Mongo Nation

The best sci-fi/slasher/buddy comedy/exploitation/road picture of the decade thus far?

By Jeremy Azevedo

Anyone who knows me could tell you that I spend a great deal of my time watching relatively obscure movies. In my pursuit of those rare gems that get skipped over on account of everybody’s too busy watching “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”. I most often find myself eyeball deep in some real shit.

The problem with most B movies is that they often realize halfway through production that the original idea wasn’t that great to begin with and just give up, resulting in a half-hearted mess. Either that or they try to hard to be an A picture because they don’t know their place. Oftentimes, the best that you can hope for is that the film would at least be unintentionally funny. But every once in awhile you see a B movie that is executed flawlessly by people that:

1. Understand the wants and expectations of the B movie audience and…
2. Actually have the chops to pull it off, without ever looking like they’re trying too hard, to appear is if the humor (intentional or not) came to them effortlessly, and to capture the spirit of fun that makes people want to make and watch these kinds of movies in the first place.

“Dahmer Vs. Gacy” is one such movie.

Directed by cult favorite Ford Austin, “Dahmer Vs Gacy” is, on the surface, a horror/comic take off on “Freddy Vs Jason”. You’ve got your two serial killing icons, you make up some excuse for them to exist in the same time and place, and you see what might happen when the two finally meet. As the kind of kid who collected serial killer trading cards to piss my parents off, I was quite pleased to see two of my “favorites” as the titular characters. And as a Guns N’ Roses fan, I gotta say I was pleasantly surprised to see original G N’ R drummer Steven Adler make a cameo as well!

Born in a lab as part of a secret military program to breed soulless super-killers, a freak accident allows the two maniacs to escape and go on a massive killing spree across America, ultimately culminating in the showdown that we are promised by the film’s title. Along the way, they garner the attention of a bloodthirsty media, in a nod to more “serious” (though some would argue, equally campy) serial killer fare like “Natural Born Killers”. They also attract the ire of Ringo, a holy soldier to whom God (voiced by Harland Williams) speaks to through the power of crazy, as well as a shit ton of ninjas.

Yes, ninjas. Read the rest of this entry →

We take a look at some of the sexiest, most influential women ever to be chased around by a guy in a Halloween mask.

By Jeremy Azevedo

Say what you will about Rob Zombie, but the dude knows his horror. More specifically, he knows his scream queens, as evidenced by the cast of Halloween II.  Now some of you (or more specifically, those of you that wear your underwear on the outside of your pants and are required by law to wear a helmet when riding in a car) may be wondering what is a “scream queen”?

Well, it’s funny that you should ask, because not only am I going to tell you what a scream queen is, I’m also going to provide you with examples.

A scream queen is an actress that is known for appearing in horror movies with a certain amount of regularity. That’s pretty much it. There are many different kinds of scream queens, ranging from the innocent “last girl” to the victim, the horny teen and even sometimes the aggressor. But the one thing that they all have in common is that at some point in whichever movie they appear in, there will be a scene in which they run around screaming while someone is trying to stab or bludgeon them or whatever. Hence the name, “scream queen”. Simple enough?

Now that the definitions are out of the way, following is a list of our favorite scream queens from horror movies past and present:

Scout Taylor-Compton

Of course you’ll recognize Scout from Mr. Zombie’s recent Halloween remakes, playing the part of victim du jour, Laurie Strode. In playing the part of the “last girl”, Scout has great potential to keep working in the genre. The reasons for this are twofold: One, the last girl is generally the star of the movie. Because they are typically cute in that sort of way that allows them to play a teenager well into their thirties, “last girl” archetypes like Scout can potentially keep this role going for years to come. Second, she doesn’t take off her top, which separates her from the “horny teen” character role that usually gets killed in the first third of every horror movie. This isn’t really an ideal role to have because eventually, audiences get tired of seeing the same chick’s tits over and over and they move on to the next thing. I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing a lot more of Scout in the near future, especially since she’s going to be playing Lita Ford in “The Runaways”, which is obviously not a horror film but is still totally awesome.

Sarah Michellle Gellar

Not only was she Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but SMG (as I like to call her) has also starred in numerous horror films, most notably “Scream 2″, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “The Grudge”. She also played Daphne in the “Scooby Doo” movies, but I don’t think those films technically count as horror films because the ghosts always turn out to be a carnie or a creepy professor or something like that in the end.

Asia Argento

The daughter of famed Italian horror/suspense director Dario Argento, Asia Argento is the prototype for the “Suicide Girls” generation of scream queens to follow in her footsteps. With dark hair, tattoos, a propensity for nudity and a near constant sneer, Asia is instantly recognizable to American horror fans despite the fact that most of her films are in Italian. Read the rest of this entry →

Dahmer plus Gacy, plus clowns, plus ninjas, plus Steven Adler = AWESOME!

By Jeremy Azevedo

When two of the most notorious killers of all time are cloned in a secret government experiment, you can be that nothing good will come of it.

Unless by “something good”, you mean Dahmer Vs. Gacy, a bloody serial killing spree the likes of which haven’t been seen since Freddy Vs. Jason! But whereas Freddy and Jason are fictional characters, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy are clearly the real deal!

Loose in a world filled with victims, Dahmer and Gacy engage in a horrific race to prove who is the better serial killer. When the government can’t stop them, they send ninjas. When ninjas can’t stop them, they send Steven Adler, the original drummer for Guns N’ Roses. When even that fails, everyone is pretty much f**ked until the two monsters inevitably take each other out.

Check out the awesome trailer right here:

Dahmer Vs. Gacy is currently showing at The American Film Market and is coming soon to late-night theaters and DVD!

We make the Nerdcore calendar girls scream!

Each year, Nerdcore releases a calendar of naked porn stars and various hot babes re-enacting moments from popular geek fantasies. These have involved subjects ranging from video games, to superheroes, to science fiction. This year, Nerdcore surprised dorks everywhere by going with a horror theme! I don’t know what they were so surprised about; few people are as hopelessly nerdy as a hardcore horror fan. And I should know. We smell our own.

So anyway, our foxy field reporter Laryn Michael went down to Royal Clayton’s English Pub to talk to all the sexy Nerdcore models and the dweebs that coerced them into getting naked in the first place. The resulting interview may be too sexy for some… So if you are watching from your office, please make sure that you don’t have to stand up for at least a few minutes. (Trust me on this.)

Hey guess what else? We also have some preview pics from the calendar itself! (Some of which, we pilfered from our friends at ShockTIllYouDrop.com.) Check em’ out:

Read the rest of this entry →

Oh, I Saw what you did there…

By Jeremy Azevedo

Saw: The Video Game has been out for a couple of weeks now… But we figured that you’ve probably seen “Saw VI” or at least considered seeing it by now.  Or maybe you told someone a longwinded boring story about why you’re not going to see it?

Either way, the fact remains that you’ve probably at least thought about it in some capacity. So perhaps you’ve also thought about playing the new Saw video game as well. And you’re probably also wondering if it’s any good or not. Well, we’ve played it, so hopefully our experience can help you make an informed decision. I promise it won’t be like that one time when we told you wouldn’t get sick from drinking your own pee. We just wanted to see if you would do it. But it won’t happen again. Real talk.

Sucks to be you.

So yeah, Saw: The Video Game. It’s about 100 times better than most movie spin-offs I’ve played, not that this is saying much. Movie spin-off games are notoriously bad. But the dudes that make the movies made a smart decision by contracting Konami to do the game, thanks to their experience with the Silent Hill series. Saw looks and plays a lot like those Silent Hill titles, which is both good and bad. Everything is pretty dark, but you always have a light source to see your way around. The controls are a little tankish, like old-school Resident Evil and the combat is a little stiff. But if you’ve played survival horror games that came prior to Resident Evil 4, it’ll all seem pretty familiar.

The darkness in Saw actually creates a lot of tension. Playing the game at night is a likely to cause you to experience a bit of anxiety.  And if that doesn’t do it, the combat will. See, Jigsaw sewed a key into your body and told everyone else in the joint that they have to tear it out of you in order to escape. So you’ve got that going for you. The combat takes very specific timing, but is actually pretty fun once you get it down. Especially when you start using traps! But it’s kind of f**ked when you walk into someone else’s trap like an idiot, and getting your head liquefied in the process. The save points are sort of far apart at times, and there were a couple of instances in which I had to repeat puzzles or encounters unnecessarily because I wasn’t walking around looking at my feet.

Aw hell naw!

Speaking of feet! Your character isn’t wearing shoes throughout the game, which sucks because there’s broken glass all over the goddamn place. You’d think that maybe there would be a “put on some shoes so you can stop walking around on hypodermic needles and various other crap like a f**king idiot” power-up, but sadly, this is not the case. There’s lots of stuff to clobber people with though, from baseball bats and lampshades to table legs and mannequin arms. So you’ve got that going for you at least. Read the rest of this entry →