#HoldYourBreath (2012)

Directed by: Jared Cohn

Writers: Kenny Zinn (story), Geoff Meed

Somehow it happened that I watched another dreadful Asylum movie, I have absolutely no idea why. Perhaps I liked the poster, but I should have listened to the golden rule I'd already mentioned: DON'T watch The Asylum movies! Well, I asked for it...

 

Though I only planned to review two other Asylum movies, as I said in the review of Barely Legal, this one at least happens to be a landmark of some kind - it's apparently the first theatrical release by The Asylum!

 

Not that it makes a whole lot of difference - this movie does look slightly better than the others, but it's so aggressively stupid that it's just impossible to overlook. The story follows a standard group of young guys and girls looking for sex and finding death instead. This time, their doom comes in the form of a particularly nasty ghost of some murderer. There's this stupid urban legend that says you have to hold your breath when you're passing by a cemetery, otherwise you risk being possessed by all kinds of spirits. But - it only applies if you're in a car (!). If on foot, you're safe.

 

Of course, in every single movie of this type there's a stoner guy, and it's him who doesn't follow the rule (he's too busy inhaling) so he's the first one to get possessed. He manages to off a cop before the spirit passes on to another member of the group, the one that looks like a hybrid between Rafael Nadal and Christopher Reeve.

 

The only difference that this body switching creates is that most of the group members get a chance to kill someone. Otherwise, unless we count occasional red eyes (oooh, scary!), there are no body deformations of any kind.

 

Of course, The Asylum wouldn't live to their reputation if they weren't unable to completely mess up even the simplest slasher formula. Throughout its length, the movie fires a cannonade of stupidity at the viewer. First, there's the infamous "give me your cell phones and I will hide them in this glove compartment, that's about to become unreachable when we most need it" plot device. Then, there's a couple that goes to an abandoned insane asylum to have a "quick" hump, while the others immediately decide to follow them for some reason (not of a voyeuristic nature, unfortunately). So they are trying to find them and they're wandering through this huge abandoned building, and yet they never try calling them. Then, that Christopher Reeve - Rafael Nadal character, who happens to be the most irritating of the bunch, gets dared by some bimbo to sit in an old electric chair, which for some reason frightens him so much that he demands a blowjob in return. Dangerous Liaisons, eat your heart out! And to top it off, the movie ends with a ghost fight so ridiculous that you have to see it to believe (but please don't).

 

If there's anything redeeming here, it's a completely gratuitous sex scene and an unusual amount of eye violence - many murders for some reason include gouging out of an eye. However, the usual total lack of competence on the part of The Asylum directors and writers makes for a painful experience of a completely different kind than (but similar in intensity to) eye gouging out.

Camel Spiders (2011)

Directed by: Jim Wynorski

Writers: J. Brad Wilke, Jim Wynorski

With a title like this, you might thing that Camel Spiders is a part of the recent animal cross breeding craze that gave us such masterpieces as Sharktopus and Piranhaconda (to be honest, I haven't seen any of them, but unfortunately I'm going to). Unfortunately, camel spiders are real animals that look just like regular spiders, except that they're bigger and more CGI-driven. Reality is so boring!

 

The movie in Middle East or some similar place where the American troops are fighting some unnamed enemy. Suddenly, the fight is over, because the enemies have all been eaten by Camel Spiders (!). Some of those sneaky bastards find a way to infiltrate the coffin of a deceased American soldier and they are transported to America, where they start to multiply and grow to a horrible size. Oh, yeah, they also kill.

 

Alas, this movie was doomed right from the beginning. The computer animated spiders look absolutely horrible and it would have been a show-stopper even if all other things worked perfectly (which they don't). Everything is so generic and sterile, the setting is ugly, the killings laughable, but the worst thing is that everyone is so serious - the actors really seem to believe the horrible lines they're given, not to mention that they try their best to look terrified by the unconvincing spiders, which would bring a truck load of unintentional laughter just if it all weren't so damn boring.

 

Jim Wynorski hadn't made a good movie in about 20 years and he doesn't seem to have the intention to start now. Even his softcore films are more bearable than this.

Mega Snake (2007)

Directed by: Tibor Takács

Writers: Boaz Davidson (story), Robby Robinson, Alexander Volz

 

In a rare occurrence that a movie is absolutely perfectly described by its own tagline, this one proudly announces: "It's big, it's bad and it bites!". No argument there! Mega Snake marks Nu Image's less than spectacular return to the realm of animal horror, not that their previous attempts like Shark Attack have been timeless masterpieces. However, this was apparently made for the SyFy channel, so it's ten times worse by definition.

 

People may say what they want, but it seems that the size does matter. Regular killing animals are just not enough these days, we have to have them enhanced somehow, so the market is flooded with all sorts of mega piranhas, giant octopuses, dinocrocs, supergators, sharktopuses, piranhacondas and who knows what else. How does Mega Snake fit in? It's utter crap, so I guess it fits perfectly.

 

The mega-stupid story, which Boaz Davidson probably wrote while totally wasted, goes something like this: There's this weird church that uses poisonous snakes for the "worshipping" rituals. Basically - if you have no fear, the snake won't bite you. The prologue finds our hero (then a very young boy) having his initiation or something. Unfortunately, he's afraid of snakes and screws everything up, so a snake bites his father and sends him into the oblivion.

 

Fast forward twenty years later and the troubled hero still lives in the same house as before, with his mother and older brother. That brother is still a proud "church" member and provides snakes for them. One day he decides that there simply weren't enough deaths in the family, so he goes off to an Indian snake seller to buy the deadliest possible snake in the history of the Universe. It's the infamous Unteka snake, responsible for killing a really big number of Native Americans (here's a history lesson for you). Because of its unprecedented deadliness, the Indian refuses to sell it to this stupid redneck, however, he conveniently mentions the tree rules for the handling of this particular snake: 1) Never let it out of the jar, 2) Never let it eat live animals, 3) Never fear the heart of the snake. You may guess three times how many of these rules get broken in the movie. The third rule seems a bit obscure, but we'll get there later.

 

Of course, the stupid bastard immediately breaks the jar (not on purpose) and the snake escapes, but he manages to catch it and puts it in a measly plastic box. That's the last time we see anything resembling a real snake in the movie. Bad CGI, take the spotlight!

 

The following night, the deadliest snake in the world easily escapes and kills a cat, then hides in the chicken pen and kills some chickens and then kills the hero's mother. The catch is - after each killing it gets bigger, until finally it transforms into... a MEGA SNAKE!

 

This Mega Snake is actually a really boring, lame looking monster that's so artificial it's almost sad. Miraculously, some of the scenes where the snake is eating someone look quite convincing (I don't know how the people at SyFy could allow such blatant breach of their policy), but that's the only nice thing I can say about anything in the movie. The snake acts strictly like a murderer in a slasher film - it hides and kills people one by one in totally unimaginative ways, until our hero is advised by the wise Indian that "never fear the heart of the snake" means that you should actually let the snake swallow you, so you can kill it from the inside. I'm not kidding. If you were hoping for some cool scenes of mass slaughter (like in Piranha 3D), blood, guts, severed body parts and other fun stuff... well, the joke's on you.

 

It's not that they don't attempt it - there's this classic Jaws moment with the authorities refusing to close the town fair because for some reason they just don't trust the warnings about a MEGA SNAKE roaming around. So the snake breaks the party and kills some people, but it's even more pathetic than the regular killings - the stunts in the background must have been misinformed about the nature of the scenes, so they just stand there and do nothing while five meters further the terrifying MEGA SNAKE "wreaks havoc". You see, for this movie they haven't used a real MEGA SNAKE, they added it digitally in the post production, so the people probably didn't know they were supposed to be scared. Professionalism at its finest! They should really put some warning on these SyFy movies in the future. One simple "This movie was made for the SyFy Channel" at the beginning should be enough for anyone to decide if they want to proceed any further.

Nine Miles Down (2009)

Directed by: Anthony Waller

Writers: Everett De Roche, Anthony Waller

 

With its pretty high production values, Nine Miles Down was a refreshing change from the crap about which I usually write here. Unfortunately, the story didn't exactly follow, so it all boiled down to a large overall "meh".

 

The entire movie takes place in a remote drilling station somewhere in Sahara, which the security patrolman Duncan McL..., sorry, Adrian Paul, is sent to investigate after the contact with the scientists working there had been lost. As he arrives, he finds the place completely deserted, with some disturbing writings on the walls, signs of struggle and a gratuitous slaughtered jackal in one of the rooms.

 

Obviously, the first thing you want to do when you arrive at a place where something sinister had obviously happened is to spend the night there, so he does, and surprisingly he encounters no demons, ghosts or anything else during the night. However, in the morning he runs into a hot blonde scientist who just jogs around and doesn't seem horribly shaken by the things that happened.

 

Our suspicions immediately arise. Is she evil? Is she the Devil? Is the place itself evil? Is Adrian Paul insane? Why the hell is Waller showing us extreme close-ups of Adrian Paul's ass? How are sad events from Adrian Paul's past related to the horrifying visions he experiences?

 

While I appreciate some of the tension and the mystery surrounding the place and the characters, the movie simply didn't "do it" for me. Generally, when a character torments us too often with his or her visions and flashbacks and whatnot, I get bored rather quickly. Nine Miles Down wasn't boring, but I never cared about any of the characters enough to appreciate the ending or feel any bit moved by it or some crap like that.

 

One of the reasons for me not enjoying this that much might be the high expectations I had from the authors - Everett De Roche wrote some great films like Long Weekend, Razorback and Fortress (which was prevented from being one of the best films ever made only by the weaker direction), though, in all fairness, he did also write crap like Storm Warning, and Anthony Waller directed An American Werewolf in Paris, which most people hate, but for me it was great fun. Of course, this is all highly subjective, and if you read the reviews, you'll see many people enjoyed it more than I did, so... give it a shot.

 

Ninja the Protector (1986)

Directed by: Godfrey Ho

Writers: AAV Creative Unit (story), Godfrey Ho (screenplay)

 

One thing you might be wondering is who the hell is this "AAV Creative Unit" guy that supposedly wrote the, ahem, "story" for this film. Was it a (very) young Ron Artest or perhaps some previously unknown daughter of Frank Zappa? Who knows. What's more important is that the director is the infamous Godfrey Ho, the Orson Welles (or was it Ed Wood?) of Hong Kong ninja cinema.

 

This is my first Ho movie so I'm certainly no expert on his body of work, but from what I gather from the reviews written by more knowledgeable people, Ninja the Protector is totally consistent with his general "style" of filmmaking. AAV Creative Unit came up with an intriguing story of an evil ninja organisation that threatens to screw everything up. The police can't do much because (see the poster) only a ninja can defeat a ninja (!). Now where have we heard that already? Oh yeah, in just about every single ninja movie in existence.

 

But all is not lost - the leader of the police, played by Richard Harrison, is actually a ninja (!), so he spends part of the time in his office, explaining the grimness of the situation to his subordinates, and rest by walking around in his nicely coloured ninja outfit, beating the crap out of the evil ninja organisation's members and leaving them handcuffed for said subordinates to arrest and bring to the justice. Such a nice example of a split personality. Robert Louis Stevenson, eat your heart out!

 

However, this is not the only thing going on in the movie. To prevent the viewers from getting bored by the nonstop ninja action, Ho ingeniously created another subplot by inserting footage from some lame drama about two brothers, one of which is a model or something. Of course, with all the overdubbing, it's hard to know what (if anything) was going on in the original film, but in this one it is turned into a subplot of a police agent going undercover to infiltrate a model agency, which happens to be the cover for the more sinister doings of the Evil Ninja Organisation.

 

One thing you must absolutely avoid at all costs is trying to follow the "plot", as it will cause irreparable damage to your brain. Godfrey Ho is an artist and he's doesn't let such trivialities as logic and continuity get in the way of his creativity. More than once you will be baffled by some character mentioning the consequences of some event before that event has actually taken place. There's also a moment in which a character, through a flashback, remembers a soft and tender love scene which he didn't witness. The dubbing also has its own quirks - for example, in one scene a pissed off girlfriend, wanting to kick her boyfriend out, tells him to get off instead of out. Or maybe she really meant it?

 

It's not hard to see that Ninja the Protector is rightfully considered to be a masterpiece of modern cinema. Not only has Godfrey Ho given us two movies for the price of one (or perhaps none), bravely challenged our perception of time and space through the lack of continuity and the supernatural powers of the ninjas who are able to (dis)appear in a puff of smoke, not only has he given us a heartwarming drama that treats not only family relations but also the dangers of modelling (so we feel a massive relief when our lead character decides, quote, "to give up modelling immediately and lead a normal life"), drama powered by numerous but tasteful sex scenes (at least those that don't feature rape) that increase our sympathy for the characters (especially the one on the beach between the lead character's brother and some bimbo) - in addition to all this, we have an opportunity to listen to some really great music, like Jean Michel Jarre's Ethnicolor, Pink Floyd's One of These Days and many others. This music brings such depth to certain scenes that it was definitely worth stea... paying large sum of money for it.

Death Stop Holocaust (2009)

Directed by: Justin Russell

Writer: Justin Russell

Justin Russell's The Sleeper was a somewhat surprisingly interesting retro sorority slasher, one that I found worthy enough to keep an eye out for the director's other offerings. Death Stop Holocaust is his earlier movie and, like The Sleeper, a nostalgia piece that this time attempts to recreate the look and feel of the 1970's grindhouse films. It's almost completely style-over-substance and, while it's very successful in the audio-visual domain, it fails the most basic movie test ever, and that is the ability not to induce boredom.

 

I was extremely happy when I noticed Jenna Fournier in one of the lead roles. Her part in The Sleeper wasn't big, but she was my favourite character in the movie, not to mention that she's the cutest young actress I've seen probably since Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty. In this movie, she and her friend Lisa Krenisky go to a remote island to have a nice peaceful vacation, which turns into... a nightmare of terror, no less. I wonder how much they pay the person who comes up with such original taglines.

 

Anyway, it doesn't take long for the two girls to fall victims to a gang of brutal maniacs with scary animal masks that start to terrorize them for no apparent reason. To my endless disappointment, Jenna is killed very early and Lisa is left alone to play a cat-and-mouse game with the killers throughout the large chunk of the movie. If there's anything scarier than a silent killer wearing a pig mask, it's the disturbing fact that other people on the island seem to be in liaison with the killers. That and the scary Japanese long-haired ghosts. In fact, I would argue that the Japanese ghosts are even scarier, but that's beside the point.

 

The main problem (which Justin successfully solved in The Sleeper by introducing dozens of characters) is that the attackers are very soon left with a single helpless female victim. Obviously they can't kill her because the movie would be over, so the only thing left for them is to act like a bunch of complete retards and, instead of killing or torturing her, to simply let the girl go for no reason every time they capture her, which is often.

 

With any trace of story hopelessly gone, the movie soon turns into tedious and repetitive exercise for nerves where the only thing happening are Lisa's pointless nightmarish visions that serve no purpose except as another means of attack on the viewer's senses. All this is powered by Lisa's too literal understanding of the "scream queen" phrase. She screams and screams, and then screams again, and she's loud and while I have no objection to the logic of that (in that situation I would have been screaming, too) it's just so damn annoying. Many times I thought "Just off her already and let my ears take some rest!".

 

Even though the movie is brutal in places, it simply lacks the atmosphere and it's hard to feel sympathy for the main character, so I find The Sleeper a much better film. While it sucks for Death Stop Holocaust, it's good for Justin Russell, since it shows obvious improvement. He just needs to do one thing in his following movie and that is to give the lead role to the wonderful Jenna Fournier. It's a sure win.

Cheerleader Camp (1988)

Directed by: John Quinn

Writers: David Lee Fein, R.L. O'Keefe

From David Fein and R.L. O'Keefe, the brilliant minds that brought us... well, nothing, comes this extraordinary tale of, you wouldn't guess it in a million years, a cheerleader camp (!) Admittedly, a story about the place where cheerleaders train for their cheerleading might've been a little boring without being spiced up with a bit of something extra, like for example a murderous maniac on a rampage, or steamy lesbian orgies, or (preferably) both. Well, orgies are unfortunately out, but a maniac is there, so there's at least one good thing about those cheerleaders - they die.

 

The story takes place in, brace yourselves, a cheerleader camp (!) somewhere in the woods. I have no idea what that place is supposed to be and how it works, since the sound was too bad for me to understand most of the dialogue, not that I feel a terrible loss about that. Apparently, some cheerleaders are there either to learn to cheerlead, or to have some kind of cheerleading competition, so there's an expected large collection of cheap bimbos, in addition to which we also have some equally useless male characters, like a fat prankster bastard with a camera, an inept sheriff, the lead heroine's stupid annoying horny boyfriend etc. The least bad moments in the movie were the deaths of these losers.

After the first few bodies are found, they are considered suicides, so the party doesn't stop. We wouldn't want a few minor deaths get in the way of the cheerleading, would we? This means that the characters continue to ignore the killer's presence, giving him the opportunity to increase the score (i.e. body count) without much effort, but it also means that the murders are not shown. Unfortunately, this lack of explicit violence continues deep into the film and poses a serious problem for the movie's integrity. Instead, the director chose to torture us with the lead character's nightmares, which are repetitive, boring and serve absolutely no purpose, except as a setup for the final plot twist, which is simply "meh".

The opening credits look as if freshly stolen from a John Carpenter movie, unfortunately, all similarities end there. This is not Halloween, and the lack of violence (and orgies) is not in any way compensated by tension, uneasiness or anything similar. Boredom is the dominating feeling and the movie is saved from being completely unwatchable only by the two wonderful leads, played by Betsy Russell (Saw III, IV, and so on) and Lucinda Dickey (who played one of the lead roles in Ninja III: The Domination, even though I haven't mentioned it in the review of that movie). Seeing those two beautiful ladies warmed my heart and made all the crap (which comprises pretty much everything else in the movie) almost bearable, but it's still not enough to recommend anything but avoiding this title.