This Hong Kong horror-comedy was directed by Lau Sze-Yue, stars Sandra Ng, Sharon Kwok and Danny Chan, and features a school for learning magic that is threatened by a bunch of evil beings.
Thai poster for the movie
It’s rude to dribble blood out of your mouth
Together with lots of (quite puerile and dated) gags and pratfalls, there are some novel fantasy elements. For instance, a group of the students attempt to beat the supernatural foes by reincarnating into various ‘foreign gods’. So, one by one, they turn into Chinese versions of Elvis, Charlie Chaplin and Jesus… with the tune ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ playing in the background! The hero also transforms into ‘Bruce Lee’, complete with GAME OF DEATH orange tracksuit. The most imaginative reincarnation occurs when four of the students merge into one being… a multi-faced Hindu god. Neat idea!
She’s angry!
A vampire locks the office door, then swallows the key!
One of the villains bares his torso to reveal a chest covered with screaming visages à la Freddy Krueger and another antagonist turns into a particularly nice cell-animated bat/ghost.
Hong Kong poster
In one scene guaranteed to make you grimace, a guy in a bunk bed dreams of branding a chained up girl whilst dressed up like Hitler… and as he enjoys his dream he begins to dribble pints of spittle, which drips down into the mouth of the man sleeping in the bunk below him. Subtle humour at its best!
This film was directed by Steve (REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES) Sekely and stars Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey, Janette (PARANOIAC) Scott and Kieron (DOCTOR BLOOD’S COFFIN) Moore.
A flowering triffid
Though it is not very faithful to the John Wyndham novel, I do like this movie, with its perambulating killer plants and scenes of a world where almost everyone has gone blind after watching a dazzling meteor shower. These type of apocalyptic survival tales are always of interest, I think, as they offer us the opportunity to see what the few ‘lucky’ survivors choose to do in a situation devoid of the old rules and certainties.
UK quad poster
I love all the shots of a desolate London filled with wrecked double decker buses and abandoned cars, etc, which definitely influenced the beginning of 28 DAYS LATER, and I also enjoy watching the creepy sequence set in one of the large glasshouses in Kew Gardens (which is not far from where I live!)
Crashed double decker
A nightwatchman in Kew Gardens falls victim to one of the killer plants
The triffids themselves are often criticised for being pretty sub-par, but I think they work well individually, and their mobile, stubby roots and clicking stalk-heads look fine in close-up. The triffids work less well when required to be seen in larger numbers, where it’s obvious many of them are guys in plant costumes. Even then, there are some good moments, such as when Howard Keel turns a fuel truck into a DIY flamethrower to torch rows of triffids.
The hero burns some triffids real good!
Triffids attack a home for the blindTriffids on the rampage!
There wasn’t enough footage of the main story to make a full length film, so extra scenes were shot, by an uncredited Freddie Francis, of Kieron Moore and Janette Scott in a lighthouse, which provides the movie with the memorable sequence of a dismembered triffid piecing itself back together. These scenes in the lighthouse definitely have more tension than some of the other portions of the movie.
Publicity shot
Lobby cardItalian fotobusta-style lobby card
THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS doesn’t effectively deal with the catastrophe-induced collapse of law and order like the novel, but it is a colourful, watchable, relatively big-scale killer plant flick!
Another publicity shot with Janette Scott
Some newspaper ads…
Ad sheet
Reynold Brown’s artwork for this particular ad for the movie is awesome
Artist Reynold Brown makes the triffids in his newspaper ad look more ferociously animal-like
Here are some great posters for the movie…
Swedish poster
US poster
Italian poster
German poster
US poster
UK double bill poster: The Day of the Triffids/The Legion’s Last Patrol
Italian poster
Spanish poster
This colourful Italian poster makes it look like triffids are vegetable-like tentacles lowering down from the sky!
Danish poster (based on Reynold Brown’s newspaper ad artwork)
This Italian poster suggests that triffids resemble the Creature from the Black Lagoon!
Japanese poster
Finally, here’s the luridly wonderful art for THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS American posters, by illustrator Joseph Smith, who also painted posters for GORGO, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE and THE GIANT BEHEMOTH…
Ghost girl prepares to stick her hand through the heroine’s body!
This Hong Kong horror flick was directed (and written) by Dickson To, stars Gigi Lai, Anthony Wong, Shirley Cheung and Law Lan, and was produced by Wong Jing.
Spirit child!
Journalist Gigi (Lai) goes back to her family home in Hong Kong’s Yuen Long District with her cop husband Fai (Wong), to help her mom (Lan) and sister (Cheung) deal with various problems, including hauntings and several attempted acts of sabotage perpetrated by lowlifes working for Mr Chin, a shady businessman.
What is the origin of this wraith-child?
Starting out promisingly with a dead dog being strung up outside the mom’s home and a guy getting transfixed by a television aerial, the movie unfortunately soon becomes a rather pedestrian, underachieving affair, lacking suspense or any sense of dread. The plot seems content to plod along with scenes of Gigi and Fai’s easy-going, unexceptional marital life, interspersed with the occasional glimpse of a creepy kid or similar underwhelming incident.
One of Mr Chin’s hired goons gets skewered on a TV aerialGigi Lai plays Gigi
Gigi becomes increasingly concerned about what is happening at the family home and is given various snippets of advice and pearls of occult wisdom by one of her work colleagues, Uncle Ming, which includes his theory that the weird phone calls she’s been getting in the middle of the night are from ghosts that are ‘on the same frequency’ as Gigi.
Blue-lit, pimple-faced spirit-dude
Events become stranger when Fai’s soul is trapped in an endless Mahjong game and the ghostly young girl becomes more of an ongoing presence at the property. Gigi, with the help of Uncle Ming, eventually gets to the bottom of what is happening, after her mute mom’s soul is released from her body (thanks to the application of electricity!) so that she can explain everything. The mother’s soul reminds Gigi that she’d had an abortion several years earlier… and the spectral girl is actually her unborn daughter’s spirit, which is causing Fai and Gigi’s sister Fen to become possessed by other ghosts.
DVD cover
Gigi allows the ghostly girl to stick her hand right through her body, but this doesn’t happen in reality, and Gigi’s willingness to sacrifice herself placates her aborted daughter’s angry spirit. Now Gigi teams-up with her wraith daughter in an attempt to extricate Fai’s soul from the ongoing ghostly Mahjong game…
Gigi allows the ghost of her unborn daughter to shove her hand into her belly…
…and the girl spirit’s hand splats out of Gigi’s back!
HAUNTED MANSION does improve towards the end, but it suffers overall from poor plotting choices, including sidelining Anthony Wong’s interesting, slightly loutish & clumsy character for a large chunk of the second half of the movie, and never explaining the reason why Mr Chin, the businessman villain, is so desperate to get hold of the property that he’s willing to kill for it. There’s a jarring shift in tone, too, when the film momentarily veers into Cat III territory, as Mr Chin’s wife gets stripped and assaulted in their office by an unseen entity. Chin is then attacked and strangled by the possessed wife, leaving his whole subplot hanging.
A couple of the paper cut-out figures from the mansion’s shrine move about somehow…
A decent moment involves the blue-lit, long-nailed ghost girl jumping onto the back of one of Mr Chin’s minions when he attempts to burn down the house, plus there are a couple of scenes featuring cut-out figurines from the mansion’s elaborate shrine that seem to move around of their own volition, though this cool concept is soon forgotten, which is a shame, as they added a novel visual aspect to the story.
The girl-spectre rides on the back of the would-be arsonist!
One-Eyebrow Priest, played by Lam Ching-Ying (who also directs the movie), has his hands full with bat infestations, ghosts and vampires in his neighbourhood.
The Taoist priest hero and his two disciples
Okay, there isn’t really a central plot-line to VAMPIRE VS VAMPIRE. Rather, it presents us with a series of occult happenings for our hero Lam to deal with.
She’s a vamp!
You can always rely on Lam Ching-Ying to play a stoic, no-nonsense priest
An early set piece involves a ‘palm tree spirit’, which is enticed from its green-leafed abode by tying some string to the toe of one of the priest’s disciples. Once attracted to the disciple’s room, the spirit is revealed to be a red-garbed woman, who can become an animated red shadow. The spirit is dealt with, but more headaches lie ahead for the one-eyebrowed Taoist priest.
A ‘palm tree spirit’ hovers over one of the priest’s disciples The ghost in red
Don’t mess with this priest…
A withered corpse becomes a western-style bloodsucker once the ruby hilt of a sword that transfixes it is removed. Gulping down the blood of a girl (there’s a close-up shot of the corpse’s Adam’s apple bobbing up and down that is a novel-looking special makeup effect), the dried-up cadaver rapidly transforms into a fanged, caped European vampire. One-Eyebrow Priest gets involved, of course, and gives the undead dude a battering. He jams a coin sword into its eye socket, burns it with a flaming log, boots it… and then lobs a large nun onto the bloodsucker, so that it gets forced under the surface of some oily quicksand!
The long-haired resurrected vampire
This dude obviously doesn’t floss
Together with the westernised vampire (played by Frank Juhas), this Hong Kong picture adds several other Hammer-esque elements. For instance, a group of Christian nuns are introduced, living in a church. There are bats too, of the Hammer hanging-on-a-wire variety.
Nuns!
Actually, though most of the bats are obviously fake, there is a well-mounted bat siege involving the nuns in the old church. Trapped in the room, the nuns must block off a doorway with planks, as the flying fiends attempt to bite their way in. Individually, the set pieces are quite novel and enjoyable, but the film is too haphazard, lacking a central focus to the story.
Nuns in peril!Sandra Ng
About the only ongoing narrative thread is the continued reappearance of a ‘good’ hopping vampire child, who regularly helps out One-Eyebrow Priest and his two pupils, although this kiddy-corpse only really serves as light relief.
Hopping vampire kid
Jing Wang Lam plays the little vampire
Watchable fun while it’s on, VAMPIRE VS VAMPIRE is not in the same league as other Hong Kong vampire flicks, such as MR. VAMPIRE (1985).
This Hong Kong horror-adventure is directed by Lam Ngai Kai (aka Nam Lai Choi, aka Simon Nam) and stars Chow Yun-Fat, Maggie Cheung, Dick Wei and Sibelle Hu.
Chow likes to smoke a pipe in this movie
Oh no! It’s ‘Little Ghost’!
Things don’t end well for this professor (Ken Boyle)
Adventurer Yuan must return to North Thailand and confront the chief of the Worm Tribe in order to look for the cure to a spell which is slowly killing him. Tagging along with him is pushy reporter Tsai-Hung and, later, his mentor Mr. Wei (Chow Yun-Fat).
Japanese B2 poster
After a shoot ’em up/kung fu punch-up/police siege start, the film soon settles down to the proper tale it intends to tell. This means lots of cave sets, guttering torches, masses of mad tribesmen, fighting and slimy monsters.
The weird creature known as Little Ghost
Transformation time!
Blu-ray cover
Though it’s not a fighting-oriented film to the extent that, for instance, WE’RE GOING TO EAT YOU is, THE SEVENTH CURSE does boast very good choreography when a scrap starts.
The Seventh Curse has decent action moments
The wire work is really over the top: whenever someone is kicked, or shot, they fly about a quarter of a mile backwards! In one amazing scene Yuan blasts a guy with his gun at the same time as his partner Heh Lung shoots the same tribesman with an arrow in slow motion.
DVD cover
When Yuan finds out that he needs the stone eyeball from a Buddha statue to prevent the onset of the Seventh Curse that will kill him, it gives the filmmakers a fine excuse to have some neat stunts on top of an impressively large statue. Rope-swinging, saffron-robed assailants, booby traps and crumbling chunks of stone confront our heroes as they ascend the Buddha. The sequence becomes more outrageous once the stone eyeballs have been removed from the statue. Blood spurts from the Buddha’s sockets as the head falls off and rolls after Yuan à la RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK!
Trouble on the huge Buddha statue!
The two critters featured in this Far East weird-fest are Old Ancestor and Little Ghost.
Little Ghost is the product of a spell utilising the blood of a hundred children. It has a strange head (resembling the Mekon from the British Eagle comic strip), which is attached to a slimy tail. It also has a pair of little arms. This odd ‘ghost’ is captured with the aid of a pregnant cow’s placenta! This could only happen in a Hong Kong film, eh?
Little Ghost!
Black magic!
Old Ancestor dwells in his stone coffin in a cave and, when he originally appears, is in the form of a glowing-eyed, clacking-jawed skeleton covered in dry skin. Operated, I assume, as a full-scale marionette, Old Ancestor closely resembles the Japanese skeleton in 1986’s THE GHOST SNATCHERS (also directed by Lam Ngai Kai).
Old Ancestor is initially a reanimated skeleton monster!
Old Ancestor’s eyes start to glow!
Once it drinks the blood of a victim, Old Ancestor does a bit of transforming, to become a huge beastie with an elongated head. Unlike the really nifty ‘split head’ monster in 1988’s PEACOCK KING (also directed by Lam Ngai Kai), which looked good in both long shots and close-ups, Old Ancestor only really impresses during the close-up shots of the head and hands distorting.
Old Ancestor’s toothy maw!
As soon as we see the complete creature, with its webbed wings, the man-in-a-suit monstrosity is reminiscent of a cross between a Mahar from AT THE EARTH’S CORE (1976) and the rubbery Dagoth god-monster from the finale of CONAN THE DESTROYER (1984). In other words… Old Ancestor looks chintzy, but is fun to watch as it whirls about the cavern! The first person we see get killed by Old Ancestor does what probably many victims confronted by a monster would do: he voids his bladder!
Old Ancestor opens up his wings
You don’t mess with Chow Yun-Fat when he gets hold of a rocket launcher, right?
Finally, it is left to Chow Yun-Fat to deal with the toothy adversary… by blowing the critter away with a rocket launcher! Way to go Chow!
Chow Yun-Fat blasts the monster to smithereens with a rocket launcher. Well, of course he does: he’s Chow Yun-Fat!
All in all, THE SEVENTH CURSE is a fine ripping yarn. (Oh yeah, look out for the action scene where Yuan crashes his jeep through a Worm Tribe hut in slow motion: one unfortunate stuntman fails to get out of the way and is hit! I’m sure it was an accident and was not intended that way, but… ouch!)
The children go to Highgate Ponds to feed the Nessie-creature they have named Beauty
When a kipper-loving Nessie-type monster hatches from an egg brought back from Malaya by his Uncle Dick (Ronald Howard), a boy called David (Michael Wade) tries to keep the creature secret with the help of his sister Sophie (Rachel Clay) and his friend Chris (Terry Raven).
‘Produced specially for children’
This B&W British production is low budget and quite sweet, featuring polite children who speak awfully properly and some comical circus villains, who want to capture the monster so that they can use it as a sideshow attraction. This results in a chase along London streets and then Regent’s Canal.
Just chillin’ in a pond
The creature itself is initially a stop-motion puppet when it first hatches (the animation is basic but charming), though in some scenes it is just a static model that the children carry about.
A stop-motion puppet is used when the creature first hatches
Another shot of the stop-motion puppet
A small non-animated model is utilised in this interaction with Michael Wade
When the reptilian critter, which the children name ‘Beauty’, grows larger, the friendly beast is brought to life as a man in a suit. There are also a couple of brief close-up stop-motion shots of its face later in the story.
Beauty is a man-in-suit creation in this scene
Directed by Alberto (DEAD OF NIGHT) Cavalcanti, the screenplay was written by Mary Cathcart Borer, who wrote a lot of now-forgotten kids films and TV series, including THE DRAGON OF PENDRAGON CASTLE (1953) and MASTERS OF VENUS (1962).
Beauty grabs a policeman’s helmet
The original story was dreamt up by Joy Batchelor, who founded the British animation company Halas and Batchelor with her husband John Halas. They were behind such productions as the animated feature film ANIMAL FARM (1954) and the Oscar-nominated short AUTOMANIA 2000 (1963).
A dog-walking busybody gets spooked by the pond-loving beastie
THE MONSTER OF HIGHGATE PONDS, a Halas and Batchelor production made for the Children’s Film Foundation, is rather quaint and very much of its time.
DVD sleeve for Weird Adventures, which includes the Children’s Film Foundation productions The Monster of Highgate Ponds, The Boy Who Turned Yellow and A Hitch in Time
Hercules attacks the huge, tree-wrecking Erymanthian Boar!
Hercules (Dwayne Johnson) and his small, loyal warrior team earn gold as roaming mercenaries for hire. But when he accepts the offer of Lord Cotys (John Hurt) of Thrace to train an army in order to protect the kingdom from a ruthless warlord called Rhesus (Tobias Santelmann), Hercules must finally make a choice between making money and making a difference.
Dwayne Johnson wears the lion headgear well!
Based on Steve Moore’s comic ‘Hercules: The Thracian Wars’, the screenplay, written by Ryan Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos, goes in a very interesting direction, presenting Hercules’ legendary labours as merely exaggerated stories used to boost his claim to be an unbeatable demigod. His band of mercs, made up of knife-wielding Spartan Autolycus, Amazon archer Atalanta, berserker warrior Tydeus, the philosophical spearman Amphiaraus and storyteller Iolaus, all do their best to help overstate their leader’s prowess as much as possible.
Aksel Hennie, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Dwayne Johnson, Reece Ritchie and Rufus Sewell
Ian McShane is wonderful, of course, as Amphiaraus, who can see visions of what is to come (but keeps getting his time of death wrong!)
Director Brett Ratner handles the movie really well, orchestrating some impressive big scale battles, most notably the clash with the bald, savage Bessi tribesmen, and he inserts twists and revelations into the story at exactly the right points. This plotting skilfully builds up to the scene that makes HERCULES a favourite fantasy action movie of mine… when, during the film’s desperate, all-is-lost moment, Hercules draws on all his willpower and belief to actually tap into the godlike strength required to break his chains.
It’s such a highpoint when Dwayne roars “I am Hercules!” and leaps into action. Love it!
This. Scene. Rocks.
What helps make this scene work so well is that, up until this point, the movie has worked hard to strip away the legend and demystify Hercules’ feats, revealing that his fights with the likes of the Hydra and the Nemean Lion were all fabricated or overly embellished. ‘Centaurs’ are revealed to merely be inaccurately observed mounted warriors and Cerberus proves to be a misremembered hallucination. So, by the time Hercules is shackled in the dungeon, seemingly powerless to prevent Cotys’ daughter Ergenia (Rebecca Ferguson) from being executed, you really don’t think he will be able to draw upon the superhuman might needed to save the day.
The Nemean Lion
The Lernean Hydra!
Dwayne Johnson makes for a perfect, very physical Hercules, Ian McShane stands out as Amphiaraus, who amusingly keeps mistakenly thinking he can foresee his own imminent death, and Rufus Sewell imbues Autolycus with a cynical charm.
Autolycus in action during the battle with the green-painted Bessi tribesmen
Though all of the monsters are ultimately revealed to be bogus, the CGI utilised to bring them to the screen is top-notch, especially the huge, tree-splintering Erymanthian Boar. The three huge, black wolves that Hercules combats in the dungeon are well executed too by the visual effects team, with one of the critters getting its jaws snapped in the vicious skirmish with the Greek strongman.
The hellish three-headed hound Cerberus…
…is revealed to be three feral, snarling wolves owned by King Eurystheus (Joseph Fiennes)
HERCULES is a handsome, well-mounted yarn with good production design and cinematography, which deftly balances humour and seriousness to produce a movie that rewards repeated viewings.
Here are some posters…
US teaser poster
Swedish poster
Japanese poster
Finally, here’s the awesome Erymanthian Boar in action…
This portmanteau horror film uses a dressing table with a cursed mirror as the link between a series of stories, set in 1922 Shanghai, 1988 Singapore and 1999 Hong Kong.
The first tale, about Mary, a wheelchair-bound woman suffering from mirror-induced flashbacks that remind her of how she poisoned her husband, is the best of the bunch.
Mary peers into the mirror and her face appears to be messed-up in the reflection
The story set in Singapore begins in a more humorous manner, with the mirror this time influencing a solicitor (Jack Neo) to commit murder to win his current court case, and it finishes with a briefly-seen ghost (played by the movie’s scriptwriter) and a rather silly twist ending involving plastic surgery.
The ghost of a murder victim appears in the back of the solicitor’s car…
…and at the end of this segment the solicitor undergoes plastic surgery after an accident… and ends up with the murder victim’s face!
The third yarn concerns a young guy called Ming (Nicholas Tse) bringing Judy (Ruby Lin), his new girlfriend, back to his home, where he lives with his rich grandmother and his cousin, Yu (Lillian Ho). He marries Judy, but unpleasant events start to occur, culminating in the death of the grandmother. It is eventually revealed that Judy framed Yu in order to make sure Ming inherited his grandmother’s fortune.
DVD cover
In addition to these three main stories, there is a brief pre-credits sequence set in a Ming Dynasty brothel and an even shorter teaser ending, based in Taiwan.
The film, directed by Agan (aka Kiefer Liu), lacks any real suspense or scares, the mirror is only tenuously involved in the second and third stories, and the tales, written by Raymond Pak-Ming Wong, are just not very engaging, though the Hong Kong segment at least boasts a dead-puppy-in-granny’s-sink moment and an absurd scene in which the grandmother’s severed head gets accidentally kicked about.
Granny’s severed head is left on a shelf
The Shanghai-set story is at least more successful in intertwining the mirror into the plot, has a well-sustained atmosphere and some decent period details, plus there’s a scene where the dressing table slides across the room menacingly, echoing a similar moment with a ‘living piano’ in the British anthology film TORTURE GARDEN. The mirror’s ability to move is only a figment of Mary’s imagination, unfortunately, and the dressing table remains an inanimate, rather passive presence for the remainder of the movie.
The dressing table moves towards Mary. If only it had creepily slid around the place more often in the movie!
Lethal chemicals in a Lucozade bottle trigger a zombie infestation in a Hong Kong shopping mall. Nonsense-spouting VCD shop duo, Woody Invincible and Crazy Bee, find themselves trapped in the mall with several other shop workers, as the crazed, scabby-faced, cannibal undead start multiplying in number.
Spectrum Films Blu-ray cover
Horror comedy BIO-ZOMBIE begins by introducing us to the lowly, trivial world of slackers Woody and Bee, who think nothing of mugging Rolls (Angela Tong), a pretty fellow mall worker, for her ring and cash. Yet, despite their superficial banter and disreputable ways, director Wilson (IP MAN) Yip manages to encourage us to tolerate these two fast-talking, disaffected teens, rather than dismiss them immediately as total scumbags. Actor Jordan Chan, from the YOUNG AND DANGEROUS film series, instils a certain amount of rough charm and hints of well-hidden decency into the character of Woody, further encouraging us to give these shirkers a chance.
Woody and Bee: the slacker duo who take-on the zombies
Zombies on the loose!
The arc of another character, Kui (Lai Yiu-Cheung), goes in the opposite direction, however, as he segues from seemingly self-assured, arrogant phone shop owner to a total coward who is prepared to shove a fellow survivor into the clutches of a mass of zombies to save his own skin.
Zombies overrun the carpark
Mrs. Kui (Suk-Mui Tam) finally falls victim to the undead
The zombie makeups vary wildly in quality, and the movie takes its time to build momentum, but it is worth the wait, as we are treated to some interesting sequences, such as the scene where a lovelorn, infected sushi guy (Emotion Cheung) fights his undead urges and tries to protect Rolls from a bunch of zombie footballers… by offering them a plate of severed fingers served on rice!
The lovesick, scabby-faced sushi dude
Poor zombie sushi dude
The film retains its irreverent humour throughout, but adds increasingly bloody encounters, including Woody shoving a cordless drill into a zombie’s mouth, and it also includes a couple of unexpected emotional moments, plus some quirky homages to survival horror video games.
A zombie stalks the mall
Unlike most zombie films, which generally feature characters unaware of the whole mythos surrounding the undead, this movie wittily has Crazy Bee (Sam Lee) suddenly remembering a zombie computer game he’d been playing, prompting him to inform a cop that he needs to shoot an undead attacker in the head.
Hong Kong DVD cover
Woody’s transformation from strutting, self-concerned jerk to heroic zombie-fighter is nicely handled, a moment of on the nose sentimentality that occurs after Crazy Bee gets bitten somehow works (only Hong Kong films can get away with this kind of scene!) and the ending succeeds in being quite affecting, as Woody willingly drinks from the deadly Lucozade bottle after seeing Rolls unknowingly take a sip (although an alternative, more obviously downbeat final shot is also featured in the end credits).
Hong Kong Blu-ray coverAlternative artwork created by Thomas Hodge for the Vinegar Syndrome release of Bio Zombie. A limited edition slip for subscribers.
Hammer time! A head gets bashed-in at the very start of the film!
The Foo Fighters (Dave Grohl, Nate Mendel, Taylor Hawkins, Pat Smear, Rami Jaffee and Chris Shiflett) decide to record their 10th album in an isolated Encino house that has a mysterious, horrific history… and soon supernatural forces are unleashed, forcing the band to deal with possessions, demons and very bloody murders.
The Foo Fighters
Poster
A delivery guy gets beheaded with garden sheers!
Directed by BJ (HATCHET III) McDonnell, STUDIO 666 was financed by the Foo Fighters and is basically a glossy band home movie writ large. The acting is pretty much what you’d expect from guys who aren’t, well, actors, with Pat Smear, bless him, definitely coming across as the most wooden and Rami Jaffee proving to be the natural thespian of the group: he’s actually really funny in all of his scenes.
Rami steals all the scenes he’s in
Based on a story by Dave Grohl, scriptwriters Jeff (PET SEMATARY) Buhler and Rebecca Hughes’ plot is an excuse for some easy-going banter between the band members, homages to 80s horror movies and a series of elaborate death scenes.
Krug (Kerry King) gets fried in an electrical accident
It’s certainly the gore moments that stand out – and it’s obvious that a lot of effort was put into them. Though there’s some CGI blood, these over the top murders are produced mainly via old school practical effects that are very striking to behold.
Chris Shiflett’s face gets barbecued!
There’s a skin-blistering barbecue demise, a death-by-cymbal, an opening hammer assault, a head crushed under a van tyre and more. The standout set-piece, though, has to be the amazingly bloody chainsaw attack on Rami Jaffee and Whitney Cummings as they have sex in bed. The whirring chainsaw chews through Whitney’s head, cuts through Rami’s face, then slices down both bodies, cutting them in half lengthways! It’s a practical effects (with added CGI) tour de force!
The chainsaw rips through Whitney Cummings’ head…
…and the saw chews into Rami’s face……and then the chainsaw bisects the bodies!
Makeup effects designer Tony (ZOMBIELAND) Gardner is the true star of STUDIO 666, dreaming up a whole bunch of exaggerated-yet-realistic practical splatter moments that the rest of the movie is obviously built around.
The late Taylor Hawkins finds himself a victim of part of his own drum kit
Intestines!
The band don’t take the film seriously and you shouldn’t either: just relax and enjoy scenes featuring red-eyed demon-zombies, cameos by John Carpenter and Lionel Richie, nods to movies like the original EVIL DEAD flicks, a disemboweled raccoon, a possessed Dave Grohl turning cannibal and, of course, the bloody fine splatter-murders!
John Carpenter plays an engineer (and he wrote music for the film, too)A fanged, possessed Grohl and some red-eyed demon-dudes
Projectile vomit!
Some behind the scenes shots…
Dave enjoys his nightmare disemboweling scene! Pat Smear and his replica headRami Jaffee has his body cast for the film’s standout chainsaw gore sceneYou can tell Mr Grohl was having a bloody good timeTony Gardner, in full zombie makeup, poses with his daughter Kyra
That’s a really realistic-looking head!
And this is also a realistic-looking head!
Rami Jaffee’s death scene would eventually require pneumatic rigs and 55-gallon drums of blood pumping under the floor, in a fake bedroom tented off to prevent the blood from spraying everywhere!
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