FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND (1981)

Any movie that starts out with a hot-air balloon crash is just asking for trouble.

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND was supposedly made in 1981, looks like it was made in 1972, and feels like it was made in 1957. It's all kinds of messed up. If it wasn't so stoopidly fun, I'd say it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I mean, it's bad. There's nothing really good about it. But none of it is boring, and being boring is the biggest sin a movie can commit. Every five minutes, it's like it's a whole other movie. You never know what's gonna hit you.

Anyway, four idiots and a dog crash into the ocean in their beautiful balloon, and life-raft their way to lovely Frankenstein Island. There's a bunch of annoying old guys (one of them is Robert Clarke, who's been in TONS better movies than this!) and an annoying Peter Brady-looking tool named Dino. Seriously. And a dog named Melvin. Seriously. You know what you're in for when one of the guys leans onto their life raft -- which there's nothing wrong with -- and says that they need to gather wood to build a raft. SERIOUSLY.

So they wander into a cliffside cave for no good reason, there's a split-second shot of the Floating Head of John Carradine, and they wind up on the main part of the island, which is lucky for them. They could have gotten killed in that cave, and nobody would ever have found them.

Then they find Amazons. Yep, there's a tribe of jungle ladies living on Frankenstein Island, and they all use human skulls as bongs, wear leopard-print bikinis, and are suspiciously white. (Really, you know? Every movie I see where there's a tribe of Amazon jungle babes, they're all white girls. I don't know if there's any science backing this up, but something tells me that isn't accurate.) And the four idiots discover that if you try to say the name of any place that ISN'T Frankenstein Island, something that's "like telepathy" makes your arm hurt really bad. SERIOUSLY. Then there's night-time snake dancing and another appearance by the Floating Head of John Carradine who spouts off about "The Power!!!!" I think they shot all of his appearances in a half hour.

So then there's some zombie dressed up kinda like the Hamburglar that nabs one of the jungle girls, and some grizzled old guys from a pirate movie show up and laugh a lot and say that they should all be friends, and then invite the team of idiots up to "where the valleys rise to the sun." They get there and wait around at a camp outside the main house on the island, and there's a bunch more zombie guys, and then Cameron Mitchell is in a jail cell and believes he's in an Edgar Allan Poe movie, and the whole shooting match is being run by Sheila Van Helsing who's the great-granddaughter of Dr. Frankenstein, and the zombie guys wave around plastic Halloween pitchforks and turn an 8x10" glossy headshot of John Carradine into an 8x10" headshot of a SKULL, and there's a zombie fight where we cut to reaction shots FROM THE ZOMBIES (who don't have emotions), and there's a weird electronic thing that gives Sheila Frankenstein the albino white zombie eyes that the zombies have, but only for a second and it's never referred to again, and the Floating Head of John Carradine who is playing the Ghost of Dr. Frankenstein pops up and says "The Power! The Golden Thread!" a lot, and Sheila's husband is a MILLION YEARS OLD and is in bed and doesn't amount to much, and Cameron Mitchell is the dad of one of the jungle girls, and then the Frankenstein Monster shows up and waves his arms around and everyone escapes, and it was all just a dream OR WAS IT?

See? You get ALL THIS for less than the price of most other movies. Nothing in the movie is related to anything else that happens in the movie, and nothing makes any sense, but I COULDN'T STOP WATCHING. Sometimes just knowing that a movie like this exists makes you glad to be alive.

FROGS (1972)

Okay. This isn't SQUIRM, but it's fun enough. Ray Milland is an old jerk who hates nature and poisons everything that moves on his little private island. Sam Elliott (who doesn't look ANYTHING like the moustached cowboy from THE BIG LEBOWSKI) is a wildlife photographer who winds up on the island after Milland's son nearly runs him down in a speedboat. Elliott must've picked the wrong weekend to go canoeing, because this happens to be the weekend that nature decides that it's had enough of Ray Milland's dickery. Everyone gets attacked by snakes, lizards, tarantulas, leeches, alligators, and, of course, frogs.

My only problem with this is that it takes itself a little too seriously. I mean, it's called FROGS, for crying out loud. (On the other hand, maybe it was supposed to be called something else originally. Frogs aren't the only thing attacking these idiots.) Then there's a big cartoon frog that hops out after the credits and slurps down a cartoon hand, so I don't know what these people were thinking. It's got a "message," which is basically "don't screw around with Mother Nature's plans, or you could get eaten by frogs," but all of these "nature turns on mankind" things have that kind of message (THEM! = "atomic radiation probably has some side effects that you might want to avoid, like giant ants"...SQUIRM = "downed power lines can make earthworms eat your face"). But it being so serious also kind of works in its favor, like a 1950s Big Bug On The Loose movie.

All in all, though, it's got a nice swampy summer vibe going on, and makes for some fun July movie viewing. Dad watched this one with me, said he remembered seeing it on TV way back when. According to him, stuff like this was on TV all the time back then. They even had made-for-TV horror movies just like this. He got off on a rant about how all the TV horror stuff was so great back when he was a kid, and nothing like the stupid CGI "Mega Octo-Python vs. The Sharkinator" stuff that Syfy shows these days, and how the next time he took me and Jack to one of those comic book conventions that we were going to find some of these things. And he wonders where I get it!!!

ASYLUM (1972)

Okay, confession time: this one actually made me stay up all night. It's probably because I started watching it at midnight this past Saturday, and I'm easier to scare after 12 o'clock. But MAN, this got to me for some stupid reason.

This is one of those many, many Amicus anthology pictures that I've already mentioned (TALES FROM THE CRYPT, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD), and while the *stories* aren't the best in this one, the *framing story* is. The setup is this: Dr. Martin is sent to an asylum for the incurably insane to interview for a job. One of the inmates is the former head doctor of the institute, Dr. Starr. But Dr. Starr has taken on another identity, and Dr. Martin has to guess which one of the inmates he is by interviewing each of them, accompanied by the attendant Max Reynolds. There's really only 3 stories in this: the first one is about a voodoo-practicing wife that gets murdered and takes her revenge from beyond the grave!!! The second is about a tailor who is hired (by Peter Cushing!) to make a strange suit out of a material that can bring things to life, but it winds up accidentally on his store's mannequin for a bit too long. This is probably the best story in the whole thing. The third is some lame split personality (or is it?) BS. The final one isn't really a story -- it's just a link back to the framing story, and is about a guy who makes tiny, anatomically correct (down to the organs!) dolls. He brings one that's supposed to be him to life, and it stabs the current head doctor of the asylum, and all hell breaks loose. In the end, we find out who the real Dr. Starr is, and there's this extended laugh that he does that goes on for FOREVER. And let me tell you, that laugh SCARED ME HALF TO DEATH. It's the craziest thing. Monsters, slashers, whatever...I can handle 'em. But this guy laughing just jangled all my nerves. Crazy.

So then I was up all night.

That's my story. Anyway, ASYLUM is great. It's a whole lot of fun, even if it's not the best Amicus anthology, but from what I've seen, you can't go wrong with any of them. Some are more hit than miss, but they're always goofy and lively.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)

Man…This. Wow. I'd been bugging my dad for what seems like FOREVER to let me watch this. His response was always something like "no, you're not ready for this." I mean, I've seen a lot of stuff, right? I figured nothing could be as disgusting as DEMONS, or as scary as SUSPIRIA or something, so how bad could this be? This gets written up in all of the horror movie books I have, and there are reviews all over the internet about it, so it's not like anything in it could be that surprising, right? So I kept going to dad with my arguments. First, it's not supposed to be that violent. There's only five kids in this, and someone always has to get away, so there could ONLY be like 4 victims, right? And everything I had read said that there's almost no blood in it. Everything's all implied. So there's that. Second, it might have been extreme for when it was made, but that was GENERATIONS ago! The whole "kids getting picked off one-by-one by toothless yokels" thing has been done to death by now (no pun intended!).

So he finally gave up.

Holy crap, man. This was disturbing. First off, it's best to go into the movie not knowing anything about it, so I'm not going to spoil any of the plot details, but if you've ever, I don't know, been on the internet, you probably already know all about how the story plays out. But it's not really about what the story is (because there's not a lot of it to go around), it's how it does what it does. And it does what it does by filling every little scene with tension. This is probably the most tense movie I've ever seen. Everything keeps your nerves on edge. Whether it's people screaming, or Leatherface squealing, or Franklin whining on and on ("I'm comin' with ya, Sally! Hold on, I'm comin' with ya!") or the *really* disturbing soundtrack, everything is keyed up to 11. Most horror movies have a big scare every so often, and then things calm down a bit. Not this, buddy! This is constantly uncomfortable, and when the big scares come, we don't go back to normal, we just go back to being uncomfortable. And then it ends, and it's like someone pulled a chair out from under you. After it was over, I barely talked for a good half hour, and if you know me, you know that NOTHING can get me to stop talking. I think Dad thought I might have to go to the emergency room or something!

Anyway, this is a movie that can traumatize you if you're not careful. It's probably one of the best movies out there, just because it does what it sets out to do really well, but it's hard for me to recommend it because of how well it does what it does. You've really got to prepare for it, like a marathon or something.