The Prophecy (1995)

Anyone have any interesting thoughts on this puppy?? As far as I am aware, it is one of the first major films to feature the type of twisted theology it has, with all the factions of angels fighting for our destiny. Since then, there have been a lot of films and TV shows that have drawn upon this general idea, like Legion (2010), many seasons of the CW TV show Supernatural, probably Constantine (2005), the TV show Dominion... I'm sure there are a lot that I have missed. And, that's not even mentioning Christian films or TV prgramming, which I imagine might have quite a few of these types of stories...

Can anyone think of any movie or TV show before the first The Prophecy, that might have got the ball rolling with this sort of movie? I know not all the examples I gave fit this perfectly, but I'm thinking of movies about factions angels fighting amongst themselves, and for the fate of the world.

Hey, look at this, maybe this will get people thinking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_angels

That list mentions The Crow (1994). I haven't seen that in awhile, but I remember it as being pretty different from The Prophecy. Maybe I'm not remembering it correctly. Anyway, anyone have any thoughts on this stuff??

Through the yeeeeaaarrss...

I highly recommend playing the Kenny Rogers song "Through the Years" while watching this Carnage Count video, showing Leatherface and a few other random psychos killing lots and lots of people through the years, in all the TCM movies in the franchise (I think) from the early 70s to today.


Here's the song to listen to. If you can't play it while you're watching a video at the same time, on your device... um, I don't know, ask a buddy to play one of the videos on their device? You figure it out.


Hey, there's a Carnage Count video of the entire Friday the 13th franchise! Also highly suitable for playing "Through the Years," as soothing, accompanying background music.

Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High aka Volume 2 coming Christmas Eve!

https://www.troma.com/news/25043/the-best-critically-acclaimed-troma-movie-yet-comes-to-troma-now-on-christmas-eve-rent-it-for-only-4-99/

Well it's about bloody time!

Notes from the Turkeyground 2019: One Hundred Hours of Turkeytude

Another year, another Turkey Challenge come and gone. The older I get, the more bittersweet that is. On the one hand, I can finally watch whatever the hell I want again. On the other, there's something magical about this challenge. We look forward to it all year and it brings us true joy while we play. You know why it brings joy? Because it brings liberation. All year, watching a movie like Miami Magma might feel like a waste of time, but during that one month, we can watch and enjoy that movie free of considerations like, "Shouldn't we be watching Midsommer? Everyone says it's brilliant." Well I bid all you Midsommer enthusiasts to ask, "Shouldn't we be watching Miami Magma?"

Every year brings a different experience. I try not to judge and compare to previous years. Each Turkey Challenge stands alone. The rules are mostly the same, but the movies change. Sometimes you choose a string of really good movies that just have low budgets. Sometimes you choose a string of David DeCoteau movies instead. To a certain extent, you get out of the challenge what you put into it. It pays to have a few movies stockpiled, preferably ordered as trifectas from a single director. This year, we kinda winged it, because we had 80 random turkeys sitting on the DVR.

But at least we started with a class act! The Fred Olen Ray underappreciated masterpiece, Beverly Hills Vamp, was how we started. The perfect mix of dumb jokes, nice tiddies, and vampires. We weren't asking why, we just felt like watching it. Probably for the tenth time in my case. We only thought after, "Hey, how can we make some extra points off this movie?" Michelle Bauer would be the obvious one. But we wanted to watch Gary Graver's Moon in Scorpio for Veteran's Day, since it was about Vietnam vets encountering the ghost of past mistakes on a cramped sailboat. So we went with the obscure blonde Jillian Kesner. These movies are connected by more than just Kesner. Gary Graver was Fred Olen Ray's cinematographer and Moon in Scorpio was shot back-to-back with Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. To finish the Kesner trifecta, we watched, oh boy, Graver's Trick or Treats later in the month. Trick or Treats stars Graver's son as a horrible kid who's into magic tricks and uses them to torture his sexy babysitter. Meanwhile, his crazy father (the great Peter Jason) escapes the loony bin and comes looking for blood: babysitter blood!

You see how we meandered through that trifecta? Well, that's how much of the challenge went. It had mixed results. We had a better time with Johannes Roberts. We stumbled onto him because his evil gypsy curse/monster bird/crazy backwoods rednecks movie, Roadkill, was on the DVR. Any movie combining all those subgenres is gonna be good, and this one doesn't disappoint. Also, while all the girls had a no-nudity clause, Roberts had a no-small-tiddies clause, so we at least get some good sweater puppies bouncing around during chase scenes. Good, dumb fun. We watched two earlier films of his expecting—well, I didn't know what to expect, but not what I got. Somehow, despite being on an obvious micro-budget, he manages to afford serious actors like Sean Pertwee and Jeff Fahey and that little guy from Alien: Resurrection. The French guy. When Evil Calls is about a mysterious text message that goes viral in a single high school. It asks you to make a wish. Naturally they all wish for dumb things and die. It's like 26 short movies that work as episodes in a single story. I think it was a Youtube miniseries. Next was Darkhunters, about dead people who think they're still alive so cats and demonic bounty hunters follow them everywhere. Roberts is a low-budget success story: he went on to direct 47 Meters Down and the new Strangers movie.

Another good one was the Brothers Kondelik. Again, we had a movie of theirs on the DVR, Jurassic Galaxy! Dinosaurs in space, what can go wrong? Despite a 2.2 rating, the movie blended decent storytelling, fun characters, a sense of humor. Sure, it had no tits, but it was still fun. Similarly, Dam Sharks!, their shark movie. You always know a SyFy movie is going to be good if Jason or Jeremy London is playing a massive asshole in it. This is one of them! The last Kondelik film we watched wasn't as goofy as the others. In fact, it's a serious haunted house flick, Behind the Walls. Why this movie is so underrated, I don't know. It's one of the most inventive low-budget haunted house movies I've seen in a long time. How many haunted house movies have a climax involving tentacles? Outside of hentai, I mean. Yeah, that's what I thought.

I thought I could get us some class in the challenge by doing a Christopher Lee trifecta. The first movie made me think that was a good idea. Panga AKA The Curse III, while a stupid movie, has a great setting, some fun shamanic terror, and Christopher Lee in an active role. Mask of Murder, by the legendary Arne Mattson, is a bland, bland whodunit where you already know who done did it! Rod Taylor's performance in this movie is riveting, though. Nobody ever talks about Rod Taylor as an actor. He's just a "handsome, leading man," but Taylor could act. Oh, then Meatcleaver Massacre, where Lee is just an on-screen narrator lending respectability to a surprisingly thoughtful film given the lurid title. It delves into Pagan mythology and revenge deities in its exploration of just why murderous punks should be murdered by anything other than a meatcleaver. These are college students, though. Isn't that a little late to be murderous punks? Like, they could just drop the class if they hate it that much. Go become a welder or something. Nobody's forcing them to study Celtic mythology.

In a similar vein, we spent some time with Kent Taylor. Starting with the spooky, kinda disturbing The Day Mars Invaded Earth. A riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers on a much smaller scale, it's actually kinda creepier. Martians are invisible psychic forces that can assume shape at well. They're especially fond of the Kent Taylor shape. The Crawling Hand was a wild ride, almost involving that devilish planet Mars. This time it tries to kill Kent Taylor with a possessed hand. The hand didn't count on the two bumbling bureaucrats from the Space Agency, though! For our third movie, we had no choice: it was time to go into Terra Al Adamsonia. I have a soft spot for Al Adamson, so I won't go too hard on Brain of Blood, a movie about uhhh, the Sultan of a fictional Arabic nation who comes to America to put his brain in a young man's body, but the doctor is evil and puts it in a disfigured idiot's body, and there are spies, and rooftop chases, and—y'know, there's just way too much plot getting in the way of this movie. But that's because most Al Adamson movies are six movies that accidentally got spliced together.

We also had a series of one-offs. One-offs are risky. Because the director who makes a single low-budget horror movie and then leaves the film business to be a manager at the local Kroger is probably not gonna give us much to work with. With The House on Skull Mountain, that's not the case. I think it may be my favorite find of the challenge. You know how the '˜70s was full of these blaxsploitation horror movies? Like, Sugar Hill and Blackula? You know how those movies kinda suck? The House on Skull Mountain is black horror movie that is •not• blaxploitation and it's actually good. They use the old trick of assembling a bunch of heirs for the reading of a will. None of them are particularly concerned that the mansion is on a mountain shaped like a skull. Typical Georgian landscaping, I guess. Do they even have cliffs like that in Georgia? Anyway, three of the heirs are black and one of them is the very white Victor French, with full Mark Twain '˜stache. They soon find themselves caught in the web of the butler-cum-voodoo master. But it's all about heritage. Except for the weird, romantic montage between cousins, it's a charming picture.

Another favorite is Dead Ant, a victim of a complete lack of advertising, I think. By next year, it'll be rated 5.5, mark ye my words. But this year, it's 4.9 and we got to enjoy a washed up '˜80s hair band (is there any other kind?) fighting giant ants summoned by cursed peyote. Yeah, that old trope! While they're busy composing their new epic Side Boob and hitting on barely legal bimbos, the ants plot their doom. Will they ever get to Nochella in time to entertain all 50 attendees? If you're in the right mood, the jokes in this movie really land. You just gotta believe there are people this stupid. Believe!


And the last one-off I wanted to mention, because it's just so weird: The Shaft. Now, it doesn't seem weird at first glance. It's directed by cult director Dick Maas, remaking his own classic De Lift. It has Naomi Watts, Edward Hermann, Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman and Dan Hedaya. But when you start watching it, you think, "So this was made by an alien who came to Earth and studied American culture for about a week, right?" Because the dialogue, behavior, and overall states of being of everyone in this movie is strangely out of touch with reality. It reminds me of other European movies that pretend to be American, like Gingerclown. Or The Room. Except, this movie is otherwise really competent. The cinematography and editing are fantastic with wry humor. And the actors struggle to give life to absurdist characters. Naomi Watts in particular has to struggle with the Plucky 1950s Journalist character who says things like, "I'll pee on them" and thinks sexual harassment is part of the job. The flirtation between James Marshall and Naomi Watts is more disturbing than the elevator deaths. With a good screenwriter to touch it up, this could've been a masterpiece. Instead, it's a weird, weird, but also charming oddity.

We ended the Challenge this year with an unconventional choice, something we've never done before: we turned to disaster movie turkeys! Yes, the low-budget disaster movie, one of the most maligned sub-subgenres, because they're like SyFy monster movies without the monsters. The only step lower is the dreaded Hallmark movie. But that's where people are wrong. These •are• SyFy monster movies. The monsters are just the ones we've created by our rampant disrespect of Mother Nature. That's why we enjoy seeing literally TENS of extras devastated by the Seattle Superstorm! Models of Washington monuments obliterated by Stacy Keach's Storm Wars! And, of course, douchebag oil tycoons melted by Miami Magma. Those last two were written by Griff Furst, my favorite SyFy guy. I actually wished we'd been doing disaster movies the whole challenge, because they were a lot of fun! And, well, there are a lot of them and they're free everywhere because nobody's willing to pay for them.

Overall, it was a great challenge this year. I thank Zombie_CPA for creating this challenge and keeping it going, and TrashEpics for giving it a home. And thank YOU for reading all this. Gobble, gobble.

Pu-239 (2006)

I haven't seen this in awhile, but I remember it making an impression on me. It's not exciting, it's just supposed to be disturbing and sad. But, I'm mentioning it here because two of the Ukrainian guys who have been in the news so much lately have been reminding of it. I'm talking about, of course... Giuliani's and our old pals Lev and Igor. But, I don't mean this in any political way. Really. I'm just saying, if you're looking for a movie about Eastern European or Russian hoods, and you've seen Eastern Promises too many times recently, then this is worth a shot. It has Paddy Considine in the main role, by the way, and I always think he's likeable in everything I've seen him in. Also... I won't gie any spoilers, but there's a scene right around the end that I promise will really make an impact on you. It just makes you stop cold and sit there with your jaw hanging open, thinking "Did they really just do what I think they did?!?!?!?" So, if that gets you wondering what the hell I'm talking about... check it out! Look at its rating on IMDB... not too shabby.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472156/

Ideas for 2020! 

Hey guys! Since we are in the last month of the year, and decade, I thought we could have a thread for Challenge Ideas, Trivia Ideas, it even games! I have been talking with @box and @ballz about challenges and we have so good ideas, but we want to hear from you guys! So if you have some challenges ideas let us know here and we can have fun challenges next year! For sure we will have the Trash, Turkey, Sci-Fi, and everyone's favorite the Horror one. But in the months those aren't we would love to have more.

Also I have been working with box on getting a trivia thing going, and would love any ideas on what kind anyone likes!

As for games I know @der has done some fun ones! Ready Aim Fire, and Roll to Dodge are just a few examples! So even if the idea is simple, just tell us!


I hope everyone has a fantastic last month! And here is to making TE even better next year!

What kind of comedy type are you?

We all have a different sense of humor. Well there is people around with no or little sense of humor but I guess (hope) they are a minority. We need humor otherwise this planet would be a sad place.

I'm just curious what kind of comedy you like. Me I don't have a clear favorite. Satire is not really my cup of tea, as it often requires to be up to date on a certain subject. When a subject does not interest me I'm not really going to catch the latest news on it. I already expressed a few times that toilet humor isn't funny to me.

While I can't really pinpoint what kind of comedy certainly works for me, I think it's more of a mood thing for me. Also it does work much better in company of others. That is more encouraging to let go that laughter. A good example happened last weekend when I watched Dumb and Dumber To with friends. I would really get annoyed with Jim Carey making silly faces whenever he can and would switch channel if I were alone. In company though I found it pretty enjoyable. Even toilet humor would become more bearable.

Rhinestone is a turkey?

In 1984, a few random-ass ingredients crashed into each other. The great Bob Clark directing, Stallone acting/screenwriting/singing, and Dolly Parton and her huge jugs would proudly unite to bring us all a film about what it is to be a cowboy singer.

So a New York business mogul is desperate to bang Jake (Dolly), but she's stuck in a contract with this "villain". If I were him, I'd want to bang her too. Her tits steal every scene that they're in, and her waist is an anomoly. And this guy wants that in his life. An option for a pardon from this contract comes her way, and the stakes seem fair. She has to turn some "average joe" into a bonified country singer in two weeks. If she fails, he keeps her longer. If she wins, she's out. Movies with premises based on bets are always great. They're always the same, too.

After sifting through some neighborhood bums, they opt for the next and most regular New Yorker they can find. A cliche of Italian stupidity. An arrogant guido who'se basically a bum. Nick (Stallone) is a loud mouthed lovable rascal who drives a cab, and his main goals are to fix the cab he totaled, but when he sees Dolly, he also strives to bang her.

Switching gears to Tennessee, Nick and Jake live the country life to learn things the country way. This consists of everyone wearing stupid outfits and learning how to sing and act like a cowboy.

Epic actor Tim Thomerson appears as a scheming former lover of Jake's, because why not? This dude is amazing.

After a few performances throughout, he might be learning a thing or two, but basically, it's all just working up to when they'll fuck. Of course, this movie is only PG, so it can only be inferred. There are a few sexual jokes made toward Dolly, so today's connived standards would likely rank this PG-13. Too bad it wasn't rated R with bonus sex scenes. I'd watch Stallone put it in Dolly, because who wouldn't? But instead, we have a more light-hearted romp. A social mismatch of country music and taxi drivers.


For what it's worth, I wouldn't classify this as a turkey. I think it's a pretty decent movie. I discovered it back in the day when I went to an actual store for Deep Discount. I bought quite a few horror classics online from them, and a few more in that store. And this title was from Anchor Bay, and I figured it would be a disservice to my habit of blind-buying Anchor Bay titles if I didn't get the one with Rambo and Dolly, so I got it, and I don't regret it. But a 3.8 on imdb? It definitely deserves better than that...

Turkey Challenge 2019 - Rules / Sign Up Thread

1) Still use IMDb ratings.

1.0 = 6 points.
1.1-1.9 = 5 points.
2.0-2.9 = 4 points.
3.0-3.9 = 3 points.
4.0-4.4 = 2 points.
4.5-4.9 = 1 point.


2) First time view = 1 point.

3) Can be any genre.

4) Trifectas. Yes. Director actors, and series. For director and actors you can bunch siblings and parent / children or grandparent / grandchildren.

5) A movie can only count towards one trifecta.

Single Trifecta - 5 points

Double Trifecta - 7 points

Triple Trifecta - 9 points

Etc.

6) 1 bonus point for the director or directors also acting in the movie. Only one point can be earned per film.

7) Movies with 5.0 ratings or better don't count for any points.

8) Must be at least 45 minutes long for full credit. Half credit for films between 25 and 44 minutes.

9) Start - 12:01 AM on November 1.
End - You must start you last movie prior to November 30 11:59 PM.

Blood Freak '72: A Legitimate Turkey

Just rewatched this one, and I don't know what's up sfpx's butt. This movie has all the makings of a trash epic. It's extremely boring, drawn out, and our protagonist Herschell reminds me a lot of our best friend Tromafreak. Of course, they both live in Florida and turn into evil turkeys when they smoke pot, but that's beside the point.

The point is that this movie is awful. The lighting and sound design are awful. The redundant stinger sound effect when the turkey is killing is awful. The editing is awful. The acting is terribly unenthused by most parties. I honestly think some of these actors had to refrain from laughing when they saw the turkey monster coming to get them.

The best part is indeed the ending. Our boring narrator has been interrupting this film on and off with his mindless musings on god know's what... I zoned right the fuck out every time he was on screen, but he kinda looks like a medley of Sean Penn and Vincent Price. This dude just preaches anti-drug shit and goes into a coughing fit because he's been chain smoking this entire movie.

And of course, at the very end, it was all a dream. This movie couldn't get any dumber, which is why I nominate it for the turkiest turkey award, which I just made up. This is a turkey slasher that epitomizes the turkey qualities we love^hate most.