Author: Chris Scullion

Chris Scullion is a Scottish video games journalist who's been covering video games professionally for 16 years. For the first six years of his career he worked at the Official Nintendo Magazine in the UK, then became the Games Editor of CVG before its untimely end. After setting up his own site, Tired Old Hack, Chris then joined Video Games Chronicle (VGC) where he is currently Features Editor. He has a passion for retro games and cataloguing their history, hence his ongoing series of console encyclopedia books (search his name on Amazon).

The Evil Dead (1981) (Video Nasty review #1)

Published on January 3, 2011January 12, 2011 by Chris Scullion12 Comments

Director: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker

“Kill her if you can, loverboy!” (Cheryl, The Evil Dead)

Since a large part of this blog is my quest to watch and review all 72 video nasty films, it makes sense for me to start with arguably the best and inarguably the most famous of the lot. Of course, had the Director of Public Prosecutions not been on the arsehole pills in 1984 I probably wouldn’t be reviewing The Evil Dead as part of this list because, as anyone who’s seen it will agree, there’s no way it should have been considered a notorious and dangerous video nasty. After all, it’s far too silly to be taken seriously.

For those still to enjoy its daft delights, The Evil Dead tells the story of five young chums who decide to spend the weekend in a cabin in the woods (sound clichéd? That’s because this created the cliché). When they get there they find the Book of the Dead, a book that when read can summon sleeping demons to possess the living. The good news is that nobody can read the book, the bad news is they also find a tape recorder with a tape of an old historian reading the book’s contents aloud. As they listen to the tape the demons are summoned and it’s up to the five friends to survive until daylight.

As the film progresses and the various teens are possessed, it becomes clear that the hero of the day is to be young Ashley, the shy and innocent one of the bunch played by Bruce Campbell in his first role. Nowadays Campbell is a bit of a cult icon among horror film fans and this is more or less solely thanks to the Evil Dead films and his performances in them. Ash takes a kicking throughout the majority of the film and there’s something satisfying about seeing the underdog getting splattered with gallons of blood, getting pinned under bookcases that are apparently much heavier than they look and generally not having a nice time of it. Even the movie’s final scene shows that he just can’t get a break.

What’s perhaps most impressive about The Evil Dead is that so many people look on it with fondness despite it on paper being, for want of a better word, nasty. One character is stabbed in the ankle with a pencil, after which the viewer is treated to the sight of them twisting it around in unflinching detail. Another has their head caved in with an axe. Then there’s the film’s infamous ‘tree rape’ scene, in which Ellen Sandweiss’ character wanders into the woods to investigate a noise she hears, only to be assaulted and violated by the woods themselves (this scene was cut for a long time by the BBFC and was only recently allowed to be shown uncut). Yet despite this, the film’s charmingly low budget and its combination of likeable characters and laughable creatures means it’s still fondly remembered as a fun movie.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing The Evil Dead yet I urge you to hunt it down, along with its sequels Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn and Army Of Darkness. Ash is one of the greatest heroes in horror history and this film shows the seeds of his creation. I guarantee laughter, I guarantee entertainment and I guarantee you’ll feel smugly satisfied when you tell your mates “I’ve seen a video nasty” while conveniently forgetting to tell them the one you watched was probably the least nasty of the bunch.

HOW NASTY IS IT? – It’s not terribly nasty but the tree rape scene, in which Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) is violated by some branches, is a little uncomfortable if a little silly in theory. Anyone who watches it though will probably come to the conclusion that it should never really have been banned because it’s far too daft to corrupt.

Nightbreed (1990)

Published on January 1, 2011January 1, 2018 by Chris Scullion3 Comments

Director: Clive Barker

Starring: Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby, David Cronenberg

“Miss Winston, everybody has a secret face.” (Decker, Nightbreed)

Despite being one of the UK’s finest horror minds (having written the likes of Hellraiser and Candyman), Clive Barker’s Nightbreed doesn’t really get much love in the UK. Maybe it’s because it’s not really as scary as the stories he’s better known for, or maybe it’s because it’s the horror movie equivalent of Fraggle Rock, I suppose we’ll never know.

The story’s your typical “boy meets girl, boy has been having weird dreams while his shrink tells him he’s a serial killer when he isn’t really, boy goes to a cemetery and is killed but then becomes part of a weird underground-dwelling group of undead monsters” plot you’ve seen a million times before. It emerges early on in the film that Boone, the lead character, isn’t actually killing the families he’s been led to believe he has and that instead his psychiatrist (played with just the right amount of cheese by genius director David Cronenberg) has been doing the killings while hypnotising Boone into believing it was him instead.

Due to his dodgy dreams, Boone finds himself drawn to a spooky graveyard where he is shot dead by police, but not before encountering a group of undead chaps and ladies who live under the ground and are generally keeping themselves to themselves. Boone’s quack discovers this and decides to tell the police, leading to an almighty clusterfuck later on where loads of cops fight hundreds of monsters in their underground lair.

For the most part Nightbreed’s acting does the trick but I was a bit unconvinced by Craig Sheffer in the lead role of Boone. Watching him change from a human to monster (as he does numerous times in the film) just isn’t believable because he doesn’t seem bothered by it, and though it isn’t his fault I was also distracted by the fact that every time he turns into his monster form he reminds me of a bad Kurt Russell lookalike:

To be fair, he’s not the only one to evoke such a reaction. When Not-Kurt-Russell eventually finds himself in the monsters’ underground lair, the film more or less turns into a game of Oh Look, It’s A Celebrity Lookalike. “Oh look! It’s metal icon Rob Zombie!”

“Oh look! It’s Vanessa Feltz! (though she’s in everything these days so it’s no surprise to see her making yet another appearance)

“And oh look! It’s Sportacus from children’s televsion keep-fit shitefest Lazytown! Well, a bit.”

Once you get past that, Nightbreed is actually cheesy fun. David Cronenberg is clearly the star of the show as Decker, the mental serial-killing psychiatrist, and his mask is fairly creepy too:

Meanwhile, as you’d expect from Clive Barker, there’s also plenty of gore and nudity to be had (even though the former is about as realistic as Aberdeen’s chance of winning the Scottish Premier League and the latter is courtesy of some terrifying monster women) and Danny Elfman’s music helps give a Burtonesque feeling to certain scenes.

The best bit though is probably the scene where female lead Anne Bobby (who coincidentally shares her names with both my aunt and uncle) first enters the underground tomb, since this is the first opportunity viewers get to see most of the film’s countless weird and wonderful monsters. This was also the scene that gave me Fraggle Rock vibes (as explained at the start of this review), because it basically shows a bunch of muppets living under the ground.

There are times when the plot gets a bit mindless, and while the film clearly wants the audience to be on the side of the monsters it can be tricky when some of them are pricks (such as the pervy one whose face is falling off or the one who looks a bit like Knuckles from the Sonic games and is generally a wanker to Not-Kurt-Russell). This may be partly due to the fact that the film was savagely cut and edited by the studio shortly before its release, something that irked Clive Barker according to later interviews because he didn’t get to tell the story the way he wanted to. Despite all this however, it’s still a good laugh to watch if a little disjointed.

Unfortunately Nightbreed is only available in Region 1 DVD in America and can’t be bought on DVD in the good old U of K, but if you can find it somehow (nudge wink elbow guffaw) then it’s well worth a watch for the cheese factor and the monster designs. Three out of five skulls, I reckon.

Why, Hello There

Published on January 1, 2011January 1, 2018 by Chris Scullion2 Comments

What is the haps my friend. This is a new blog that I hope will actually take off and won’t become abandoned after two weeks like many of my projects do when I realise I don’t have any real spare time to do them.

When I’m not playing video games for a living I’m spending as much of my free time as possible watching movies, preferably those that are a little kookier and off-the-wall than the more mainstream fare. While I’ve got a wide-ranging taste and can watch more or less any kind of film, my specialty by far is horror, and over the past ten years or so I’ve easily watched thousands of cheap and nasty horror flicks from all sub-genres, nationalities and eras.

As a result I’ve seen some bizarre things that your standard cinema blockbusters just don’t tend to show. I’ve seen a Japanese woman giving birth to a fully-grown man (Gozu), I’ve seen an Italian zombie wrestling with a shark underwater (Zombie Flesh Eaters) and I’ve seen a man having his goolies chopped off in a bath by a wronged woman (I Spit On Your Grave). These are the moments that make lesser-known films fun for me, because they go beyond what mainstream studios think the audience wants to see.

This blog, then, is a celebration of the more weird and wonderful movies I tend to watch. Any time I see a film that strikes me as offbeat, odd or unusual I’ll pop a review on here. While horror will be far and away the most covered genre (since that’s what I usually watch), I’ll still add any non-horror films I see that fit into the category (a good example being Shaolin Soccer, a Hong Kong football film in which players’ shots are so powerful they turn the ball into flame-covered tigers and one opposing team consists of female players wearing fake moustaches).

My other purpose for this blog is part of my New Year’s resolution. As I recently mentioned in my other general blog, I aim to watch all 72 ‘video nasty’ films that were banned by the UK’s Director of Public Prosections in 1984. Since all these films are notorious and certainly not mainstream, all 72 of them will (hopefully) in time be reviewed in this blog.

I hope you enjoy my reviews, and if you have any suggestions for films you want me to cover then by all means mention them in the comments and I’ll do my best to get round to nabbing them.