Well, writing this up took a lot longer than my lazy ass expected.
Anyway, Day 3 of the Wicked Weekend opened with two Canadian films, one a grindhouse action flick and the other a home invasion horror movie, then returned to America with a pair of holiday horror flicks and a gross-out horror-comedy.
First up...
Spare Parts (2020)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Less a horror movie than a grindhouse action flick, Spare Parts is a mix of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, rock & roll, sisterhood, and exploitation, a "gladiator game" movie in which people are forced to fight to the death in an arena to the roar of the crowd. It's not that good at storytelling, its character arcs and some of its critical subplots feeling rather half-baked when they could've gone deeper with them, but it is damn good at style and action, between its sexy punk-rock atmosphere and its multiple cool action scenes in the ring. It's hardly one of the best examples of its subgenre, but its better qualities meant that I was consistently entertained even if the writing wasn't up to snuff, and for that, I give it my recommendation.
The film follows Ms. 45, an all-female rock band playing a biker bar where they set off a massive brawl after a lecherous fan attempts to rush the stage. Clearly, this impressed a group of people staging an underground deathmatch fighting tournament in a scrapyard outside of town, part of a cult that believes that such human sacrifices are necessary for their continued prosperity, and so the band is run off the road and kidnapped. When they wake up, they find that their right hands have been cut off and replaced with mounts for bladed weapons, and that they are to become gladiators in the ring. As they fight and train, one of them, the guitarist Emma, is given special treatment by her captors, who see her as their star, driving a wedge between her and her bandmates, including her sister Amy. This makes matters a bit more complicated when the time comes to stage their rebellion and escape...
The film's biggest fault is that, while it has a lot of interesting ideas in its various plot threads, it never fully commits to any one of them. This was most evident with Jill and Cassy, who are given comparatively short shrift compared to Emma and Amy. They are a lesbian couple, with Jill having recently been artificially inseminated and in the early stages of pregnancy, which seems like it ought to be a more important story thread than it actually winds up being. As part of the operation that turned her into a scrapyard warrior, Jill was given an abortion, with the villainous cult leader known as the Emperor taunting her by showing her the fetus floating in a little jar and leaving her heartbroken and infuriated... and yet, she is killed minutes later, while her partner Cassy is kept out of focus after briefly grieving. The film also couldn't really seem to decide just how much tension Emma and Amy had in their sisterly relationship, such that the story of them eventually reconciling felt rather hollow. Nor did it really flesh out the similarly troubled relationship between the Emperor and his son and heir apparent Sam, the subplot where Amy starts falling for her trainer Driller, or the subplot where Emma's boyfriend is looking for her that the film seemed to forget about. The protagonists all had a clearly defined goal, escape the cult that mutilated them and is keeping them captive, but the film heavily meandered on the road to that destination, such that it was difficult to get invested in what were pretty shallow characters all around.
Fortunately, the cast was solid, and the film had style coming out of its ass. At its core, this is a hotter and sexier version of Mad Max without the cars or the post-apocalyptic setting but with a bunch of badass women with blades bolted onto their arms doing battle in a Roman-style arena. This was a movie where the action needed to be engaging and frequent, and on that front, it kept me well entertained. In the arena, the blood flowed thick from both friend and foe, and the clashes between the protagonists and the various bikers they're put up against felt brutal and visceral. The four heroines were charismatic and sexy without coming across as fetishized, and all of them felt like they could hold their own in a fight to the death; it did not surprise me when I went on IMDb and saw that Emma and Cassy's actors, Emily Alatalo and Kiriana Stanton, both had backgrounds as stunt performers. The atmosphere also had a level of grit to it that went beyond just the junkyard setting, the fact that the heroines are in a rock band together bringing the film into a Rob Zombie-esque world of dive bars and sleazy bikers early on that soon comes to characterize the film's tone. Watching it, I was able to easily groove to this movie's scrappy, rebellious feel, as it kept me having fun with it even when the story was proving forgettable.
The Bottom Line
A punk-rock girl-power take on any number of deathmatch storylines, Spare Parts is pure style over substance: a pretty shallow film, but also a very fun and entertaining one. If you're looking for some low-budget action, check it out.
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Staying in Canada for the second film, we now jump into the "Frights" part of Popcorn Frights with...
For the Sake of Vicious (2020)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
For the Sake of Vicious is, well, vicious. It starts off with a hell of a hook and three very interesting main characters, then takes a sharp left turn into something way more over-the-top with a sudden surge of violence that caught me off guard. It's a gritty, in-your-face home invasion thriller that does not pull its punches, throwing viewers right into a morally cloudy situation that never gets any easier for them or the characters to navigate, and it culminates in a blowout of violence that served up a lengthy and brutal hand-to-hand action sequence. Keep your eye on this one when it comes out, because it will not disappoint.
At its core, this is a rape-and-revenge vigilante movie, albeit of a different sort than usual. We start with our protagonist, a young nurse named Romina, returning home after a day's work to find her landlord Alan laying bloody and beaten on the floor of her kitchen, with Chris, the man responsible, sitting right there. After an altercation between Romina and Chris, we find out what happened: Chris' young daughter was abducted and raped, and he believes that Alan did it. Alan furiously denies it, and tells Chris that he's trying to cover for his own sins. As Chris and Alan interrogate each other and Romina desperately tries to defuse the situation, things get taken up a notch or ten when a bunch of masked biker goons show up at the door with murder on the mind.
This is essentially two movies stapled together at the halfway mark once the bikers show up, but once it's revealed what's going on, the two halves fit together a lot better than they should. In no small part, this is because of the atmosphere of chaos that the movie runs on, with Romina serving as the audience POV character as she's dropped into a situation that's rapidly spiraling out of anyone's control. While Lora Burke gave an admirable performance as Romina, especially during the finale when she's called on to do some pretty gnarly stuff, the real main characters here are Chris and Alan, and they were both mesmerizing. Neither of them is a good man; Chris' suspicion of Alan is based on a hunch and circumstantial evidence, as both Alan and Romine make clear to him, yet it's enough to hang a cloud of suspicion over Alan, especially when he starts making phone calls behind Chris' back that ultimately led to the bikers storming the house. Nick Smyth and Colin Paradine play a twisted tug-of-war as Chris and Alan, one where we can't be sure which of them to really trust -- or if both of them are terrible people who have thrust Romina into a life-threatening situation.
When the action kicks in during the third act, of course, it goes all out on the bloodshed and violence. Everybody involved both takes and receives some vicious blows once the mysterious bikers attack the house, lured there by... well, it's not entirely clear until the end what's going on, though the cuts we get throughout the film before then to a strange, wealthy man who seems to have some connection to Alan offer a clue. Leaving us just a bit in the dark as to what's happening offers a very "WTF is going on!?!?!?" feel of chaos to the proceedings, and having already gotten me invested in the characters, the film proceeded to sock me in the face and send me for a hell of a loop. The gore flows freely as the characters perform brutal acts of violence on one another that feel like they were lifted from a John Wick movie, repurposed to emphasize the horror. It's all exceptionally well-shot, too; as these people dish it out, seemingly going out of their way to trash the house in the process, you feel every bit of it -- especially given how clear it is that none of the actors had stunt doubles. The third act played out like an epic, extended fight scene, one where the bruises, dings, and gunshot wounds slowly added up for both the heroes and the villains.
The Bottom Line
A grim thriller that kicks the shit out of you, For the Sake of Vicious is one hell of a movie, even if its tonal shift about halfway in can be jarring. It grabbed me by the balls, and then twisted them to keep things interesting. I did have a few questions about the plot, but if you're into low-budget DTV action, this should be on your list.
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For the third film, we return home to America for something with a bit more Halloween spirit.
Bad Candy (2020)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Possibly the biggest film of the day in terms of production values, Bad Candy is a film that bears the mark of Trick 'r Treat in a lot of ways. An anthology horror film set around Halloween that combines a fairly light touch with grindhouse splatter, the comparisons to Michael Dougherty's modern classic of the spooky season are obvious at first glance. Bad Candy lacks some of the unique qualities that made Trick 'r Treat so much damn fun, but even so, on its own merits, it had more hits than misses in its various segments. If you're into movies set around Halloween, you can do far, far worse than this.
The plot, such as it is, is a loosely connected series of vignettes that all take place around Halloween, tied together by rock musician Corey Taylor and Zach Galligan as the late-night DJ Chilly Billy and his producer Paul hosting their annual Halloween special, taking calls from listeners as they relay all these tales to them. We meet a young girl whose drawings can come to life and uses this to fight back against her abusive father, a boy whose theft of some candy comes back to bite him in Brothers Grimm fashion, a mortician whose mix of psychedelic drugs and sexual frustration causes her to start hallucinating the dead coming back to life, and more. Observing from the sidelines is a strange, creepy-looking clown, who occasionally gets involved in the action himself, as in one story where he murders a man in a dingy public restroom. All of it is happening on one Halloween night in the small town of New Salem, the characters often crossing paths and the action eventually coming to Chilly Billy's DJ booth.
The highlight here is undoubtedly Chilly Billy's radio show, the framing story tying everything together. It's here where the film really sets itself apart from Trick 'r Treat, lending itself a rock and roll atmosphere courtesy of Taylor and Gaffigan as they introduce each caller's story and occasionally interrupt to provide their own color commentary during a more humorous or brutal twist. They both felt like the kinds of DJs you'd happily listen to on a long night out on the road, and even when they got to a less interesting story, they were always there to eventually right the ship and move on. The fun continued with the better stories told to them, my favorite being one about a group of veterans who use Halloween to hunt a group of degenerate drug dealers and pimps and purge the streets of filth -- and have a shapeshifting demon at their side. (Why? Because it's awesome.) There was a trend in the best segments in the film, that of them tying themselves to Halloween without taking themselves too seriously, whether it was the veterans using the holiday to carry out their own version of the Purge, the introductory stories about the girl with the magic art book and the boy who exploited the honor system to steal candy, or a woman who dressed as a sexy cop and got mistaken for a real police officer by the crooks breaking into her pitch-black home. Other stories whiffed, often feeling a bit too bare-bones to keep me interested in the characters, such as the bathroom hack-and-slash or the drugged-up mortician. Unfortunately, the final segment of the film, about a group of ghost hunters, fell flat for me, its plot being a mess of different timelines that proved very hard to follow, leaving me scratching my head by the end with a fairly unsatisfying payoff and conclusion.
The Bottom Line
It's not going to replace Trick 'r Treat in my Halloween viewing schedule any time soon, but despite its flaws, it was still overall an enjoyable experience from start to finish.
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Moving from Halloween to Christmas, we get another holiday movie.
Babysitter Must Die (2020)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Babysitter Must Die is a good movie with the seed of a great one within. On the whole, it worked, and a lot of its component parts were great. It had a good cast, solid production values, and a cool twist on a basic "Die Hard in a house" home invasion premise that offered the possibility for some Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque shenanigans, and for the most part, it delivered. The problem was, there were so many places where it felt like it could've gone above and beyond, and it suffered from an uncertain tone that couldn't seem to decide whether to take itself seriously as a gritty horror movie like You're Next or go for more whimsical horror-comedy in the manner of The Babysitter. It was still a crowd-pleasing effort that I had a lot of fun with, it just felt like it could've been even more fun.
The protagonist Josie Jane is working as a babysitter for the family of a rich and famous musician. One night, she gets way more than she bargained for, but exactly what she should've bargained for given that she's babysitting a bunch of kids in a remote mansion in the woods, when a group of cultists invade the house, seeking a mysterious artifact that lay buried within that can grant them ultimate power. Josie was separated from the rest of the family, and winds up as the only one in any position to fight back. Fortunately, the former Girl Scout knows some dirty tricks she can use to fight back, pulling the cultists into a cat-and-mouse game within the halls of the mansion.
There was a lot to like about this movie. I liked Riley Scott as the titular babysitter, exactly as plucky and tough as you'd expect a horror movie heroine to be. She's warm with the kids, but when she's put into a fight for her survival, she demonstrates grit and wit in equal measure, most notably in a scene where one cultist learns the hard way that Josie has a scout badge in drama after she pulls a wounded-gazelle gambit on him. The home invaders being a religious cult opened the door for some spicy possibilities, and I did like Melinda Yeaman as the cult leader, known only as "The Woman", who the film takes seriously as a genuine threat even as it started getting more comedic. The film made great use of its setting as Josie and the cultists stalked each other through its halls, bedrooms, and outside, with plenty of twists and turns as the family and a poor pizza delivery boy got caught up in the action. If you're not thinking too hard, this is a very fun movie to watch, one that always flows nicely and demonstrates that director Kohl Glass knows how to make a compelling watch.
It's just that Glass' script (co-written with Julie Auerbach) leaves itself so many opportunities to become a downright great movie, and it lets virtually all of them slip from its grasp. As noted, the big twist here is that the home invaders are a cult, one that's specifically looking for an artifact buried somewhere within the house. Unlike the very similar Becky, where the key the villains were searching for was just a MacGuffin to get them to the house, this film devotes a lot of time to its subplot about the artifact, complete with the cultists tearing out the living room floor and revealing a mysterious glowing hatch underneath. There was so much that could've been done with this, between the implication that the cult actually is in communication with some supernatural force and the fact that a former rock star has this weird stuff in his home (raising the possibility that he made a deal with the devil for his success, and now the cult is coming to collect), and given how much I liked Josie in particular, it would've warmed my heart to see a good old-fashioned Buffy homage here, especially with the humorous tone that the film takes in some parts.
Alas, it's with this very tone that my biggest problems came in. The film is wildly unsure of what it wants to be, at times going for more lighthearted goofball humor as Josie flaunts her Girl Scout experience yet at other times taking itself completely seriously as an intense horror-thriller. The shifts sometimes happened within scenes, producing whiplash that left me unable to take the serious parts seriously but also unable to seriously laugh at the villains. It felt like a film born of several different ideas for horror movies concerning cults, a home invasion, and a Girl Scout babysitter, but not a whole lot of ideas about how to tie them together into a coherent whole.
The Bottom Line
Babysitter Must Die could've been great, and the finished product was ultimately a letdown given how much I liked various parts of it. But the parts I did like ultimately pulled this movie over the finish line for me, making for a solid watch even if it could've been so much more.
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And finally, we get some fuckin' gross-ass shit.
Cyst (2020)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
If you've ever willingly watched more than one Dr. Pimple Popper video, then not only can you probably guess the appeal of this movie, you're probably wondering why it wasn't made sooner. The things that she and others like her extract from people's skin are already disgusting enough, so making a horror movie about them was a no-brainer the moment they became a trend. This film wisely goes for broad camp in its homage to such, playing out like an old-school monster movie influenced by its B-movie forebears from both the '50s and the '80s in equal measure, which is about as seriously as you can possibly take a movie about a gigantic killer cyst. The result was a very amusing horror-comedy that combines gross-outs with a nice sense of humor about itself, and is bound to find its audience among anybody who habitually watches the YouTube videos that inspired it.
Set in the 1960s, the film follows Patricia, a nurse at a dermatology clinic who is about to retire. Naturally, her last day on the job sees her egomaniacal doctor boss unveil a new machine he's designed to destroy pimples and cysts with lasers, and over her objections, he decides to demonstrate it for some investors by injecting a serum into a man's skin in order to give him an absolute monster cyst. That serum worked too well, as the cyst in question becomes a monster in its own right that starts eating people, forcing the clinic under lockdown and the people trapped inside into a fight for survival against it.
There's not really much to this movie beyond a well-made, well-shot, and entertaining throwback monster movie, one that borrows from its '50s forebears a period setting and its sci-fi plot and borrows from its '80s forebears a whole ton of gore. Refreshingly, while this movie is filled with all the disgusting things you'd expect given the title, the poster, and the plot description, the gross-outs it goes for are meant to entertain rather than horrify. The real Dr. Pimple Popper videos that this movie homages can get far more legitimately horrifying and disgusting than this film, which plays the gore and pus flying everywhere to such extremes that you can't help but smile. The titular cyst is too goofy-looking to be scary, but in a movie like this that's going for comedy as much as horror, it definitely did the job, especially given the quality special effects work that was filled with all manner of gross little touches. There wasn't really a lot of meat on this film's bones in terms of plot, but that's not really the reason you go see a movie called Cyst about a giant killer cyst, is it?
That being said, the cast was solid all around. They all have good chemistry with one another, especially Eva Habermann's jaded, seen-it-all nurse Patricia and George Hardy's Dr. Guy, who's played in full classic mad scientist mode. Even more than the cyst itself, Dr. Guy is the real villain of the film, a clueless egomaniac who wanted to prove himself and unleashed a force of nature that Patricia is now tasked with cleaning up. A lot of characters are there just to get killed in creative ways, but the film frequently serves up inventive death scenes and lets the actors have fun with their sick deaths. And occasionally, some real scares manage to slip past the film's goofball atmosphere, especially whenever the cyst is lurking offscreen ready to kill someone; while it may look deliberately hokey when we see it, it's still a menace when we're not looking at it, and the manner in which it functions like the titular monster from The Blob (only with way more pustules) means that getting killed by it is a pretty horrific way to go out.
The Bottom Line
If you normally watch pimple-popping videos, you'll probably be able to handle anything this movie throws at you, especially with its goofy B-movie atmosphere that serves as the real attraction. Overall, it was a very insubstantial movie, but I had a good time with it.
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