The Angry Rail-Riding Homeless Gentleman With a Pump-Action Long-Barreled Firearm

Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)

Short version: If you grew up with 1980s VHS action-gore-trash, you’ll love Hobo With a Shotgun.
I would have preferred a more straightforward gritty semi-realistic 1970s vibe, though.

Hobo owes SO MUCH to Street Trash—the flick’s pretty bad in an intentionally campy way—but not as smart or deranged as its many influences. It’s clever, I get it—and seeing extreme splatter on the big screen is always fun—but Hobo just didn’t quite click for me.

Hobo With a Shotgun (great frickin’ title, though—and wicked cool font; see below) was a spoof of a certain type of 1980s action-slash-horror movie—it looked a lot like a Nick Zedd film actually—And I had a lot of problems with all its very obvious influences: the aforementioned Street Trash, early Sam Raimi, Asian gore flicks like The Story of Ricky, and so on.

And I am getting a little sick of tribute/mash-ups/homages—I have seen enough where it really needs to grab me, to be more than just a reference—it needs to be worked into context. (Or else be really funny or smart.)
Honestly, though, right now I cannot think of a counter-example.




But Rutger Hauer, the coolest white man EVER, was great—every second he was on screen was riveting—really!
(And I did enjoy that one of the bad guys was named “Ivan”….)

While I have already criticized the film’s script, I will say that all of the Hobo’s dialog is classic: angry Zen retard brilliance. Highly quotable.

Overall, I think if I’d seen Hobo With a Shotgun at home, with a six-pack or other intoxicants, I would have enjoyed it much more. But the $13 ticket cost and the $6.50 for a small popcorn (WTF?!?! I really should’ve said “no”—but I was hongry…) made me watch this movie with a shotgun-toting-hobo-sized chip on my shoulder.

Space Germs Will Fuck You Up: A Look at DVD MIA The Incredible Melting Man (1977)

The Incredible Melting Man (1977)
Directed and written by William Sachs
Special make-up effects by Rick Baker
With Alex Rebar, Burr DeBenning, Myron Healey, Michael Alldredge, Janus Blythe, and others
American International Pictures; 84 minutes

While passing through the rings of Saturn, something happens to the crew of the Scorpio Five, and back on Earth, astronaut Steve starts, well, there’s no other word for it—he starts melting, getting all drippy and runny and gooey.

It’s never properly explained, but Steve starts craving human flesh and after escaping from the hospital, sets about devouring a few hapless victims.
(Not that it helps in anyway, but I think eating flesh is supposed to slow down the effects of whatever Saturnian space germ he’s picked up.)

Steve’s affliction is supposed to be a secret, so that’s why the police are never contacted and why security for an ill astronaut is so lax.
(And also helps the film by keeping costs low.)

While the flick is dopey and illogical, it gets big points for letting you sometimes sympathize with the oozing Steve: he didn’t ask to be a liquefying cannibal, and after he kills someone, he seems to show regret.

And the ending (yeah, yeah, yeah, SPOILER) is quietly tragic (while disgusting):
Steve keeps melting and melting until all that’s left is a pile of messy clothes—
that a janitor unceremoniously sweeps up and then dumps into a trashcan the next morning.


One step above a John Waters movie financially and technically—especially with some cool early Rick Baker makeup FX—
but a step below in the smarts and laughs department
(although I really did enjoy all the quirky secondary characters peppered throughout the movie, from the pre-adolescent smokers to the horny octogenarians to the sleazy nudie photographer),
The Incredible Melting Man
is often delightfully goofy (and with a title like The Incredible Melting Man what did you expect?), while never forgetting to squeeeeeeeze in as much gore and muck as the MPAA will allow, or the basic fact that it’s a horror movie—so scares, tension and weirdness are the watchwords of the day.
It’s a very “’70s” B-movie. And that’s a compliment.

Had this flick only been gorier or funnier—or both—it would have been completely awesome!

But as it is, The Incredible Melting Man is still worth a look for gorehounds, freakazoids and aficionados of the Cinema of Weirdness.



And yes, director Jonathan Demme (between making Fighting Mad and Handle With Care?) does make a cameo as a dumbass victim doing the “going into the dark house alone” shtick.

But it’s Demme’s costar in the scene who steals the show. I knew I recognized her and the credits identified her as Janus Blythe, “Ruby” from The Hills Have Eyes! (I have had a crush on Ruby since forever…)

After Demme disappears into the dark house, Janus enters the house, but unlike dummy Demme, she turns on the lights.
The Monster is there and chases her, she barricades herself in the kitchen, Melto breaks through the window, she chops off his arm (!), he runs away… and then Janus has an Oscar-worthy freak-out.
It’s incredible to watch—and so real! Raw, honest.
It’s the most authentic thing in this movie: And of course someone would have a major freak-out after almost getting eating by a dissolving astronaut!
I know I would…
(Her incredible freak-out starts at about 4:50 at this clip—but Demme is at the beginning, looking very “hillbilly ripoff.”)



A remake of The Incredible Melting Man would be a good flick for one of those new breed of French or Serbian or Norwegian splatterpunk goremeisters (or even Eli Roth) to tackle; see if they can balance the gore and laughs, take us someplace new.

Roth would know how to make a good flick, if he would just get back to directing…



As a kid, I was a subscriber to both Starlog and Fangoria, and I remember one of those mags promoting the living shit out of The Incredible Melting Man back in the day.

Originally released by the gone, but not forgotten AIP in December 1977, The Incredible Melting Man is a flick I’ve only recently gotten to see despite knowing about for about 33 years (!). Like many AIP flicks (but not I Was a Teenage Werewolf, damn it!), The Incredible Melting Man became part of MGM’s seemingly defunct Midnite Movies DVD series—
Which means that The Incredible Melting Man is now DVD MIA.

However, The National Film Board of Ivanlandia managed to screen it via the N-flix InstaVue option—
And as much as we are annoyed by N-flix’s weird and draconian policies reducing the user-friendly options to nil,
we praise the InstaVue policy—and its awesome B-movie selection, a fan’s dream!
Look, I’m not saying these flicks are good, but it’s nice to be able to screen movies that haven’t been available for ages, aren’t on DVD, and there are no more local TV stations that used to air the madness.

The DVD-MIA flicks I’ve screened so far are:
The biker flicks Angels From Hell and Devil’s Angels (with John Cassavettes!),
I Escaped From Devil’s Island (with Jim Brown!),
I Bury the Living (with Richard Boone!),
Master of the World (with Vincent Price /and/ Charles Bronson),
Futureworld,
The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday (with Lee Marvin and Oliver Reed!),
Alakazam the Great,
Robert Aldrich's The Choirboys [we're working on a future review right now],
Queen of Blood [ditto],
Looking for Mr. Goodbar [ditto]

and Richard Lester's The Bed-Sitting Room (which I hated—hated enough to write this:
Technically, this flick is perfect in its low-budget depiction of post-nuclear war England, but its script is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. Being "surreal" is no excuse for not being funny, either. Maybe it's funnier if you're English... But I’m not and it isn’t.

Meanwhile, I’ve been able, through a friend, to screen a bunch of flicks unavailable except for in their various shadow-world/bootleg off-the-web manifestations.

This way, I’ve managed to screen some really choice bits, including:
Run of the Arrow,
Michael Reeve’s The Sorcerers,
The Passage (with an mindboggling performance by Malcolm McDowell),
When Eight Bells Toll (young Antony Hopkins doing Alastair MacLean),
Fear Is the Key (MacLean again, but with a car chase to rival Bullitt’s—honestly, it’s that good; this movie is starring Vanishing Point’s Barry Newman, so you know I’m right),
and the grim Report to the Commissioner, with young, baby-faced Michael Moriarty, a young Yaphet Kotto in old-age makeup and a young Bob Balaban (credited as “Robert”) being super-awesome as a homeless guy with no legs who gets around on a low cart—and at one point he chases a taxi through traffic, a great scene!

Via N-flix Insta, boots, Warner Bros. Archives, Universal, Columbia and others opening their vaults for DVD on demand, there is a flood of material previously thought gone forever.

That said, I feel that the concept of DVD MIA could almost be put to rest.
Sure, sure, there’s lots I still want—need—to get my paws on, but who’s to say their release isn’t around the corner?

Speedfreaks See Bugz

The Downtown Nowhere Movie Theatre Presents Ten Little Genre Movies



With the exception of one film, all the movies covered here today were screened by The National Film Board of Ivanlandia on DVD.

Most of these flicks had a theatrical release of some sort (often limited), but several were either direct-to-DVD or didn’t develop a fan base until they were on DVD.

Like The Burrowers and Starship Troopers 3: Marauder,
Infestation, The Breed and Altered are the type of decent, hard-working B-movie that would have, in the not-so-distant past, been shown at drive-ins and/or as the second bill of a low-rent moviehouse in Downtown Nowhere.


But the economy and the world being what it is, weird exploitation or genre fare has to seek exposure elsewhere.

I could never understand why any movie fan could turn their nose up at a specific sort of release a film might get: “Ewww, that’s ‘direct-to-DVD,’ I’m not watching that!”

But what if the film’s good?
Then who cares what the format is?

It’s only the boozhy Normals with their pernicious telepathic pressure who keep concepts like “direct-to-DVD is second rate” alive.

If you appreciate B-movies or exploitation flicks or Grindhousers or the Cinema of the Trashy & Weird,
then you should be able to appreciate a flick for its own merits, whatever the format you screen it.

Jeez, without direct-to-DVD,
I would never have seen a lot of good stuff!
(and before that, direct-to-VHS;
and how about even before that: “made for TV” movies--why people put those down was beyond me!),
(Back to the drive-in and the thee-aY-ters on the bad side of town….all the way back to that first primeval B-cave painting--





Infestation (2009)

Give Infestation a chance and you shall be rewarded--
Although the bugs in Cloverfield were really top notch--nasty little critters!--
This is probably the best giant bug movie in a decade (and we love Them!)

(But we do not like Eight Legged Freaks--I never felt they got the physics of the spiders’ jumping properly, and David Arquette just wasn‘t doing it for me)

Infestation has a good blend of humor and horror--
realizing that most of the humor has to be of the “sick” variety--
and any pop culture references are part of one specific character’s “shtick.”

The flick has good effects, nothing spectacular, but effective and often gross.
And it’s obvious that they’ve thought out as best as possible the questions of mass and density when the bugs move.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, bugs can’t grow that big. Whatevs.

Good gore, but not really enough for my gorehound’s palate--but adequate, and all done towards maximizing the story.

Plotted well, the movie starts strong, and ups the ante repeatedly--
meanwhile, like all good exploitation B-movies should, Infestation has naked boobies.

And I love, love, love the fact that the bugs are never “explained.”
They just happened.

There’s a great “Carpenter-esque” vibe running throughout Infestation, leading to an awesome (non)shock ending
(if I can be any more vague).

Infestation should be on a double feature with Them!, of course, but I’d add a midnight showing of the incredible (and still unavailable on DVD The Hellstrom Chronicle)





Altered (2006)

This flick gets 4 out of 5 stars for gorehounds, and 3 for normal folk.

That said, despite the medium acting and dialog,
Altered is like some blood-splattered cross between The X-Files and an old Outer Limits episode---
and really feels like what M. Night Shamalamadingdong’s Signs should have been had the movie been any good.

A darn good B-movie, Altered has a fast pace and a high level of weirdness:
this flick starts off intense,
and keeps getting crazier as four friends finally get revenge on the extraterrestrials that “probed” them years ago.

And while that sounds like a goofy premise,
the movie plays it straight, aided by some top-notch gore and well-executed alien effects, and really delivers the scares.
Check it out.

Altered should be on a double feature with
Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County,
a flick that scared the crap out of me when I saw it on Channel 9 in the late-1990s.
(Sigh…Remember when we used to worry about simple things, like alien abductions? Those were better days….)



Here is one of my entries into that ultra-bogus New Yorker caption contest.
My caption had the alien grey doctor saying,
“The bad news is that it’s a tumor.
The good news is that it looks delicious.”

Factoid: That cartoon is by P.C. Vey, who is not only an excellent cartoonist, but the son of my high school shop teacher!

Orphan (2009)


This is a deliciously transgressive and nasty flick that is destined to become a camp classic.

There’s no way anyone renting Orphan or seeing it for the first time is not
going to know that little Esther is a
devil-child up to no good,
and the film’s fun is in watching how
the murderous moppet absolutely destroys her adoptive family.

Especially since this adoptive family is such a collection of jerks and losers,
with the mother being the worst:
She’s an annoying bundle of confusion and nerves, and generates zero sympathy.
She’s a magnet for bad karma.

So this dry-drunk keeps putting her career as a classical music teacher on hold to be a baby machine?
And she can’t pay attention to the kids she’s already got because why?
Oh right, she’s a dumb selfish cow.

It becomes fun watching how Esther messes with her head, and inspires Mom’s increasing paranoia and instability.

Meanwhile it’s actually quite disturbing to hear some of the foul or creepy language that comes out of Esther’s mouth, let alone the “other things” she does to mess with the Daddy character. Creeeeeeeepy!

In summation: a very unhappy and messed-up family adopt a kid without knowing a thing about her---and they get what they deserve!

Psychotic pre-teen Esther is helping this family grow out of its morbid shell.
(Honestly, though, I prefer to think of the film ending with the alternate or original ending available on the DVD’s supplementals--much creepier, and less Hollywood, but what can you do?)

A near perfect double feature with John Water’s Female Trouble





Big Fan (2009)

A cross between Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground,”
Big Fan is Robert Siegel’s second script about sports and losers,
but it is not as effective, interesting or sure-footed as The Wrestler.

The difference in quality between these two flicks is like night and day.
This movie feels like a rough draft or student film sometimes.

And although he gives a riveting performance, Patton Oswalt is seriously miscast in Big Fan.
Oswalt is an awesome stand-up comic, but he’s not a good enough actor to play “dumb.”



Big Fan’s football-obsessed main character is a simple, almost stupid man, and there is too much intelligence in Oswalt’s shifty eyes.
(Smart actors good at playing “dumb” include John Hurt, Warren Oates and Robert Duvall.)

Using the core of evil that exists inside every comedian, Oswalt does his best, delivering a performance that, in another different movie would have been perfect.

But in what director Siegel has conceived, Oswalt’s performance is out of place.

Double Feature with either Observe & Report
(which I didn’t like, but I think its fans will like Big Fan)
or even better, Patton Oswalt’s stand-up show/concert movie,
the incredibly funny My Weakness Is Strong




The Breed (2006)


This is one of those flicks that had it only been one hour long, it would have been perfect.
But as is, The Breed is a decent B-movie with good action, some creepy and moody scenes, and some excellent cheap shocks (those dogs jump out of everywhere!).

Despite a slow start with a series of ridiculous “friends having fun” scenes, and a lame “quarrelling brothers” subplot, The Breed offers an intriguing premise: a pack of vicious and super-intelligent mutant canines
(perhaps the ancestors of the mutt from A Boy and His Dog pre-apocalypse??)
have escaped from their lab and taken over the island it was on.

They’ve eaten all the other animals there, and now here come some vacationing twenty-somethings!

Personally, I would have preferred even more gore, but a big plus for the flick is that 99% of the action and effects are practical ones, and hardly any CGI is used. So those hounds are really attacking those stunt men, and that’s a visceral thrill no computer can match.

On a triple feature with The Doberman Gang and A Boy and His Dog


Dead Snow (2009)

Despite some excellent (but also infrequent) gore effects, Dead Snow is a major disappointment:

There are too many tonal shifts and idiotic attempts at snarky dialog, and the flick is so derivative, stealing from many popular horror/gore flicks, it becomes annoying.
It takes far too long to get going, and none of the characters are worthy of our interest, not even as victims.
Only gorehounds in desperate need of a splatter-fix need go near this loser.

Double feature (and only if I have to) with A Cold Night’s Death, with Robert Culp (RIP) and Eli Wallach as scientists trapped at an Artic installation in this excellent pre-Carpenter’s The Thing horror TV movie--
which is shamefully not out on DVD!
(BTW, Wallach’s wife Anne Jackson was in her own frozen horror flick: Kubrick's The Shining)




The Prophecy (1995)


I did not expect to like this movie as much as I did: a very pleasant surprise!
The Prophecy won me over with its very intelligent (and usually over the top) almost blasphemous theological discussions, acted out with incredible verve by Walken, Stoltz and Mortensen (who’s especially brilliant in his cameo as Lucifer).

Additionally, the flick has great style and ample gore---I’m amazed that it took me so long to discover it.

The Prophecy is theological horror that puts the Omen series to shame. (And I think I’ll protect my memory of this movie by not seeing any of its sequels.)
BTW, I love how the angels contemptuously refer to us humans as “talking monkeys.”


Triangle (2009)

We also screened Triangle recently, and liked it, although it tries way too hard to be David Lynchian--but it was quick and gory and crazy and stylish enough to hold interest.

I’d put Triangle on a double feature with Night Tide.




Ginger Snaps (2000)

One of the best interpretations of the werewolf legend I’ve seen.
Ginger Snaps is another flick that I have to kick myself for taking so long to see.

The film’s dialog sequences are the best parts;
the horror and gore are good, but nothing super special, however they are effective in the overall work.

That said, Ginger Snaps has a very intelligent script interpreted brilliantly
by two young actresses who perfectly capture that specific type of super-smart Goth misanthrope that can be found in high schools everywhere.


An almost perfect B-movie, a flick that balances social issues (teen sexuality; feminism; suburbia’s soullessness) with exploitation,
Ginger Snaps (get it?) really captures that feeling of high school awkwardness---with blood and guts and werewolves!

I’d double feature Ginger Snaps with the direct-to-DVD werewolf flick, Big Bad Wolf.
I think BBW is a sick and crazy entry into the lycanthrope canon, with high levels of gore and a gruesome sense of humor. And as much as Ginger Snaps may have a “grrrrl power” vibe, BBW’s wolfman is the complete opposite:
a sexist asshole.






Le Couperet (2005)

Director Costa-Gavras adopts a low-key style to adapt Donald Westlake's incredible book to France--and it really works!
One of the only adaptations of a Donald Westlake novel that really succeeds, while also maintaining the author's deadpan flavor.

The flick's a must-see for the author's fans, but nigh on impossible to: it's never been released in the US, and because of its incendiary subject matter probably never will be.
Can't have American workers going around killing each other, now can we?

Didn’t see this on DVD, but if you have the right technology, you can track down a version. I saw this on a friend’s playstation.

Double feature with the excellent Spanish boardroom thriller, The Method.