and held for ransom, adventurer Peter Westen (Cliver) is hired to rescue her. But when she falls into the hands of savage natives who intend to sacrifice her to their vile, living god, Westen's job becomes far more difficult. Will he be in time before the monstrous devil-god drives her mad or eats her?

I wasn't more than 10 minutes in before "Devil Hunter" made me feel dirty for just watching it. It was suich a slasp-dash effort technically and the way the camera lingered on a shot of female genitalia made it clear what Franco was wanting emphasize. And that was before we got to the rapes and scenes of the Devil literally eating a woman's pussy.

I thought "Oasis of Zombies" had to be worst Franco film. I was wrong. This is movie's even worse. It's more sloppily put together, more chaotic in its story-telling, and even more embarrassing technically. It's like no effort whatsoever went into color correcting different bits of film, or even considering that shots of characters that are supposed to be together at the same time should be standing in the same light. is the worst Franco film. The pacing is glacially slow at all times, causing even the interesting bits to become tedious. And the Foley work is generally so awful that it's probably the worst seen outside a student project that received a failing grade.

And the soundtrack? Oh my God... the soundtrack! It's performed entirely on a Hammond organ, and it sounds like it was being ad-libbed as the film was running. It's everything you'd expect from a parody of a cheap horror film from the 1950s. (The score is credited to Franco himself, so I guess this means he's as good at slapping music together as he at a film.)

Amusingly, whoever did the English dub that I watched seemed to care as much about making a quality product as Franco did. At roughly the 1:10 mark, the characters stop speaking English and are instead speaking in Spanish. The English dub resumes at about the 1:17 mark. Fortunately, dialogue isn't that important, because there's no story to get in the way of the plot.

So why am I even giving Two Stars?

Because the scenes with the Devil were actually very creepy and even downright scary. If Franco could have done the entire movie this skillfully, he might actually have made something decent. The use of sound whenever the mutant cannibal devil is creeping about in search of some pussy to eat is damn effective. (Of course, it might also just seem so, because everything surrounding it is so ineptly done.)

The final 10-15 minutes of the film are also pretty intense. They are by far the best part of the movie, and I suppose Franco might have been keeping in mind that if you finish strong that's what the audience will remember, and they'll have a better opinion of the film than it deserves. On the other hand, it could just be an accident. Or maybe I had just been ground down by the rest of the film, and I had stopped fighting and was now accepting of my fate.

"Devil Hunter" has a running time of 1:47. Maybe if chopped down to 1:10 or maybe even just 50 minutes it could be bearable. As it stands, however, it's just a movie to be avoided.

Wrong Turn Wednesday:'Wrong Turn 2: Dead End'

It's the second Wednesday of 31 Nights of Halloween, so that means it's time for a look at another installment of the Wrong Turn Series.


Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)
Starring: Erica Leehrsen, Texas Battle, Henry Rollins, Aleksa Palladino, Daniella Alonso, Steve Braun, and Matthew Currie Holmes
Director: Joe Lynch
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

 The contestants and crew of a reality show are stalked by in the deep forest of West Virginia by inbred cannibal mutants who want to add them to the menu.

 "Wrong Turn 2: Dead End" is one of those surprising sequels that improves on the original. While the first "Wrong Turn" movie was a lazy collection of slasher movie tropes, the writers here actually seem to have made an effort to come up with something a little different.

While most of the characters are the usual assortment of cliches you expect to find populating a movie like this--the obnoxious hipster, the sullen goth chick, the slimy filmmaker, the nail-spitting lesbian--there is usually enough of a twist on the character to make it appealing... and if the character itself doesn't have an interesting dimension, the casting and direction is solid enough that you still regret to see the character fall victim to the marauding cannibals.

The most fun character in the film is Dale Murphy, a retired special forces colonel portrayed by Henry Rollins. A typical approach in a film like this is to have the Hollywood-type who appears to be a bad ass turn out to be all bark and no bite when the real danger manifests itself--"Wrong Turn 2" took a different approach and made Murphy every bit the bad-ass he appears as on the reality show, and then some, as well as being a heroic figure to boot. It was nice to see a character take the fight to the psychos immediately instead of waiting until cornered.

The filmmakers even managed to make the reality show conceit work, something which only the minority of the five or six other films that have tried that have managed to do. The set-up and the approach to filming it felt real to me, and the way the show's producer became a contestant and ultimately a victim was also very well handled. All in all, the filmmakers did a nice job of making me buy into the possibility that a reality show could be made like this, and they did an even better job of threading the hi-tech multi-media aspect of that set-up through the entire film.

Now, the film is not perfect. By using the same setting as the first film, they leave a big question out there: How the hell can these cannibals still be running around given the fact they were so thoroughly exposed in the first film? I find it heard to swallow that state troopers didn't flood those woods and raid every cabin spotted from the air or the ground. The easily accessible location where the film's climax took place seems particularly fantastic given the ending of the original "Wrong Turn". There are also several examples of characters being stupid just because if they weren't, the film would be a lot shorter.

But I can forgive those flaws because of Henry Rollins running around kicking cannibal butt. Having his character in the mix really makes this movie for me.

While I can't recommend you waste your time on the first film in this series, I think the fun factor in this one makes it worth checking out. I'm not saying it's a masterpiece, and you're going to need a high level for gore for the sake of gore--but if you didn't, why would you want to watch a movie featuring cannibal mutant hicks in the first place?--but there are worse movies you could waste your time on.

If you end up watching 'Wrong Turn', you may have chosen badly.

Welcome to the first Wrong Turn Wednesday... even if I'm already starting to regret the decision to watch and reveiw these flicks as part of the build-up to Halloween..

Wrong Way (2002)
Starring: Desmond Herrington, Eliza Dushku, Emmanuelle Chriqui, and Jeremy Sisto
Director: Rob Schmidt
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

A group of twenty-something beautiful people are stalked and brutally murdered by mutant cannibal hicks in the deep woods of West Virginia.

If you've seen even one killer redneck movie, you've already seen everything "Wrong Way" has to offer. They may do it better here--depending on what film you watched--but it brings nothing new to this slasher film sub-genre. The characters you expect to survive do so, and the characters you expect to get killed fall in predictable order. The film feels like the writers and director were working form a list of check boxes of genre tropes and once they got them all included, they felt their work was done.

There is nothing all that good about this film, but there is also nothing outright awful. The scene in and around the old observation tower is the high point of the movie (hurh-hurh... I made a pun), but it is nowhere enough to elevate this cookie-cutter, lazy genre film above its mediocre status.

What's more, the good will that scene earns this picture evaporates during the its climax where the filmmakers show us that not only are they not terribly original, they don't know when enough is enough and subsequently manage to transform the final fight stand of the Beautiful People against the Hideous Hicks from thrilling to ludicrous.

(By the way, filmmakers... if you want to make a movie about mutant cannibal hicks who have murdered so many people that they have a whole glade full of cars, you might want to NOT have them start killing cops and forest rangers. I can kinda-sorta accept that everyday people might be written off... but when it's law enforcement that starts going down, my ability to suspend disbelief goes down, too.

Unless you simply can't get enough of malformed cannibals haunting the back-country of West Virginia, or are a founding member of the Eliza Dushku or Jeremy Sisto fan clubs, "Wrong Turn" is a film you can safely skip.

'Urban Flesh: Rebirth Edition' brings underground classic to DVD, new century

Urban Flesh: Rebirth Edition (2007)
Starring: Martin Dubreuil, Mireille Leveque, Marie-Eve Petit, K.M Lavigne, Anthony Pereira, and Marc Vaillancourt
Director: Alexandre Michaud
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Four thrill-killers (Dubreuil, Petit, Pereira, and Vaillancourt) prowl a the night of a Canadian city in search of victims to kill... and to then eat raw. As a homicide detective (Lavigne) closes in on them, he and his wife (Leveque) are added to their menu.

"Urban Flesh" is something of an underground legend among fans of gore movies. It was made on a shoestring budget by Canadian filmmaker Alexandre Michaud with the intention of selling it through mail-order catalogues. However, it ended up banned in England, Germany, and the director's homeland of Canada... and I'm sure this has helped its cult status along greatly.

I've never seen the original version of the film, but I was recently supplied with a copy of the "Rebirth Edition" by director and co-writer Alexandre Michaud. This will mark the film's debut on DVD, and, as it will be distributed by Sub-Rosa Studios, it may even find its way to a wider audience than ever before.

The recut version of "Urban Flesh" was produced from digitized versions of the original videotapes, and there are a couple of places where the now ten-year-old tapes are showing that they were starting to decay. These are only minor flaws, however, and in general, the film looks pretty good for a shot-on-video film from that period. In fact, I'm very impressed with the overall quality of the movie, given that this was Michaud's first feature. It's a better work than some directors mount on their fourth or fifth tries.

In an interview that's included on the DVD, Michaud mentions that the recut "Rebirth Edition" has been shortened from its original run-time of 100 minutes. I have no sense of what was in the original, but I can say that this is one of those films that I had to take a step back from and acknowledge that I am not its target audience, because if I'd been doing the editing, I may have been tempted to shorten the film even further. Unfortunately, I'd probably have been cutting material that is the very thing that appeals to those who would seek this movie out.

The main point of this movie is its shocking gore, and I think "gorehounds" will get a tremendous kick out of it. As for myself, I found the extended scenes of our modern cannibals munching on entrails somewhat dull. I also found myself wondering if they'd ever heard of blood-born diseases, and if they were big fans of sushi before they took to eating the citizens of Montreal.

If you watch movies for gore, I think you'll enjoy this one quite a bit. If you watch movies for shocks and horror, I think you'll enjoy it as well. The film contains one of the most shockingly repulsive scenes I've ever come across in a movie, and all the way up to the point where it happens, I kept thinking Michaud would back off from it. But then, this IS a movie that was banned in three countries. (It's a scene that involves a pregnant woman and four cannibalistic psychopaths looking for "something different". Think of the absolutely most horrible implication of that, and you'll know what's in this movie.)

However, if you're picky about plot and structure, you might enjoy this movie a little less. It delivers the gore, it delivers horrific moments, and it even delivers some decent performances on the part of the actors, (who, for the most part are excellent at the absolute hardest kind of acting there is: They manage to come across as perfectly natural and as if they aren't acting), but it is very weak in the script department.

The climactic murder and killing session with the cop and his wife come about through coincidence rather than design on the part of the killers... and a coincidence that monumental is harder for me to suspend my disbelief over than that four gore-covered, bloodspattered murderers could wander city streets without attracting police attention, or leaving a trail of witnesses. Adn then there's the problem that the movie ends before it even seems close to being over. Our heroine (Mireille Leveque as the police detective's wife who is tortured and captured by the cannibals) is fighting back... and then the movie just ends. We don't learn her final fate, we don't learn what happens to all the killers... the movie's just over and way too many threads hanging for my tastes. (It DOES end on a very creepy image... but I still would have liked something that came close to approximating an ending.)

For all my complaining, however, I think this is a decent movie. In fact, it may even be a good movie, as it did leave me feeling creeped-out and just a little sickened. I'm certain it's a work that should appeal to its "gorehound" target audience, and it will even have an impact on those who aren't neccesarily big fans of gore (like me).

Destined to make you look at the clock

Destined to Be Ingested (aka "Holocaust Holocaust") (2010)
Starring: Kitty Cole, Kris Eivers, Noshir Dalal, Theodore Bouloukos, Manuel Fihman, Suzi Lorraine, Bill Weeden, and Randall Heller
Director: Sofian Khan
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

In 1987, four Yuppies (Bouloukos, Cole, Eivers, and Lorraine) were stranded on a South Island. The title of the film gives away part of what happens next--and even if it didn't... has there ever been a south sea island that wasn't home to cannibals or people-eating monsters?--but it won't prepare viewers for the Tarazan-esque love story, nor the arrival of the zombies.


First off, let me admit that I may be ill-equipped to review this film. I may even be committing the sort of Reviewing Deadly Sin that I ranted about in this article(and numerous others), because I have seen very few of the movies in the cannibal horror/jungle savage subgenre this movie belongs to,and I've reviewed even fewer.

And that could be the reason why I'm not entirely sure how I was supposed to take "Destined to Be ingested". The title and the preview for the film both scream comedy, but the execution is straight-laced and so restrained that I can't help but think it was intended to be viewed as a straight horror movie, perhaps even a homage to films like "Cannibal Holocaust" and "Slaves of the Mountain God". The fact its set during the 1980s--when many such films were being made--can be used to support either approach, as can the sound mixing. Like many films where quick and cheap dub jobs were done, the dialogue is crystal clear and obviously recorded in studio; either the filmmakers were doing it intentionally, or the soundtrack needed to be mixed better.

Whether it's to be taken seriously as a homage to the cannibal and zombie pictures of the 1980s, or viewed as a spoof of those movies, the film's flaws are the same. First off, it takes entirely too long in getting to the violence and mayhem everyone knows is coming--nearly one-third of the movie's barely over an hour running-time. The movie spends one-third of its running time on setting up characters that never rise above the level of cliches, setting up sex scenes that we don't get to see because the scene cuts away, and setting the stage for some of the most tepid violence you'll ever see in a horror flick featuring cannibals (unless the Hallmark Channel decides to make one).

But even when it gets going, it moves in fits and starts. We have a burst of violence and suspense as the cannibals make their first attack on the hapless Yuppies, but then we're treated to another stretch of nothing... where boring characters wander around doing boring things. Even though in theory there are vicious cannibals in loin clothes and body paint lurking nearby, we get the feeling that the greatest threat facing the characters is that they'll run out of beer before they are rescued.)

It isn't until one of the cannibals falls in love with Kitty Cole's character in violation of the traditions of this culture, and gets her knocked up, that the film starts to get interesting. By this time, however, the film's well over half gone, and there's really no saving it. It gets even more interesting with the hints dropped about the background of the cannibal tribe's chief, but nothing at all ends up coming from that.

The film's one redeeming feature is the way it introduces the zombie aspect. As I do with the vast majority of films I watch and review, I came to this one with no real knowledge of what it contained beyond a little blurb supplied by the distributor. I truly did not see the zombies coming, until they were chowing down on the cast members. (Yes, they're set up their arrival through ominous dialogue about the village being cursed because of Kitty Cole becoming a baby mama instead of a human sacrifice/finger food, but I hadn't expected the curse to be manifested as zombies.)


Unfortunately, the zombies also come to represent the film's biggest inconsistency and the most clear example of how its various pieces--cannibal horror, love story, zombie rampage--don't quite fit together. It's hinted that the cannibal chief is a product of a forbidden union, just like the child his son's outsider love will give birth to. But if this is the case, then why didn't the zombies destroy the village then? Did the curse come to be later? The film doesn't even provide a clue to that question, so as enlivening as the sudden appearance of zombies were, they ultimately end up making the experience of viewing this movie an unsatisfying waste of time... the only benefit you'll gain from this film is the opportunity to check your watch. First, you'll be looking to see if it's working because time seems to be passing slowly, and when the end credits start to roll, you'll be double-checking the movie's length, because it has to be longer than an hour. (It's not, though.)

And that's too bad, because "Destined to be Ingested" is actually a fairly well-done movie as far as the cinematography goes, and the acting is pretty decent all around. With a more focused and better developed script, this could have been a decent movie. (Unless I'm missing something, due to my basic unfamiliarity with the cannibal horror genre.)

"Destined to be Ingested" has been kicking around since 2008, but it will receive wide distribution on DVD through Midnight Releasing on October 5, 2010.

'Slave of the Cannibal God' has no surprises

Slave of the Cannibal God (aka "Mountain of the Cannibal God" and "Prisoner of the Cannibal God") (1978)
Starring: Ursula Andress, Stacy Keach, Claudio Cassinelli, and Antonio Marsina
Director: Sergio Martino
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

Susan Stevenson (Andress) arrives in New Guinea to launch an expedition to search for her husband who has gone missing. A former collegue of is (Keach) reveals that he traveled secretly to a mostly unexplored island to study cannibals who worship a holy mountain. Suan convinces him to help her in her search, and they head into the unknown, along with her sociopathic brother (Marsina).


"Slave of the Cannibal God" is about what you'd expect from a movie with the words "Slave" and "Cannibal" in the the title, starring Andress, and made by Italians. I'd expected more gore, nudity, and sexual perversion, but I suspect I may have seen the "censored" version.

Storywise, the film was reminicent of a 1930s jungle adventure film, or a Joe Kubert-penned Tarzan tale--most of the explorers are in the jungle for reasons that are not at all what they claim they are--but production-wise, it's all cheesy Italian production from the 1970s. (You know you're not going to be watching the cream of the film crop when the first shots in a film are images of random animals in the jungle.


However, the film is mercifully light on filler animal footage, the acting is better than is usually found in these sorts of films, and the story moves along at a good pace. If you like jungle adventure movies, you can do far worse than this one. On the other hand, if you're looking for a gory cannibal flick, you should probably pass on it. I'm still not sure who the "slave" of the title is.)