Nightmare at Noon (1988)

After having seen Mutant, I had a craving for more Wings Hauser in a zombie film, and fortunately, I was in luck with this movie. Considering it also had Brion James, this had all the makings of being superior to Mutant, and I looked on it with much anticipation.

Nightmare at Noon has Wings as an entertainment lawyer taking a vacation with his wife in their Cadillac RV. They pick up hitchhiker Bo Hopkins, and head into a sleepy little town for some food. Unbeknownst to them, an albino Brion James has earmarked this town for an experiment where the drinking water is contaminated, turning the town into homicidal zombies. They try to escape, but Brion has also set up some device that turns off people's cars if they drive by it. Now they team up with George Kennedy, the town's sheriff, and his daughter, to get to the bottom of this and eventually take Brion down.



This was a pretty solid film. The zombies were kind of weak, and they didn't eat people, they tried to kill them by conventional means, like with guns and whatnot. There were plenty of ludicrous explosions: one had a dirt bike jump a van or something and explode into flames; another had Kennedy getting set on fire and jumping into a van that worked as Brion's command post, causing it to explode; and at the end there's a helicopter chase thrown in for the sole purpose of blowing one of them up. It also wanted to give this Western element, from the showdowns in the abandoned town squares, to the actual showing of High Noon at a local drive-in where our heroes confronted Brion and his men. Whatever it was, Nightmare at Noon is just a ridiculous pile of silliness that gave me and my friends tons of enjoyment.

Wings was good in this. He always had his mouth open, even when he wasn't speaking. I don't know what that was. I couldn't tell if he thought it was a cool acting effect, or if that's what he does in real life. I've seen a bunch of his films, and I can't remember if he did that in all of them. I'll be looking for it now. I'm debating going back and watching all his other ones just to see if he never closes his mouth. Has anyone else ever noticed this?



Bo Hopkins tries to throw us a curve here with his classic type-cast as a sheriff. We think, because he's a hitchhiker, there's no way he could be a sheriff too, but we're wrong. He was a sheriff before he ran off to chase a dude who raped a girl or something and was let off due to a technicality. After George Kennedy dies, Bo slips into his most comfortable role, and takes over as this town's sheriff. How did this guy get into doing sheriffs? It seems like that's all he does. Even when he's not doing them, he is.

Brion. Brion, Brion, Brion. Let me count the ways. Does it get any more amazing? This is the second film I've seen him in as an albino (the first: Virtual Assassin aka Cyberjack, with DTVC Hall of Famer Michael Dudikoff), and I must say, it never gets old. Brion never gets old. It's a shame he passed in 1999, because he still had so much more to give us. How many more albinos could he have played? We'll never know.



I dug George Kennedy in this film. I'll always remember him fondly for those Breath Assure commercials. Is that stuff still around? There was an MTV Music Awards about ten years ago where Jim Carey thought he'd be funny and say about not kissing Will Smith: "One word, two syllables: Breath Assure." I was with a bunch of people, and I only knew a few of them, and when I said: "Breath Assure is two words, three syllables, you moron!" no one laughed, and some of them looked at me funny. I learned a valuable lesson that day: no one likes a Grammar Hammer. Anyway, I digress.

Yeah, this is a good deal. The copy I got from Netflix was listed as the "2003 version". I'm serious. I'm not sure who the pretentious bastard was that decided a crummy zombie film from the late eighties needed to be updated, but it happened. I've never seen the older version, so I can't say which is better. Hopefully they're both hot. This is a fun romp and worth the cash. Give it a spin.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100261/

From Dusk Till Dawn II: Texas Blood Money (1999)

Bruce Campbell is one of my favorite actors. From the Evil Deads to Brisco County all the way down to Jack of All Trades and his recent stint on that USA show Burn Notice, if Campbell's in it, I wanna see it. When I saw on my program guide that this film was on Sci-Fi, and Bruce Campbell was top billed, I was stoked. I decided to forego watching the edited version for renting the DVD on Netflix. Again, Campbell was top billed there too, so I figured he would play a prominent role, right?

From Dusk Till Dawn II: Texas Blood Money is really more about Mexican blood money. The guy from Pulp Fiction who brings Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames down to Zed is a bank robber on the run from the law. Sheriff Bo Hopkins (as if he plays anything else) goes to the guy's friend, Terminator II et al's Robert Patrick, to find out where he is. Patrick runs some subterfuge, then rounds up a gang of bad dudes and meets the Pulp Fiction guy down in Mexico. There, all but Patrick are infected with the vampire virus after Danny Trejo bites the first guy while he's waiting for the rest to show up. Anyway, Patrick, Hopkins, and a bunch of Federales take care of business.



You'll notice Bruce Campbell's name doesn't show up in the plot synopsis. That's because he's only in it for like FIVE MINUTES!!!!! I was beyond pissed. Not at the movie, but at myself. I fell for the old Campbell bait-and-switch hook, line, and sinker. As a veteran bad movie watcher, I knew better than that. Just the same, it still hurt, and I was pretty disappointed. I watched some old Hercules episodes with him in them to make myself feel better.

As far as the rest of the film goes, it's your run-of-the-mill vampire movie. The problem with that is the film makers are intent on giving this to us as something more than the run-of-the-mill. They try all these cute camera angles and throw in these off-beat conversations that are more annoying than cute and more trite than off-beat. I say, if you're gonna make a vampire flick, just fuckin' do it, man. Forget mixing it with some indie-film noir kind of thing. Only the absolute best film makers could pull something like that off, and if you're making something Direct to Video, chances are you aren't that talented.



I liked Robert Patrick in this. It would've been nice if he'd been able to act opposite Bruce Campbell, but that's neither here nor there. We usually see Patrick as this overly buttoned-up baddie, so it was cool to see him as a greasy bank robber living in a trailer park. One thing I did respect that the film makers did was have Patrick steal Sheriff Bo Hopkins' sunglasses, so he could put them on and remind us of his work in Terminator II.

Danny Trejo and Bo Hopkins shined in this as characters they play in almost every other movie. Bo Hopkins is still solid as the small town sheriff, the role he seems to have been born to play. Trejo was also great as the cut-throat Latino. It seems if Trejo plays a Native American, he's the benevolent friend to the hero who usually sacrifices himself to save him. If he plays a Latino, though, he's usually a bad guy. The Pulp Fiction guy didn't understand these rules, and he made the mistake of getting a ride with Trejo, and of course was bitten after Trejo turned into a vampire. These people never learn.



I mentioned above the attempts by the film makers to give us something other than a run-of-the-mill vampire flick, and there was one filming device used by the director over and over that annoyed me more than anything else. I called it inanimate object cam. He had rotating fan cam, car radiator cam, bank safe padlock cam, telephone receiver cam... it was like he was totally fascinated with the idea of what inanimate objects see when they observe us. It was cool once, but every scene... it just got old quick. Does this director think people like Kurosawa or Bergman got to be who they were by their gimmicky camera angles?

This is really not worth renting. If you see it on Sci-Fi, and you've got nothing else going on, maybe give it a try, and that's a huge maybe. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time. I think the Blade movies were more entertaining vampire flicks, and that's not really saying much, is it?

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120860/

Mutant aka Night Shadows (1984)

I first got wind of this movie through a friend, and ended up buying it cheap (one cent before shipping) on Amazon. Unfortunately, the transfer was pretty rough. The picture had these trails whenever anyone would move, and it made us feel like we were on acid. I looked on the box, and "DVD" was written in lower case letters, maybe indicating its cheapness. The cover image I have above is from a different release, so maybe that one is of a better quality.

Mutant is about two brothers, one played by Wings Hauser, who are going on an end of school vacation. Wings is a dick, apparently, and he pisses off some rough dudes who run his car off the road. While the two are waiting in town for the car to be fixed, they run into the toughs again, and sheriff Bo Hopkins tells them to stay at some old woman's house while their car gets fixed. Wings' brother disappears over night, and he has to find him. As he does, he learns the townsfolk have been subjected to toxic waste and are turning into zombies. With the help of Hopkins and a hot teacher/bartender, Wings has to do everything he can to get out of town alive.



As zombie movies go, I've seen better... and I've also seen worse. This is no Romero film, but it has a certain charm due to its age that makes it a little more interesting to me than say a 28 Days Later or Resident Evil, especially more than the latter. It's just a good film to put on with some friends and yell at the screen.

One of the elements that makes it so entertaining is our resident DTVC Hall of Famer Wings Livinryte. He's definitely livin' right in this. He plays a heel to start with, then gradually redeems himself because he wants to impress the hot teacher/bartender. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're so inclined) he has no sex with food scene with this woman like he did with Kathleen Kinmont in Art of Dying. It's funny, because the zombies in this were pretty gross, yet nothing they did was ever grosser than that sex scene.



Speaking of the zombies, they were interesting. They had no set group of abilities or detriments. I'm not saying some were good at somethings and others at others, I'm saying at one point none of the zombies could run, then in another scene they were running, and then in another they were limping again. Depending on the convenience of the plot, they were either easy to kill or escape from, or lethal, unstoppable killing machines. One of the funnier parts was how the zombies had these gashes on the palms of their hands that oozed this yellow liquid. It was like a white grape juice stigmata.

Bo Hopkins, surprise surprise, plays a sheriff in this. He's always playing a sheriff. He actually plays a sheriff in another Wings Hauser movie, Nightmare at Noon, which also features the late great Brion James. It's hard to argue with it, because if I were making a film, and needed a small town sheriff, I can think of few people who'd fit the bill better than Hopkins. Maybe Billy Bob Thorton or Kevin Sorbo.



Looking at the back cover, I noticed that one of the producers was named Dick Clark. I figured there was no way it was the same dude, but an imdb check confirmed it. The world's oldest teenager produced a Wings Hauser zombie film. He's uncredited in the movie, so it's probably only later that his name was associated officially with it. I wonder if he let Wings hang with him that year for New Year's Rockin' Eve. I bet he didn't even return Wings' phone calls.

This is worth your time if you rent it or can buy it cheap. Remember, though, that some transfers, like the one I have, are crap, and if you paid more than a buck or two for it, you'll feel ripped off. The good one's probably the one with the image I have at the top. The one I have has some weird creature with big teeth that isn't even in the film on the cover. Stay away from that one, unless you want bad acid flashbacks.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087796/

Uncle Sam (1997)

I think I saw this film with some friends the same night we rented Jack Frost. Or maybe we saw the trailer for it on the video that had Jack Frost, and we rented it later. I don't remember, and I'm not sure it's all that important anyway.

Uncle Sam is about a guy killed in Desert Storm who sits in a coffin in his sister's house for a while before his charred body is resurrected and he dons an Uncle Sam costume and kills everyone that's not patriotic. This film also has Isaac Hayes and the guy who does G.W. impersonations, which is interesting, because I didn't know the guy existed before G.W. was elected in 2000. Anyway, there's a big Fourth of July cookout, and Uncle Sam, who's already killed quite a few people, has plans to do away with a lot more then. Isaac Hayes won't let that happen, nor a kid who's related to the soldier (I can't remember if he was the son or nephew. It doesn't really matter). They blow the bastard up.

 

This movie was disturbingly bad. I like bad horror as much as the next guy, but this fell smack dab in the category of depraved, and I couldn't get behind that. Most distressing was some kid who was scarred with burns on his body, rendered blind, and confined to a wheel chair after a bad fireworks accident. It took a silly horror movie and made it darker than it needed to be. The people who make these films need to understand that you can't have it both ways: it's either silly or dark. When you've got a guy in a silly Uncle Sam costume killing people, you can't have a hideously scarred boy in a wheel chair.

My buddy liked this. I'm not sure I really get why. He liked it more than Jack Frost, which was pure silly, and silly done right. I'm assuming he loved it for how horribly bad it was; a bad that made me hate it. A bad that makes me sick to my stomach as I describe it to you.

We were all shocked to see this had the guy who does Bush impressions. You know the guy I'm talking about. He did that show the guys that made South Park used to have. He looks just like G.W. I've never seen him in anything other than when he's impersonating Bush, and even crazier, this film came out before Bush was elected, so it's not like he was playing on any fame from doing Bush. It was just another strange wrinkle in a totally odd movie.

 
I think the filmmakers were trying to make a point about the way a family deals with a soldier going away to war and dying. There's no killing by Uncle Sam for the first 45 minutes because of this. I think it's a very important issue, one that's even more relevant today; but I'm not sure a campy yet depraved horror film with a guy dressed as Uncle Sam killing people is the right venue to raise that issue. It just adds to the overall "huh?" factor of this film for me, and makes me all the more ill in trying to fathom what was going on in it.

I'm getting a headache, so I better wrap this up. Don't go near this. Don't rent it, don't watch it for free, don't have it on while you're doing something else. If your options are watching this, or staring at a wall for 90 min, start staring. This was hardcore.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118025/

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