Terror Eyes - Campfire Satanthology

Terror Eyes
1989
D: Eric Parkinson, Michael Rissi, Steve Sommers
W: Eric Parkinson, Vivian Schilling

S:  Vivian Schilling, Daniel Roebuck, Lance August
Not rated - Approx 90 Min
Park-Schilling Productions Inc.

Taglines
 - No more films... no more horror... what's the Devil to do?

Alternate Titles:
None









"It was wonderful, just wonderful....superb....just lovely....double thumbs up.  Just like the Wonderful World of Disney.  Let me ask you all a question:  Where's the guts?  Where's the gore?"
                                                          - Richard (while possessed)

Terror Eyes was a blind buy off of Amazon.  I was hunting around for random VHS tapes, just for kicks and giggles.  Terror Eyes popped up for 99 cents.  I figured, "What the hell!  Why not!" and plunked it down (virtually of course) with the rest of the tapes in my cart.  That was a few years ago.  I finally got a chance to sit down and enjoy this little ditty in my new media room/office (Yeah, I'm moving up in the world!) and I've gotta say, I was quite surprised!

This is an anthology film, comprised of three separate stories and of course the obligatory wrap around story. The wrap around revolves around a young advertising executive who is assigned to write a horror screenplay for a horror film during a writers strike.  Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves though.

Troy is playing poker with a stuffed monkey.  Seriously.  He is.

ROEBUCK!

Late nite snack attack?

The opening story is about a young couple, Starla and Troy, who receive a mysterious book (called The Book of Life) by a shady car-salesman-looking-guy (played by Daniel Roebuck) that contains their entire life history and future.  Unfortunately for Troy, that future is not going to last very long.  According to the book, he's going to kill himself soon.  Troy (being your typical,  testosterone fueled dude) forbids Starla to read the book anymore.  Starla (being your typical, defiant type) just can't leave it alone.  Troy decides to put an end to things once and for all, first attempting to throw the book out in the dumpster.  When he gets back into their apartment the book is back sitting on the table.  He tries to rip the pages out, but to no avail.  He tries to burn the book, but it won't burn.  Finally he decides if nothing else will work he will dissolve it with acid.  Naturally, I won't spoil the end of the story...but "Starla" wakes up and we discover it was all a dream.

Starla's real name is Eva and she is the advertising executive.  The shady guy that gave her the book is (in waking life) her husband Richard.  Eva is frustrated because she isn't a writer and doesn't have the first idea how to write a horror screenplay.  She was hoping maybe she could use her dream but after waking she couldn't remember it.

ROEBUCK!

Hmmm....something is off about Richard.

Eva and Richard go on a camping trip with some friends and while sitting around the campfire, having a a grand old time, Richard goes off to take a leak in the woods.  It's there, in the dark of the woods, taking a leak that he is possessed by a demon (or Agent of Hell as he's called in the film).  When Richard returns he starts acting like a total Dick (see what I did there?) and is trying to force Eva to come up with a horror story.

Their friends (none of whom seem to notice that Richard has changed from a sweet, caring type to a major douche nozzle) attempt to help Eva out by telling stories about scary stuff that's happened to them.

Mannie doesn't know what he's getting into....

Neither does his bookie!

The next story involves their friend Mannie (played by Dan Bell.  You might know him better as Neil in the Wayne's World movies or as Smiley in Darkman!)  Back in the day, Mannie had a bit of a gambling problem (especially when it came to betting on horses) and ended up owing his bookie a lot of money.  Instead of breaking his legs in twelve places, his bookies offers him and alternative:  Steal money and jewels from his wife's safe and they will split the loot.  Not really having much of an alternative, Mannie agrees.  What follows is a twisted sort of time travel/Groundhog Day tale in which Mannie keeps reliving the same day over and over again as his bookie continues to murder his wife and attempting to murder him.

Hey, she found Bobby Fischer!

Hey now, my kinda video game!

Never bring your fists to an axe fight....

The final story is about a woman named Alex who wins a chess championship and publicly announces that she will be using winnings to fund a campaign against a video game company that sells games that glorify rape, murder and other unsavory acts.  She is kidnapped by the head of the video game company and is placed in a real life game of life & death where she must solve a series of puzzles before ultimately ending up in a ghost town where she must play a final cat and mouse game against the crazed gamer designer, old west style.

This game is can get a bit dicey.....

She's heading for the 90's living in the wild, wild west!

The wraparound concludes with the Agent of Hell revealing himself, some carnage and then of course the obligatory feel good ending....which is fine cause we're not really here for the wraparound anyway.

DEMON ROEBUCK!

I've heard of FLASH mobs, but this is ridiculous!

Gunned down by a demon with invisible guns.....

GORE
There's some red stuff, but not a lot.  There is a pretty nice melting flesh effect in the Book of Life story.  In the Groundhog Day segment, there are some gun shot wounds, and the same goes for the Video Game segment.

T&A
No skin in this one, amigos.

MONSTERS
The Agent of Hell is an interesting make-up (also rendered on the box art) with horns coming out from behind his eyes.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I had an awful lot of fun with this one.  It's a hell of a lot of fun and the performances are all extremely campy, especially Daniel Roebuck who wrenches up his performance to an eleven once he's possessed.  Terror Eyes (to the best of my knowledge) has never been released on DVD.  This VHS only gem is well worth hunting down a copy and firing up your VCR.  You could also watch the film in it's entirety on YouTube, but I think that would be far less fun.  VHS OR BUST BABY!

Back of the VHS box.  Just don't make 'em like they used to!

VHS: Viral - Terror Gets An Upload

VHS: Viral
2014
Bunch of Directors, Writers and Stars!
Rated R - Approx 82 Min.
 8383 Productions/Bloody Disgusting/Collective Digital Studios
aka  Video Tapes: Virus 
         V/H/S: New Virus 

Mayhem Goes Viral












I sort of think of VHS as this generation's Creepshow....at least in that it's an anthology franchise.  You don't see too many sequels to anthology films.  Sure, we just got The ABC's of Death 2 (which I covered yesterday) but I don't really consider that an anthology so much as a mini film-fest.  When I think of anthology films I think wraparound segment with 3 to 5 stories interspersed between.

If you've seen any of the prior VHS films then you know the score:  Anthology Found Footage Films.  However the series has been evolving with each edition that comes out.  In the first outing everything fit in with the VHS aesthetic. One of the shorts was filmed with a hidden camera in glasses, others with various forms of consumer handy-cams (except for the short that completely took place from a laptop computer's web cam).  They all looked like something you might find on a VHS tape.  In VHS 2, they started to use concepts like a camera in a fake eye, a Go-Pro camera and professional cameras used by a documentary crew.  In VHS: Viral we get cell phone footage, documentary crew footage, police surveillance footage, Go-Pro's and in one of the shorts, the found footage is completely dropped and takes on full cinematic framework!

So let's take a look at the newest entry piece by piece:


Vicious Circles - This is the wrap around segment and it follows the events during a police chase involving an ice cream truck.  Apparently the truck is leading the police in circles and spreading death and destruction in it's wake.  It's unclear really how this is supposed to tie in the other films.  It's quite disjointed and didn't make a lick of sense, but it had a few interesting moments in it.

 

Dante the Great - The first (and best) of the segments is presented like a documentary.  An aspiring magician living in a trailer park finds fame and fortune after finding a mysterious cape that allows him to perform real magic.  Unfortunately magic comes with a price and the supernatural entity that allows Dante to perform his miraculous feats needs to feed on fresh victims often.  Through various bits of footage (including Dante's own collection of VHS tapes that he keeps a record of the cape's victims on) we witness him descend further and further into darkness as the cape takes over.  When police raid his theater it's a pretty incredible fight as an armed SWAT team befalls terrible deaths at the hands of Dante and his magic.  As a former professional magician, of course I found this to be quite intriguing and if there was to be a rogue magi who was able to perform real magic, I imagine it would go down pretty much like this!  This is the segment in which the found footage aesthetic is dropped when the SWAT team confronts Dante.  Worth the price of admission for this segment.

 

Parallel Monsters - A man invents a machine that opens up a portal to another universe.  Turns out that his doppleganger from that universe created that same machine.  The two men, excited by their success and discovery decide to swap places for fifteen minutes to explore each other's mirrored universe.  All seems exactly the same at first, only mirrored.  Then a single picture hanging on the wall proves to be different in each universe and leads to the discovery that this are radically different.  There are some fun effects here and while it's not anything we haven't seen before in other films and TV shows, it's still a fun take.  It would have been nice to have been able to explore the parallel universe a little more, we still get a disturbing glimpse into a horrifying world.

 

Bonestorm - I've got some mixed feelings on this one.  On one hand our man characters are completely deplorable douche bags that you just want to punch in the face as soon as you meet them.  On the other hand, it's got some great practical effects and when shit goes sideways, it happens in the middle of the day....which somehow makes it even more disturbing.  So the "plot" revolves around some skateboard punks who hire a camera man to film them pulling off tricks and stunts.  They end up taking a trip down to Tijuana to drink, smoke weed and film some more.  That's when they run afoul of a Mexican death ritual.  Cult members start attacking them from every angle and after then manage to kill off all the cult members (with their skateboards and a gun that one of them randomly has (?)) they are transformed into skeletal wraiths and begin their attack anew.  What makes this particularly cool is the fact that these skeletal wraiths look A LOT like the Templar zombies from the Blind Dead series!  Also Bonestorm is such a 90's-tastic title!  Sounds like an NES or Sega game I would have played back in the day!

GORE

As usual there is plenty of gore to be had.  Some of the highlights include a SWAT team member having his chest and rib cage ripped open by magic with his innards falling out everywhere.  Various limbs are ripped asunder by various monsters.


T&A
There is some nudity, but not a lot.


MONSTERS
There are a few different monsters on display here.  I don't want to give away too much here, so I'll just reiterate that the Mexican zombies are great!


Final Thoughts
I had a good time with this one.  It's certainly not redefining the genre here, but as far as found footage goes, you could do a lot worse.  I will be very interested to see where the VHS series goes from here.  There was supposed to be a forth segment titled Gorgeous Vortex, which if I'm not mistaken is where the DVD/Blu Ray image comes from.  I'm not sure why the segment was dropped though.

The ABC's of Death - Or 26 Ways to Die Violently

The ABC's of Death
2012
Directed by -  26 Different People
Written by 26 Different People
Starring a whole shitload of people!



Taglines:
26 Directors, 26 Ways to Die.
It's Not Educational.



Alternate Titles:
Abeceda Smrti (Alphabet of Death) Bosnia
Herzegovina (States) Serbia

I love anthology films...always have.  There is something so satisfying about the anthology....maybe it's the feeling that you're getting more bang for your buck with multiple stories.....maybe it's the fact that it feels like the film equivalent to an old EC comic book....whatever the case, it's something I just can't resist.

When I first heard about The ABC's of Death, I was a bit skeptical.  Seriously?  Twenty-six different shorts?  The first thing that popped to mind (for some odd reason) as an old VHS tape that I used to have, called Moron Movies.  It was a no budget affair, which consisted on five to thirty second films on varying subjects.  Some were fairly amusing in a "It's three o'clock in the morning and I've had too much to drink" sort of way.  The shorts ranged from stuff like "Jello Makes a Lousy Doorstop" and "Punishing a Camera For Taking Lousy Pictures" to "Hitler in First Grade" and "Ghetto Divorce Court".  It was a grab bag of weirdness.  Actually now that I'm thinking about it.....I kinda wanna watch it again. Anyway, the point is, 26 shorts seemed like and hell of a lot to cram into one feature.

The results are mixed.  Some of the shorts are fantastic.....D is for Dogfight, H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion, Q is for Quack, T is for Toilet and X is for XXL all rank among my favorites.  Then there are some that are truly head-scratchers....F is for Fart is one of the weirdest shorts in the whole series.....of course, it WAS written/directed by Noboru Iguchi, who gave us such whack-tastic films as Machine Girl, Mutant Girls Squad, Dead Sushi and RoboGeisha.  Then there are the bottom of the barrel shorts.  M is for Miscarriage comes to mind immediately.  I was so disappointed when I found out that Ti West wrote and directed that one.  It was just so unimaginative and contrived.  In between are the rest.  Which range from okay to mediocre.

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the flick and I will buy the blu ray when it comes out.....but there were just some instances where I found myself questioning how some of the shorts made it into the final product.  A little game I liked to play was trying to figure out that word while watching the short.  Some were fairly easy to figure, such as D is for Dogfight and M is for Miscarriage, but some of the others I really hard time trying to decipher.....and some I even had to downright question, such as K is for Klutz....which is an animated short about a woman who runs afoul of her own....er.... excrement.  It really had nothing to do with being clumsy and I spent most of the short figuring that K would stand for Kling On (Cling On......you'll understand when you see it).

Midnight Cinephile Totals:

Body Count:  Well, there are at least 26 deaths in here.  Some shorts feature more than one death.

Boob Count:  There's some nudity to be had here, including my favorite bit with an anthropomorphic burlesque dancer's furry boobs.

Beast Count:  There are plenty of monsters and creatures roaming through the shorts here, my favorite being the monster Toilet in the T is for Toilet short.



Final Thoughts:
Again, the shorts are a bit uneven.  Some are great, some are not.  But that is to be expected in any anthology.  There will always be strong stories and there will always be weak ones.  I think that this will be a great "Party Movie"......and I can think of a million different drinking games that you could play with it.

Final Rating:
Three out of Five Pizza Rolls!