Quickshot I: Howling 3, Amityville 4, Blood Lake

[Quorthon]

Quickshot Collection I

These are movies that I'll quickly review in a much more basic and simplistic manner. Movies that don't require much thought to review and that don't deserve a lot of thought to be dumped into them.

First up:

Howling III: The Marsupials
1987
PG-13

This film revolves around a group of werewolves of some sort that live in Australia and are marsupials with a backdrop where a film crew is making a really awful werewolf film. Almost as bad as this one.

The effects are sub-standard at best and poor when compared to the original, far superior, Howling. Mediocre acting carry along one of the film world's first bastard PG-13 sequels in a previously R-rated franchise. As we all know, the Robocop, Alien, and Predator franchises are just a few following instances of such creative destruction. The writing is fantastically weak and cliche at times with the movie rounding out with an ending that just screams that the writer was just in a hurry to finish up his monstrosity.

Recommended to: Not really anybody, werewolf fans may hate this as much as they tend to have hated Wolf due to it varying wildly from werewolf norms. The Marsupials could've been a good idea, but they went about it all wrong. 3/10


Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes
1989
Not Rated

I'll confess that I haven't seen any of the other Amityville films aside from this and the first one, however, I can't imagine those others being this awful. I have heard that it was made-for-TV, so that should give us all some clue as to what we're dealing with here.

A family brings home the most ghastly lamp on the face of the earth--even as art this thing is ugly. It looks like a dead tree that God hated with giant glowing testicles for the lights. Now, if the Whore of Babylon were here today and standing next to Heidi Fliess and half the centerfolds from Hustler, there still wouldn't be more ass-ugly make-up on them than on the people in the family in this film. Even the boys in the family are so heavily caked that they look like a Norman Rockwell porno. At any rate, the lamp, for some reason, has the evil spirit from the Amityville house in it and it starts scaring the family in the tender comfort of constant daylight. Uninspired acting and zero atmosphere drag this movie along, but if you happen to have put it in, you won't notice. You'd have started reading a magazine 20 minutes into it.

Recommended to: Horror Survivalists. And nobody else. This film has little to no redeeming value and zero tension, more a curiosity for the bored horror fanatic--and since that's me and I disliked this film, then nobody should watch it. Wal-Mart $5 bin--and it's overpriced. 2/10


Blood Lake
1987
R

This particularly awful film revolves around a group of poor-acting kids in a cabin on the lake wherein somebody starts killing them. Good. I hated them all anyway. This film's title actually appears in the extremely harmless "Garfield" font. Yeah. That fat cartoon cat. I kid you not.

Well, geez, where to begin? The acting is repugnant and the atmosphere is weak. The story is unoriginal and the killer is really lame. How lame? Well, Jason wears a hockey mask and carries a machete, Freddy has the glove with knives for fingers, Chucky is a demented serial-killer infested doll. This guy is a fat hick with cowboy boots and one leg of his pants is tucked into a boot--and the other isn't!! Fucking scary!! Well, roughly 25 minutes of this film are spent watching the kids water skiiing on the lake. I'm serious, here. They might as well have flashed the logo for the brand of skis they were using across the screen. We literally spent about 10-15 minutes watching a few of them water ski, then finally they stop, head to the dock and then.... go out water skiiing again!! They didn't spend this much fucking time on the lake in "Piranha." The kills don't even look good and there is really no gore at all. This movie is just a waste of time. And afterwards, you'll be so depressed that you may see your life as pointless if this is what you waste your time doing. Watching total shit like this. You just might kill yourself.

Recommended to: Absolutely no one should ever watch this film. There is nothing good here, nothing creative, nothing interesting, nothing new--except for the pants thing, and that's just retarded. Only if you're a real hardcore horror curiosity seeker--but if you really want a depressant, just try alcohol. 1/10 (I tend not to give zeros.) By the way, it's shot on video.

[slayrrr666]

Good reviews, Q. I do have Howling III, and for once, I agree with you about a horror film! Holwling III is the worst one in the series (don't count VII as one, that was simply a giant waste of celluloid; Country music in a horror movie! That was scarier than the movie itself, and remember, the movie isn;t at all scary) but I actually think part 4 is one of the better werewolf movies. It had an acceptable story, good subplots, okaay acting for a film of it's caliber, and that meltdown is a great gore scene. I really like it, and I think it's a better film than.............















An American Werewolf in London. A pretty over-rated film in my opinion.

[Quorthon]

Well sir, I've got a lot of catching up to do on the Howling series. I've only seen up to part III, and none after that. I know two of them are packed together on one DVD at Wal-Mart for ultra-cheap. I'll have to watch for that disk. I think it's parts VI and VII, or VII and VIII. Is there eight Howlings...? So I can't really debate you about part four being better than American Werewolf in London--and that's a damn good movie. So, personally, The Howling, American Werewolf in London, and Dog Soldiers are tops on my list of werewolf movies.

You know what's really sad? I knew Howling III was a bad movie and I still bought it!! It was worse than I'd remembered!!

[Bartwald]

I love watching horror franchises - bad or good - so the Howling series is on my list, too. So far I only managed to see parts 1 and 2 because the rest of them haven't yet been released on DVD here.

Strangely enough, the Amityville series is one of the very few that never appealed to me; I watched parts 1-3 and said STOP.

[slayrrr666]

quorthon said:

Well sir, I've got a lot of catching up to do on the Howling series. I've only seen up to part III, and none after that. I know two of them are packed together on one DVD at Wal-Mart for ultra-cheap. I'll have to watch for that disk. I think it's parts VI and VII, or VII and VIII. Is there eight Howlings...?

I'm not really sure. Let's count them out together:
Part 1-Duh
Part 2-The one with Sybil Danning and Chris Lee
Part 3-Marsupials
Part 4-The Original Nightmare (The one I like)
Part 5-The one in the castle. Not too bad.
Part 6-The Freaks. Haven't seen it, can't comment.
Part 7-The Western one. Avoid this one since it will castrate the men and render women with male genitalia, which will then become castrated.

Seems like there's 7 "official" sequels, though there's all the inspirational ones too.

quorthon said:

So I can't really debate you about part four being better than American Werewolf in London--and that's a damn good movie. So, personally, The Howling, American Werewolf in London, and Dog Soldiers are tops on my list of werewolf movies.

You know what's really sad? I knew Howling III was a bad movie and I still bought it!! It was worse than I'd remembered!!

Well, four is really a personal favorite, almost you could say "Guilty pleasure" movie, so it's not going to be really recommended by many out there. It's got some good gore, Q, so it does have that, plus an early appearance by "The Pretender," Michael T. Weiss, and I heard it follows the novel closer than the original, so it has those going against it.
However, the storyline may be seen as "stupid" by others, the plot-lines may be hard to follow, and the werewolf at the end looks pretty ridiculous, but it's a crapic, so if that says something, I don't know.

[Quorthon]

Howlings VI and VII must be the ones packed together on one DVD, then. Pretty sure I saw them in the Wal-Mart $5 bin.

[slayrrr666]

Those could be it, I'm pretty sure.