Anthropophagus 1980

AKA "Antropofago", AKA "The Grim Reaper", AKA "Man Beast", AKA "The Savage Island", AKA "The Zombie's Rage".

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Starring George Eastman as the ugly cannibal. What more do you need?

The story is pretty simple. A bunch of hapless victims find themselves on an abandoned island in Greece and go exploring. Little do they know a maniac cannibal lives on the island, having been stranded there himself and forced to do some bad things to survive.

That's really about it. It's a cool eerie setting filled with fancy haunted mansions, seaside cliffs, stone ruins, and cavernous crypts. The film is mostly set during the daytime, which is pretty unique.

Being Italian, there's an inherent video nasty charm to its gratuity. It's all about that slow foreboding mood, and when big George shows up in his hideous visage, you know you're in for a good time with some mindless old school gore.

#Review

Cannibal Apocalypse 1980

Video nasties were any aspiring horror fan's wet dream in the early 2000s. That's when I first saw this and several other notorious splatter flicks. Like many others from its era, this one is nothing original. It tries to combine the infectious concepts of a zombie movie with the idea of cannibalism, yet it ends up nothing like either one of these subgenres. What we get instead is some kind of crazed Vietnam vet contagion scenario that's made watchable because it has the great John Saxon, as well as Italian horror staple Giovanni Lombardo Radice.

Back in the war, Saxon saved Giovanni and another POW, but not after they had to resort to cannibalism to stay alive. Cut to the present where Saxon is living in a nice neighborhood with a slight case of PTSD, and his old friend Giovanni comes back to visit. However, Giovanni still has that urge to eat human flesh, and it gets him and everyone else into some trouble with the authorities and a shitty biker gang for good measure.

In typical Italian sleaze fashion, there's also a subplot about a teen girl neighbor who seduces John Saxon for some shock value later on in the movie. Then another doctor guy is trying to get with Saxon's wife, trying to act all platonic until he casually blurts out that she should have married him instead of Saxon, to no reaction from the wife at all. I guess these type of suggestive comments are to be thought nothing of in Italy, but I definitely found it stupid.

The cops are inept and nothing works out for anybody in this movie. It's hardly an apocalypse though, but given enough time, some form of higher scale outbreak could occur. Of all the various alternate titles that this movie has, "Cannibals in the City" is the most appropriate, though it isn't nearly as cool as the more misleading Cannibal Apocalypse.

#Review

Some Site Updates...

I've been rummaging through a lot of files. Breaking this, fixing that, etc. Here are a few notable changes:


HUDs have been restored. They're still pointless, but at least they look cool. You'll see them back in the drop-down menu.

The camera/snapshot system has been redesigned. Hopefully it will be more convenient and more app-like, particularly on mobile devices. Tested on windows/chrome and android/chrome, still buggy on iPhones (typical).
https://trashepics.com/cam/
https://trashepics.com/snap/

A soundboard has been added with some wonderfully awful noises you can use to annoy the hell out of people.
https://trashepics.com/app/soundboard/

And blackjack games now allow the use of multiple decks.

Movies worth a lot of Trash Points

What are some movies that would get me a lot of points in the trash challenge?

Typically, Troma movies are a great place to start. Anything by Lloyd Kaufman is bound to be obscene, but what else is filled with taboos? John Waters movies like Pink Flamingos are quite insane for the hell of it, too.

I was watching Freeway II: Confessions of a Trick-Baby, and that movie is loaded with inappropriate subject matter. Gotta love a movie that has no qualms normalizing shock value.

What movies in this or any previous trash challenge scored you a lot of points?

The films of Bethel Buckalew



Sure am glad I bought so many Something Weird Video dvds back in the 2000's cuz those things are either very hard to find or ridiculously priced. Love those double features. SWV put several director's filmographies on dvd over the years, including Herschell Gordon Lewis, Doris Wishman, and plenty lesser-known people. One director I discovered through Something Weird was one Bethel Buckalew, who actually may or may not have existed. I've read rumors of several exploitaiton directors getting together back in the 70's and making these movies, which none of them wanted to take credit for. So, they blamed them on poor 'ol Buckalew.

Was watching one of them the other day for the first time in a while, called Tobacco Roody. This movie is no different than all the others Buckalew directed. Heavily inspired by The Beverly Hillbillies above all. Really corny, childish hick humor mixed with one softcore fuck scene after the other.

Tobacco Roody is about this backwoods family whose drunken patriarch, Mose, has a hardon for his hot, adopted daughter, Tootie, who only really wants to go off and play with her sisters in the creek. Although they always run her off. Partially cuz they want to be left alone to eat each other's pussies, but they also genuinely hate her and don't consider her family. One day, they cover Tootie in mud and send her on her way, but after tattling on them to Mose, he comforts her the best way he knows how: By introducing her to his penis. He then slides it in Tootie and breaks her in, which in all fairness, does get her mind off the rejection. Meanwhile, Mose's wife is off fucking the sheriff, and I believe the daughters get involved in an orgy with some drunks. A pretty light-hearted, cartoonish tone to it all. No actual screen credits as they were all painted on rocks and the side of the barn, and pretty sure not only this one, but all these movies were filmed in Los Angeles, robbing them of any level of authenticity.

Tobacco Roody was released on a double feature dvd along with a film called Southern Comforts. Something Weird Video also released several other Buckalew double features such as The Pigkeeper's Daughter & Sassy Sue as well as Midnight Plowboy & Country Cuzzins.

Entertaining stuff, and a very overlooked part of exploitation history.

Slumber Party Massacre III 1990

Now here's a movie you don't see mentioned much. It's always about the first two movies and never this one, so why is that? Probably because it was made in the 90s. Yeah, 1990 is still pretty close to the 80s, but at the tail end when things started to lose their charm a bit.

SPM3 is kinda dull, isn't it? It's not nearly as fun as the first two, opting for a slightly more serious tone like the first one, only that one was still much better than this. Don't get me wrong, though. I do enjoy this movie, but it really doesn't have anything great going for it.

Who is the driller killer this time around? It isn't immediately obvious at the start like it is with the others. We're given a few weirdo creeps who may be the perp. One is a voyeur on the beach, and the other is some nerdy adult named Morgan who is overwhelmingly awkward. First, he breaks into the girl's house under the pretense of being on the market for a new home, but then he lingers. And then he lingers some more. I want to kick this guy's ass for being so lame and dry. But is he the killer? Hmm...

What follows is a strong rehash of the first movie. Girls have a slumber party, some dude bros try to crash it, the pizza guy^girl gets it, and then the real killer reveals himself. But before that, our protagonists act like sluts for a while. One of the hotties goes topless and it's rather jarring, because she has pepperoni nipples. I find that to be one of the most memorable aspects of this movie.

So spoilers for anybody who's 30+ years late to this party, but our killer is the seemingly regular guy with daddy issues (I think?). He's also got trouble getting it up, which is why he needs to get revenge on these stupid sluts for (not) turning him on. After breaking all kinds of household objects on his head throughout the film, the girls blind this dude with bleach and yet he still manages to kill a few more of these inept broads until one of them gets the upper hand and murders the shit out of him with his metaphorical penis: another big-ass drill.

It takes a while for the cops to show up because the asshole at the desk immediately assumes every call to the station is a joke and can't be bothered with. It's an easy way to keep everyone isolated, and this whole movie seems pretty void of life. It basically killed the series, until Jim Wynorski quasi-revived it under the new moniker Cheerleader Massacre. Now that's a good movie! I mean, it's pretty shitty, but he makes up for that by including dumber & sluttier chicks. Then the sequel to that one has robots.

#Review

Leprechaun and F13 part 3

I'm just wondering if they were filmed at the same locations. There is a barn in each movie, and it looks like it sould be the same place. Also, the land and the trees just look really similar. They were both filmed near Los Angeles, of course, in somewhere called Santa Clarita.

By the way, at one point in Leprechaun they have lunch at a diner called the Saugus Cafe. As a Bostonian, that made me say something along the lines of "what the hell?!?" because there is a town north of Boston called Saugus. Apparently someone from there was a prominent citizen in Santa Clarita in the 1800s, and a local neighborhood there is named after his home town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saugus,_Santa_Clarita,_California

2023 Oscars

What a fucking joke. That movie Everything Everywhere All at Once won all the big awards. It was okay at best, but still a convoluted mess of a movie. They only gave it awards because it had Asians and gay people. They really didn't have anything better than that last year?!

I hope someone got slapped.

So, I Saw a Video

Called The Russian Lathe Accident. That was all kinds of ew 🤮

Poker Face, tv show

There's been lots of talk of it lately, so I gave it a whirl and watched season 1. It's pretty decent. Natasha Lyonne is great in it as the human lie detector who gets caught up in weekly murder mysteries in various settings. I find it comparable to The Incredible Hulk in that she's on the run from something, inadvertantly doing good deeds in the various places she hunkers down in. It's more episodic in that sense than a lot of other shows, so you don't need to pay too much attention to a greater narrative, though there is obviously is one.

There are a lot of good guest stars, notably Benjamin Bratt, Adrien Brody, Chloe Sevigny, Tim Blake Nelson, Tim Meadows, Nick Nolte, Luis Guzman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Clea DuVall, and Ron Perlman. I also noticed a cameo by Sean Lennon.

Also, the title card is reminiscent of Columbo and retro films, what with that "(c) MMXXIII MRC II DISTRIBUTION COMPANY, L.P. / ALL RIGHTS RESERVED." subtitle. Fun fun.

#Review