I’m too embarrassed to disclose every detail of my fantasy life, but I don’t mind sharing the ones that involve horror films. So even though these films don't exist, rest assured that if this website ever makes me stinking rich or somehow launches me into a career as a Hollywood producer, at least one of the following films will come to a theater near you.

Prawn of the Dead
directed by Larry Blamire

Tagline: The deadliest catch just got deadlier.

Plot: In the summer of 2005, the crew of Louisiana shrimp boat Laffitte Morte unleash a briny hell in the gulf when they discover a new species of anthropods living off the toxic waste of a sunken trash barge. Lance Henriksen stars as Bernard, the ship’s stalwart captain who must convince his inexperienced crew, including his little brother Jimmy, his stowaway daughter Sue, the greenhorn Edmond, and the mysterious Cajun cook Mr. Savoi, to risk life and livelihood to stop the mutant shrimp invasion before it can reach the unsuspecting fishing town of Port Petite.

Most Controversial Scene: While some may find the sea-monster sex scene merely gratuitous, Blamire treats it with the utmost sensitivity and proves even the goriest of monster-movies can be directed with a flair for the romantic if handled correctly.

Bikini Girls with Machine Guns
directed by Quentin Tarantino

Tagline: Hell hath no fury like a woman armed!

Plot: Director Quentin Tarantino returns to the screen with another grindhouse thriller. When a gang of vicious inmates from Raleigh, North Carolina make a daring escape from the Women’s Correctional Facility, they soon terrorize the small, southern town of Zebulon. Sherrif Jacob Richard is the only man with guts enough to stand up to this Dixie stampede of blood, booze, and blonde fury. After his friends and deputies abandon him, Jacob soon finds himself alone in a desperate, “high-noon” showdown with the gang’s beautiful but psychotic leader, Titania Santanna. The film stars Josh Brolin as Sherrif Jacob, and Cynthia Rothrock as Titania. The film aslo features an original soundtrack by The Kills, The Cramps, and Donita Sparks of L7.

Most Memorable Quote: “Don’t let their bikinis fool you. I’m telling you these women are concealing enough guns to blow this town to Hell and back and then back to Hell again!” -- Sherrif Jacob Richard

The Book of Job
directed by Eli Roth

Tagline: And on the 8th day, God created horror.

Plot: Job is the most pious man in the world. But God and the Devil have a bitter argument over whether his virtue is truly sincere or simply the product of his good fortune and prosperity. To prove the Devil wrong, God allows the Devil to torture Job by destroying his house, killing all of his children, and mutilating his flesh. Through all of it, God wagers that Job will stay faithful and obedient. Eli Roth directs this horrific morality tale that stars Russel Crowe as a brawling, barrel-chested Job, Gilbert Gottfried as the loud, funny-looking Devil, and Samuel L. Jackson as the foul-mouthed and wildly unpredictable God of the old testament.

Goriest Moments: In an early scene, Job is tied to a large stone slab as the Devil slices the flesh from his upper right thigh with a large, rusty scythe while his terrified wife watches in horror from behind a nearby bush. In a later scene, the Devil savagely rips each festering boil from Job’s skin with a dull shard of glass as they wrestle in a large cauldron of oil and vinegar. In a deleted scene available only in the unrated DVD version of the film, God gets angry when it looks like he might lose the wager and dismembers the Devil’s tail by pinning it to a tree with a fork and then hacking it with his ceremonial golden axe.

Blue Velvet 2
directed by David Lynch

Tagline: She wore bluer velvet.

Plot: In the follow-up to Lynch’s controversial masterpiece, Dean Stockwell reprises his role as Ben, who is now reformed and the proprietor of the recently re-opened Slow Club. But Ben’s world turns upside down when a mysterious man in a lime-green cowboy hat presents him with a bag of toenail clippings. To make matters worse, Ben learns that his new lounge singer, Elizabeth, turns out to be the little sister of Dorothy, the woman he once terrorized. Elizabeth does not seem to know about Ben’s violent past, but her onstage behavior becomes increasingly erratic as she insists on only singing Jonathan Coulton’s “Blue Sunny Day.” Ben begins to question his own sanity and whether he can escape his past and finally find redemption.

Questions: Fans of this film have been asking about the significance of the singing garden gnome, as well as the blood-soaked paisley tie worn by Ben’s twin brother and the moss-covered tie worn by Frank in the dream sequence. In response to these questions, Lynch set the record straight in a recent tweet in which he said that all questions will soon be “harmonized in an automatic manner in the vision of all the people” and that you can always “know that, by knowing which, all things are known.”

Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil
directed by Pascal Laugier

Tagline: His name rhymes with “scare.”

Plot: Fans of classic literature and torture porn can now be united in Laugier’s riveting adaptation of the French work that inspired the modernist movement in poetry. The film features an ensemble cast of international stars, including Mathieu Almaric as the ancient, binge-drinking “Le Vampire,” Christina Aguilera as the defiantly diseased and disgusting “Red-haired Beggar Girl,” Gary Oldman as the mysterious and seductive “Dancing Serpent,” and members of the Rolling Stones as “The Seven Old Men.”

From the DVD director’s commentary: “Benoit Lestang did all the brilliant special effects you’re seeing, and I should actually give him partial credit in prompting me to make this film. He fell asleep one day during the filming of Martyrs and he neglected to take the makeup off the actress. Her skin developed a pretty bad rash, and she had a terrible time driving to her hotel, because all this gooey stuff kept melting into her eyes. So the next day, he brought her flowers. They were so beautiful. But, in a way, they were also evil flowers, because, you see, he did a very bad thing in making her wear all that uncomfortable makeup. So I was thinking… flowers… evil… BAUDELAIRE! And voila! I knew I had to eventually make this film.”

Hitchcock once said, with his always wry sense of humor, that Psycho helped put murder back in the family, where it belongs. I’ve always taken this to mean that we don’t have to look further than our own backyard, or even our own skins, to find all the horror we can stomach. By this same logic, Susan Monford’s While She Was Out puts horror back in the American suburbia where, the film suggests, it’s been festering for a very long time. Just about every frame in the first half of the film reminds us that what we’re witnessing are the consequences of suburban expansion. Kim Basinger plays the role of Della, a battered and beleaguered housewife who lives in an expensive, but disheveled modern home in a prosperous gated community with her two kids and an over-worked, A-type alcoholic for a husband. Her only respite from all of this is a quick trip for wrapping paper to the sprawling, crowded shopping mall, where she can’t even find a place to park her giant SUV. And as if the parking situation weren’t bad enough, once inside Della also has to contend with obnoxious Stepford-wife suburbanites bragging about their husbands’ promotions that have paid for their swimming pools, large lawns, and salon-styled hair.

The message of the film is clear enough even after these first few scenes: the civility and trappings of suburban life is simply the pretense for something far more primitive and vicious lurking beneath it. But the film takes a turn towards the horrific when Della leaves the mall to be confronted by a vicious gang who attack her because she left them a note on their car chastising them for double parking. These particular hoodlums are, admittedly, a bit inexplicable in the way they’re so easily prompted to violence, as they seem to have no qualms over murdering a guard in well-lit parking lot, most likely covered by surveillance cameras. At this point, While She Was Out becomes far more allegorical than realistic. For instance, the gang is deliberately multi-ethnic, a parody of the globally-minded ethics of the United Colors of Benetton that Della might have been browsing inside the mall. They also parody the fear of those dangerous minorities and urban thugs that her gated community is so desperate to keep out. And I think it’s also deliberate that the gang’s leader, Chucky, is reminiscent of Krug from The Last House on the Left. In addition to their striking resemblance, both Chucky and Krug have no motivation other than being vicious and crazy.

The allegorical nature of this film is further reinforced by Della’s retreat into the dark confines of the forest beyond the illusory safety of her suburban bubble. She’s very much a “little red riding hood” alone in the woods with her own big bad wolf. But in this version of the fairy tale, her basket becomes a tool box, complete with a tire iron that she learns to wield in fairly gruesome fashion. The tool box is as deliberate as everything else in this film, particularly in the way it pays homage to slasher classics such as The Toolbox Murders, but especially the Slumber Party Massacre. Just as the girls in SPM band together to cut off the killer’s “drill,” Della uses her toolbox to turn the tables on her attackers. In doing so, she taps into hidden resources and reserves that enable her to embrace the wilder nature that’s been suppressed by her suburban confinement. Della’s no final girl. She’s a final woman, hear her roar!

This isn’t to say that there aren’t a few of problems with this film. There’s an odd scene in which the street-tough gang pour a 40 for their fallen while listening to Joy Division’s brooding, gothic classic “Day of the Lords.” I LOVE Joy Division, but it’s not the kind of music any self-respecting gangsta would ever listen to before a fight. Then again, these aren’t your ordinary street toughs, as Vingh taps into his inner-shaman and insists that Della has turned into an avenging spirit. And there are a few moments of painfully canned dialogue, as when Della delivers the lines “Where are you God” with enough melodrama and “ACTING!” to embarrass even SNL’s Master Thespian. Still, Basinger is terrific in just about every other scene. And the film’s final sequence is brilliant, in part because it’s punctuated so perfectly by Roxy Music’s ambiguous and creepy “In Every Dream There is a Heartache.” All in all, While She Was Out is a smart film with something very substantive to say about the way suburban culture might be damaging our better, and more primitive, natures.

Corey and I spent a weekend in NYC at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horror, and I’m still processing all the strange sights and sounds. We were witness to a horror-themed fashion show hosted by the one-and-only Gwar; we met a demented DVD salesman named Twisted Chris; I was nearly impaled by the over-sized spikes on the shoulders of Gwar’s Oderus Urungus; we saw Tom Savini single-handedly destroy the elaborately constructed curtains on the main stage as he made his surprise entrance to be the guest judge of a costume contest.

However, one of the more surprising things about the Fangoria convention was the recurring complaint offered by its guest speakers that the current trend of horror film remakes is bad--REALLY bad-- for horror films. For instance, during the Last House on the Left panel discussion, the villains from the original film, (David Hess, Fred Lincoln, and Marc Sheffler) unanimously agreed that the remake of their film is, at best, simply a calculated effort to make money, and, at worst, a film that is helping to prevent real horror films from being made. David Hess explained it like this: what made the original film so subversive and powerful was that Wes Craven and the cast really had nothing to lose. They could take risks without worrying so much about a studio’s bottom line. Fred Lincoln speculated that another thing that made the film so powerful was its intimate and natural connection with the culture and zeitgeist of the 1970s, and so the film loses much of its original tone when transplanted to another decade. The result is that we’re watching a replica of a horror film when we could, if it weren’t for all these pesky remakes, watch real horror films.

Nearly every panelist or guest speaker said as much over the weekend. Tom Savini hated the Friday the 13th remake. Doug Bradley is appalled by the fact that a Hellraiser remake is being developed, and he cited many of the same reasons offered by Hess and Lincoln— it’s simply a vehicle for making money, it risks nothing, and it crowds the market for new and innovative horror films. Horror fans should instead demand that film makers find ways to keep it gritty and make it shocking. This won’t happen, as one panelist said, if directors insist on using eye-candy from the WB network in their films simply for an increase in revenues. As Bradley put it, we need to avoid warmed-over films and instead “go looking for the new again.”

But perhaps the most articulate explanation as to why we should all be suspicious of remakes came from James Marsters, the Spike-y headed vampire from Buffy. He likened the situation to the difference between New York’s glossy, professional, and strictly for-profit Broadway Theater and Chicago’s non-profit Steppenwolfe Theater. While you’re guaranteed to see a good and entertaining show on Broadway, you’re not likely to encounter the sort of gutsy, unpredictable, and challenging theatrical experience offered by Steppenwolfe. A non-profit theater company can take risks with their material, artistry, and audience expectations in a way that other theater companies can’t because they have to be concerned with simply filling their seats every night. By the same logic, remakes will always be problematic because they’re more likely to simply be commercial ventures, and they seldom take the same risks as the original.

On the one hand, I am completely sympathetic with all of these arguments. While I actually liked the Friday remake, I admit that it didn’t have the same impact, or creepiness, or gut-wrenching fun as the original films. And I cannot fathom why anyone would think it’s a good idea to do a remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, a damn near perfect film, other than it might be a convenient way to make a buck. Still, I can’t help but think that for every big-budget, glossy remake, there are dozens upon dozens of horror films being made that have no mercenary intentions, or any intentions at all other than to scare the bejeesus out of you, or provide an altogether new twist on an old story. 2008’s Dawn of the Dead is a perfect example of a director making a classic film seem new again. And if it weren’t for remakes, we wouldn’t have such modern gems as The Fly, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the many good versions of Dracula. Good or bad, there have always been remakes, and, as the good book says, there’s really nothing new under the sun. Both Hellraiser and Last House on the Left were, technically, remakes of earlier literary works. I think much of what was said at Fangoria stems from what must be the uncomfortable experience of watching your original work turn into a simulation of itself, much like walking into a wax museum and seeing your life-sized replica. Still, the panelists at New York’s Fangoria offered an interesting challenge to horror fans and film makers alike -- without at least some risk, there’s no possibility for genuine horror.

Corey
corey@evilontwolegs.com

Nothing puts a smile on my face faster than watching zombie movies, particularly those directed by George Romero, or those directly linked to his work. However, if you’re like me, you sometimes have a hard time keeping track of which zombies belong to what film. Even within the same film, Romero zombies don’t always behave the same. Some move fast, some move slow, some are mindless, some have remnants of their former personalities, some look almost human, some are little more than piles of goo. It becomes even more confusing once you begin considering those films within the Romero universe, but not created by Romero himself (e.g. the remakes and the insultingly bizarre Day of the Dead 2: Contagion). I therefore present the only safe and guaranteed method of quickly identifying a Romero zombie. You can easily and conveniently place a particular zombie in its appropriate film by simply identifying its color. In fact, by color coding Romero’s zombies, it becomes clear that, much like clothing, certain colors are more fashionable for zombies depending on the decade. The “smurf blue” of the late 70s gives way to the “cuticle pink” of the 2005 zombie season, followed by a return to the old fashioned “baby food green” of 2008. If zombie hues continue to follow this retro trend, I predict zombies will once again be blueberry colored as they were in 1970s by the year 2035, probably right around the time they'll be doing a second remake of Diary of the Dead (shudder).

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

1950s Black And White

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Smurf Blue

Day of the Dead (1985)

Dry Mold Green

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Rotting Pumpkin

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Banana Slug Yellow

Land of the Dead (2005)

Cuticle Pink

Day of the Dead 2: Contagion (2005)

Magenta

Diary of the Dead (2007)

Apple Pie Crust Brown

Day of the Dead (2008)

Baby Food Green