Hatchet For The Honeymoon

A guy wearing an ascot kills a honeymooning couple aboard a speeding train with a meat cleaver and wipes the gore off with the dead bride's veil and I'm going to have to stop this review right here. A meat cleaver is not a hatchet and there's no way you're ever going to get a blood-drenched meat cleaver clean with a gauzy veil. I've tried. Dead bride veil material is one of the least absorbent fabrics known to man, or at least known to mother-obsessed lipstick-wearing cry-baby fancy-lads who have a secret sexy-time wedding-dressed mannequin-filled hump-vault, or so I've heard.

You're just wasting time and money trying to clean up those messes from your wedding-fixated killing sprees. Toss out those old, stained veils because there's really only one product you'll ever need to get your murder weapons clean and sparkling.

5 Dolls For An August Moon

Extravagantly dressed boors have a go-go party where they pretend to have an occult ritual and stab each other and run in circles around tropical foliage and then become alarmed where the partygoers actually start ending up stabbed in this uninteresting giallo film.

Those guys know how to party, right? If they're that darn bored, why don't they play some Pictionary? And nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to dance provocatively on my coffee table. I don't care how many Gin Rickeys I serve, you better get your dirty feet off my furniture.

So the cast looks suspiciously at one another for about an hour as the bodies start being hung in a meat locker, and someone's responsible. Well, for the murders, not the meat. I'm not sure why the meat is there. That seems like it wouldn't be very palatable, you know? Like, "Hey, were going to store the bodies in here next to tonight's dinner. How does boeuf bourguignon sound?" Maybe I'm wrong and don't know a lot about haute cuisine. Honestly, I like tater tots and Junior Mints, so I'm not an authority on how vacationers on secluded murder islands like their meat stored. I probably wouldn't hang the bodies next to of a side of beef, even if it looks good on camera. I would probably move the meat to a different corner of the meat locker away from the corpses, but they didn't ask me.

Crimson: The Color Of Blood

Paul Naschy stars in this brain transplant crime film as a bank robber who gets shot by police while making a getaway in a car where it's nighttime inside the car but daylight outside, and then spends about 45 minutes not starring in this brain-transplant crime film. So Paul Naschy is taken to a country house where he needs a complete cerebral transplant, but unfortunately they don't seem to have a full stock of brains for some odd reason, and you can sort of tell where this whole thing is going to go. So some poor hapless dude is tricked by some chick, and he gets his head removed by getting run over by a train, and there's a strange Mongolian interpretive dance/strip tease of some sort, I think, and I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Meanwhile, there's also a whole bunch of comb-overs, bell-bottoms, blue eyeshadow, and pornstaches, none of which are very interesting. Then Paul Naschy goes on a turtlenecked, head-bandaged rampage for some reason, and then the movie is over.

http://youtu.be/oL61BINWUjE

Deathsport

A guy wearing a loin-cloth and a cape while spouting poetry fights motorcycle guys wearing aluminum foil in this cheesy 70s motorcycle flick. In the future, amidst plastic 70s modular furniture, the desert, and horses, some people battle other people and then condemn these people to Deathsport.

Spoiler Alert: Deathsport is motocross. That's all it really is. It's motorcycles jumping dirt ramps, sometimes jumping through fire, and sometimes unconvincingly disappearing through contact with unconvincing laser beams.

OK, so there are some lasers and swords, but it isn't really very interesting. There are also lots of headbands, camera-shadows, and co-stars unconvincingly riding motorcycles.

The Comeback

A pop singer stages a career comeback from a country estate as the bodies start mysteriously piling up in this 70s thriller. I don't know an awful lot about Jack Jones, but he reminds me a little of a not-very-edgy Scott Walker.

In fact, the plot of The Comeback seems to borrow a little from Scott Walker's career, only with fewer Jacques Brel songs and rotting, maggoty corpses. Well, I'm not sure how many corpses figure into Scott Walker's career, but I do know he's punched some meat in his time.

OK, so Scott Walker didn't actually punch the meat, but he was directly involved with meat punching.

Anyway, Jack Jones runs around in a revealing bathrobe much of the time as a corpse rots in a stairwell, and Bosley from Charlie's Angels is kind of a douche. Everybody seems to be a villain from the jump, and the ending isn't much of a surprise.

The Awakening

A writer travels to a boy's boarding school to debunk a haunting in this BBC thriller. I'm not ashamed to say I jumped a couple of times in this well-made, beautifully shot, atmospheric film; however, I was a little disappointed in the ending. I very much enjoyed the slate-grey cinematography, the chilling spirit photography special effects, and the use of early 20th-century technology to debunk the haunting in a 21st-century way.

Deathstalker

Because of all the headbands, I think it would just be easier to describe the plot to Deathstalker as being exactly the same as the plot to the music video of "Working For The Weekend" by Loverboy...

...except replace the vocalist, guitarist, bassist, rhythm guitarist, and drummer with swords, sandals, puppets, tits, and Barbi Benton eating an enormous turkey leg.