The Gold Standard for saying "Yoouuuu bastard."

No one can do it better than John Cleese. It's at 3:10 in this clip.

Romance!

...is the thing of fairy tales. I don't believe in it, because people don't understand it as well as the movies do. What romances in film do you find the most endearing?

I'll start with a few that I can remember...

The Terminator - Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor! He came across time for her! I couldn't give a fuck for them in Genisys though, where they had no chemistry at all.

The Crow - Eric Draven and Shelley Webster. They don't show much of it in the film, but it's the driving force of the whole rape/revenge scenario, and it has a genuine stylish, morbid authenticity to it.

Horns - I'm not gonna lie: this movie surprised me. Visual, bizarre, fantastical, and heart-filled.

The Butterfly Effect - Assman Ketchup really knocked it out of the park with this one. I can't tell you how much I loved this movie when it came out.

Wicker Park - A surprisingly tense romance, or rather tense search for the romance that got away.


The more I think about this topic, the more I realize that I don't give a fuck about any film romance outside of these few. I guess love really is a fake piece of shit, am I right? •canned laughter•

Anyone have a blog?

Something outside of Trash Epics that they post their random thoughts on? Blogspot? Wordpress?

I was toying with RSS feeds again, and I've added some of our user's blogs to the TE news feed. Namely @damn_cyborg and @deadandburied. All this does is simply link to the posts of these unaffiliated blogs so they'll get more exposure. If for some stupid reason you don't want your blog linked, I'll remove it.

Perhaps the greatest movie I've ever seen...

...in my entire life. And when I say "great", I mean absolutely horrible in every way. Loaded with stock footage, horrible special effects, awful dubbing, retarded fight choreography, and tons of CGI blood, this movie is pure bullshit. But if you love poop as much as I do, watch the full movie on youtube.

(Not) directed by Saint James Street James, the brilliant mind who brought us Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury.
https://trashepics.com/forum/460/

How was your October Challenge?

https://trashepics.com/post/45/15/

I'd mostly watched a bunch of films I've already seen a dozen times before, and several times during the month at that. All my first-time viewings were pretty lame too, but that's to be expected when a chunk of them are Children of the Corn sequels. 😄

The only FTVs I had worth mentioning are:

I Spit on Your Grave 3 - Unconventional sequel that does something new with the franchise. Not necessarily anything great, but still pretty damn entertaining at that. There were, however, too many fake/dream sequences. Fuck that shit.

Would You Rather - Probably my favorite of the FTVs. Just a really dark, twisted competition among strangers. Survival of the fittest, at its worst. It's great to see Jeffrey Combs as the lead villain, and even greater to see Robb Wells of Trailer Park Boys fame try to be serious. Don't know if it worked though, but he did try! Very cringe-worthy scenes.

Tales of Halloween - Nothing great, but still a film loaded with atmosphere of our favorite holiday. If one segment sucks, just stick around and you'll find one that you enjoy.

YOUR TURN!

Necronos (2O1O) -TrashEpics Rec Challenge Viewing!



I hadn't known it, but apparently this is a thing. The low budget Deutsch gore epic, an effects-driven extension of the slasher (??) wherein characters wander into frame simply to get disfigured in some disgusting way... these cruel movies must be labors of love since their independent crews go to such extremes to convey borderline-comic brutality on clearly homespun budgets. It feels like a sub-subgenre totally distant to me and about which I'm totally unqualified to even interpret one random flick like this, far let alone evaluate it. I need to at least come to terms with it existing in the first place.

If such movies get more grandiose and ambitious in their set-up than Necronos, I'll be honestly surprised. It aspires to convey the battle of Otherworldly Evil vs.Earthly Innocence (not necessarily "Good"). It starts with a protracted introduction set in some middle ages or something, which right away reminded me of the nihilistic epics Thomas Zupko used to direct for Extreme Associates back in the early 2000s (most like the black plague themed In the Days of Whore, for instance, in which a leper's penis falls off in a raped woman's rectum). That the over-lit videography sits unfavorably even next to Zupko's hideous, heinous stuff, which was shot 10 years prior, and was porno, didn't offer much to my expectations. But maybe it's all in one's expectations. Some subgenres do seem to approach "film-making" more similarly to pornographers churning their delicious gooey smut than to directors who "create" "art." I am not knocking anybody, just musing.

Anyway, the presentation of this movies back-story was hilarious. You see these big blocks of calligraphy for a few seconds which narrate each following scene. There was barely enough time to read it all and it was like "books on film," as if mise en scene didn't exist, as if the story couldn't be told in any filmic way. It really gave me a hint of the director's concern with approaching big-c Cinema as a medium for ideas, moods, stories, sensory blasts, erections, whatever, what-have-you, all the good stuff that makes movies worthwhile. So apparently there was once a warlock named Necronos, in league with the devil (Hail Satan, by the way) to use an army of zombies that will bring darkness to the world of mankind. One thing I don't get is, why does Satan always suck so badly at taking over the world? We're just people, after all. He's the Prince of Darkness. Anyway, I was actually hoping the whole movie would be told in this format— all of the exposition bluntly spelled out in between the blustery blood sequences. That would have been pretty novel and amusing to me.

But then it's on to the present day, where everyone, everyone, from chubbsy-wubbsies relaxin' with a fishing pole to naked babes practicing the ars amatoria, are getting torn apart, gored apart and downright impolitely killed. Necronos is still around, using his devil-derived henchmen, still plotting with Scratch to conquer Earth. Which, it should be easy; they're immortal and people aren't. I couldn't tell if the movie was supposed to be bad, but the tight story was easy to follow and pretty much guided most of the sleazy sequences (which is the same kind of praise you'd give a porno). I liked the set design of Satan's domain and the simple black make-up was fairly menacing (Necronos brings to mind Darth Maul, especially as he refers to Beezelbub as "my master"). I'm guessing some of the gore effects and kill scenes are impressive, if you're into that kind of stuff. I noticed a woman getting impaled on a spikey pole, Cannibal Holocaust style (but more explicit). There's a somewhat silly meat grinder and lots of beheadings. In the end, the Devil spits some wisdom, "Love defeats all pain," the demonic invasion begins and we're set up for a sequel.

If I'd never seen a horror movie before, all of this would disturb and scare the sh!t out of me. Partly within the story's context, and mostly without it— just that it exists... that even amidst a surplus of real tragedies and massacres someone decides "ahoy, it'll be fun for us to make this," and that it is. Also, this movie is long. I hate long-ass movies. I doubt anyone sits down and really watches it intently for over 2 hours straight. There must be a sub-sub-cultural buddy experience associated with gore flick consumption that I'm just totally missing. I watched half of it while taking a bath, with the speed accelerated slightly on VLC media player, and even then I was like "guh, I get the gist."

Tromafreak picked it for the TrashEpics Rec challenge. I'm hopeful that someday, me taking in this movie amounts to something, somehow, if only as an awareness of stuff I'd never have experienced otherwise. I'm convinced that Scummy movies often bear an actual value, though in some cases I'm still trying to figure out what and how. So it wouldn't be fair of me to call it bad or dumb, even though it is. My own tastes in movies are so specific that when the subject of movies comes up with civilians in real life conversations, I've found it's easier for me just to say "You know, I don't even really like watching movies very much" to just avoid the topic even though watching movies is actually one of my dominant hobbies. Earlier, I compared gore movies with porn movies and the analogy is obvious and old-- and I did not mean it disparagingly. In each, gutteral releases are usually set up by minimal plots. It's always interesting though when the primal sensationalism is uniquely framed. Was that the case in this movie? I don't know, this kinda stuff is new to me. I will just say that while watching sex mostly makes me happy with the world, violence and murder make me uneasy. A number of my recs for the challenge reflect this difference.

Any horror movies you'd like to see remade?

I know remakes are the devil and all, but are there any horror films you feel would benefit from one? Perhaps because it was a good concept poorly executed or because they haven't aged well? Any reason really

The Incredible Melting Man



Might not be the best movie in the world but it difently has the best fat chick running in slo-mo thru a door that I have ever seen.

Post your internet announcements here

I (just now) changed my IMDb username to "SoapboxQuantez8".
I did this in honor of the western, but will probably opt to keep it this way permanently.
This is all I have ATM.

Vacancy 2 (2008)

I watch it every November 1st.
The only thing I like about the first is the theme music, which is quite suspenseful.

In the original, the couple's constant feuding actually kept the film from having significant character development, imo. It didn't hurt that the sequel has a third main character.
This one seem more gritty and realistic, and
by the time Jessica finds her friend dead, there's a vulnerability the first one never reached.
My two cents.

Vacancy 1: 5/10
Vacancy 2: 6.5/10