House II: The Second Story

Watched September 15, 2015

1987
Starring: Arye Gross, Jonathan Gross, Royal Dano, John Ratzenberger

Based on the cover art of the decomposed hand ringing the doorbell of a house and the description on the back of the box I figured this movie was about a haunted house that didn't want anyone to live in it. So it proceeds to attack the main character with ghost and ghouls. I was so wrong, this movie is not really a horror movie, it's like a weird fantasy movie with some strange horror aspects, kind of.  
A young couple in the 1950's give their baby away but are sad about it. Then they go back into their old Richardsonian Romanesque house. The wife hears something strange, the husband gets a shotgun then a ghost man named Slim Razor shoots them.

Twenty five years later, that baby is all grown up and he comes back to the house. Apparently the house has been in Jesse's (Arye Gross) family for years. Who raised him or who took care of the house for those 25 years is left unexplained. He shows up with his girlfriend, Kate (Lar Park-Lincoln) who works at a record agency. They are maybe moving into the house, but it wasn't clear to me. That night his friend Charlie (Jonathan Stark) and his girlfriend Lana (Amy Yazbeck) show up drunk because it's Jesse's birthday. Charlie and Lana are invited to stay in the house and they specifically play Lana's new demo really loud to get Kate interested and it works. Kate think Lana has some talent so she calls her boss John (Bill Maher) to come check out Lana's music.

Jesse is some sort of artist, but that doesn't amount to anything aside from Charlie giving him a copy of American Art that Jesse is featured in. Jesse in obsessed with the history of the house and finds some photos of his great-grandfather and a crystal skull. Jesse wants to know where the skull is so Jesse and Charlie dig up his grandfather's grave. As soon as they get the coffin out the ground and open, the crystal skull is there and a hand chokes Jesse. Jesse and his Great-Grandfather share the same name. The grandpa comes to life, he has been waiting for 70 years for someone to dig him up. They bring him back to the house where he tells them a bunch of stories in a crazy montage. Gramps and Charlie get drunk and drive Charlie's sportscar around, which is super weird since cars didn't exist in Gramps's day. Gramps says it's important to protect the crystal skull, so he puts in on the mantle.

While the guys were hanging out int he basement, a Halloween party has started. An old girlfriend of Jesse's shows up and hits on him which makes Kate mad and she eventually leaves with Lana and John. A beefy caveman with rough clown make up shows up and steals the crystal skull. He takes it up stairs into room that leads to a jungle dimension. Charlie happened to have an uzi in his car and with Jesse they go get the skull from the cave man. Just before Charlie is about to be killed by the caveman, a pterdactyl eats the caveman and takes the skull to it's nest. Jesse gets the skull but a baby Pteradactyl has it. They fall through the floor back into the house with a baby peterdactyl and a dog worm.

The party is now over as the house has been opened up to different time dimensions. Some Aztecs come and steal the skull next, but Charlie and Jesse can't tell where they went. The next day a electric repairman ( John Ratzenberger ) shows up to fix the wiring in the old house. Instead of fixing anything he rips a giant whole in the wall that leads to another dimension. He is not surprised as he has seen walls open to other dimensions before.  In that dimension they find the skull and the Aztecs who are sacrificing a virgin. Charlie and Jesse fight the Aztecs and get the skull back and save the girl. Back in the house with Gramps they all sit down to have a nice turkey dinner along with the woman they saved, the worm dog and the baby Pteradactyl. When Gramps pulls off the cover to reveal the turkey, instead it's the wild west bad guy Slim Razor who shoots Gramps. They are taken to the wild west zone and Jesse manages to shoot off Slim's head. The cops show up and surround the house because of all the previous gunfire. Slim comes back to life and shoots the cops. Charlie and the virgin are still tied up in the wild west dimension. Jesse defeats Slim and gets the skull but Gramps still dies. He grabs the Pteradactyl, the dog worm and heads to the wild west to live there forever.

The back of the VHS box that I have has this movie rated R, which doesn't make any sense. Elsewhere it seems rated PG-13, which seems like a better fit as nothing very terrible or gross happens. 

Part of my disappointment in this movie was thinking it was going to be a horror movie, not expecting a strange fantasy adventure tale. Since Jesse ends up in the wild west, is it possible that he is his own Grandpa? It's never explained why Gramps wanted the skull, was he trying to come back to life?  

They set up the girlfriends with backgrounds at the beginning but then they just leave after the party, so their stories don't go anywhere. This movie was very strange, there is a worm dog and a baby Pteradactyl, which I've never seen before as supporting characters. Even

Spiders II: Breeding Ground

Watched September 8, 2015

2001
Starring: Stephanie Niznik, Greg Cromer, Daniel Quinn, Richard Moll

On the high seas, a group of people are hanging out on a boat playing cards. They kill a large spider on the wall, foreshadowing the menace to come. Unexpectedly, some pirates board their boat, then knock out and kidnap several of the people.  As the pirates leave they throw a grenade on the boat to blow it up.

Next we see a married couple who is headed to Hawaii on a little sail boat. They encounter the boat from the beginning and it was only partially blown up. They board the burned out boat and see two dead bodies, the remains of the group. A storm comes out of nowhere, so the couple Alexandra (Stephanie Niznik) and Jason (Greg Cromer) get back on their boat and call in an SOS. They are quickly thrown off their boat and are stranded in the ocean.

Luckily, a large cargo ship shows up and takes them aboard. The cargo ship doesn't say where they are headed, as they have a minimal crew and a crazy doctor onboard. Jason had cut his neck during the boat wreck, so he is given shots by the Doctor (Richard Moll). Alexandra is hit on by the captain, but she doesn't take it too seriously. Jason has a weird dream that he is being touched by a giant spider. Once he wakes up he snoops around and finds a cold storage room full of dead bodies. When he gets Alexandra to show her, the dead bodies are gone and it's just cow carcasses. She thinks he has a fever and is being crazy. They have a fight at the mess hall and the crew drags Jason away. 

The crazy doctor takes Jason to his lab where he is implanted with a spider egg by the queen spider. It wasn't a dream, this ship is full of spiders.  Alexandra has dinner with the Captain and he tries to make out with her. She pushes him away and goes to find Jason who is no longer in the recovery room. She tries to get to the lab where Jason is, but it's being heavily guarded. She turns off the power which releases all the spiders from their cages. Instantly the freed spiders start attacking the crew.

Alexandra finds Jason and tries gets him out to the deck, but he is weak from being a spider womb. They are attacked by spiders all along the way, but still manage to get to the deck of the ship. Jason  needs the antidote to the spider egg inside him, or he won't make it. The doctor still wants Jason so he can continue his experiment  with the spider that is inside him. A spider sneaks up on the doctor and kills him. 

Alexandra heads back to the lab to get the antidote. She fends off a spider then opens up a ton of barrels of flammable liquid. She escapes to the deck, gets Jason and herself onto the lifeboat, but the winch stops so they have to jump into the ocean. Then the cargo ship explodes. There is a spider that is almost the size of the ship, which is nuts. The coast guard helicopter finds them and starts to pull them up when one last spider pops out of a box and grabs Alexandra. It's dragging her down until the coast guard throws her a grenade. She pulls the pin to blow up the spider and they manage to escape onto the helicopter.

The CGI is terrible, it's like cut and paste spiders all over the place. They do use several animatronic spiders that look a lot better. In once scene, Alexandra takes the toothpick out of one of the shipmates mouth and stabs him in the cheek with it, later he puts it back in his mouth. It's not great, Alexandra and Jason are supposed to be in love but they fly into rages at each other pretty quickly. It's an intense acting style. Unless you're really into giant spiders, don't waste your time with this one.

The director also directed Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo.

C.H.U.D.II Bud the Chud

Watched September 1, 2015

1989
Starring: Brian Robbins, Bill Calvert, Tricia Leigh Fisher, Robert Vaughn

Having little to do with the first C.H.U.D. movie, this one tries the horror comedy approach to a sequel.

Colonel Masters (Robert Vaughn) is heading up a secret program to create C.H.U.D.'s as soldiers, but they can't seem to remove the cannibal part from their test subject, Bud. Bud (Gerrit Graham) tries to escape from the medical facility where they are testing on him. The soldiers and scientists freeze him with Nitroglycerin, essentially killing him. 

Meanwhile two teen friends, Steve (Brian Robbins) and Kevin (Bill Calvert) are in their high school biology class. After class ends they are in the back room of the lab putting frogs away when the corpse they are supposed to look out later is pushed out of the loading dock and rolls awat. They are worried they'll get in trouble for losing the body, so they go to the local disease control lab, which happens to be the same place that the military is testing C.H.U.D.s. They end up stealing Bud the C.H.U.D. They take him back to Steve's house and he ends up in the bathtub, then a hairdryer falls in the electrocutes him back to life. Steve and Kevin lock Bud in the basement to figure out what to do next. Bud easily escapes and bites Steve's miniature poodle. This turns the poodle into a C.H.U.D. too. I guess C.H.U.D.-ism is similar to how zombies become infected, in that everyone that is bit turns into a C.H.U.D. and can infect other people.

Steve and Kevin team up with their gal pal Katie (Tricia Leigh Fisher) to look for Bud. General Master is also looking for the C.H.U.D. Bud makes a bunch of friends and ends up on a farm, the government also finds Steve, Kevin and Katie there and try to arrest them. The C.H.U.D. group manages to escape.

 For some reason, the military know the C.H.U.D.s are attracted to large groups and there is a Halloween Dance at the high school that night. The C.H.U.D.s now have a whole posse and they all head down to the High school, synchronized dancing along the way. Steve and Kevin figure out that if you freeze then electrocute the C.H.U.D.'s you can cause them to explode, destroying them. Bud is attracted to Katie so she lures him and the the rest of the C.H.U.D.'s to the high school pool. They all fall/jump in, then Steven and Kevin throw nitroglycerin into the pool. Steve and Kevin rip and electrical line off the wall and throw it into the pool, causing all the C.H.U.D.'s explode, but not before Steve is bitten. All the C.H.U.D.'s are destroyed, Kevin finally tells Katie that he likes her romantically. Steve, now a C.H.U.D. tells his friends that he is off to explore the world. He hitches a ride with Colonal Masters, now a C.H.U.D. alond with a random woman played by Bianca Jagger.

The custom song Bud the C.H.U.D. is pretty great and plays often. I had some fun watching this movie, but that doesn't mean it's good. The makeup for all the C.H.U.D.'s is just some green face paint for the most part. The original C.H.U.D.'s were real mutants that looked pretty gross. Most of the laughs in this one fall pretty flat, but I did like all the great costumes at the high school Halloween Dance.

The Net

Watched August 25, 2015

1995
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam, Dennis Miller

I've continued watching movies based around the internet that were made in the mid-1990's. The Net is another one on the list, it's less about virtual reality and more about the fear of all your information being accessible online.

Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) is a computer beta tester who loves the internet. She barely needs to leave the house because she can always order out from Pizza.net, her favorite online pizza delivery site. She lives in the larger Los Angeles area somewhere and works for Cathedral systems, an IT company based in San Francisco. Her mother has Alzheimer's and is in an assisted living facility. Angela visits her regularly, but it's hard watching her mother forget who she is. She doesn't have a lot of friends because she loves computer so much. A coworker from Cathedral Systems sends her a disk for a program they've been debugging called Mozart's Ghost. Once the program launches, there is a pi symbol in the bottom right corner, once pressed it opens a back door to top secret files. She talks to her coworker and they are both curious about what the pi symbol means. Her coworker wants to talk in person so her and he flies down in his personal plane down but a glitch in air traffic control computer makes him crash into some power plant towers. 

The next day Angela heads to Mexico for a beach vacation. That's where she meets Jack (Jeremy Northam.) He's kind of charming and creepy, but he manages to trick her into a date on his boat. A weird dude keeps watching them, eventually he steals Angela's purse on a beach walk. It's all a trap because Jack just wanted the Mozart's Ghost disk. He takes Angela further out on the boat to kill her, but she just thinks it's a nice date and they have sex. While he is below deck, she puts on her clothes and his jacket where she finds his gun. She asks him about the gun and he takes it from her saying it's for shark fishing, with a silencer. Luckily she took clip out so he couldn't shoot her.  She hits him with a bottle of wine, and escapes in the little motor boat only to crash into some nearby rocks. 

Several days later she wakes up in a Mexican hospital without any personal identification. At the US embassy they grant her a temporary visa with the name Ruth Marx, she reluctantly signs it even though the name is wrong. At the airport she goes to where she had left her car and it's gone. When  she gets to her house, it's for sale and open house is going on. Angela goes in and starts freaking out at the realtor.  The cops are called and Angela tries to explain her situation.  The cops run Ruth Marx's name, since that who they think Angela is and she has a bunch of warrants that Jack just added to get her into trouble. Angela escapes out the back door and steals the realtor's phone. She doesn't have any real life friends, but she has an ex-boyfriend Alan (Dennis Miller), who also used to be her therapist. Alan doesn't believe Angela's story at first, that her identity has been switched. They do get Angela checked into a hotel. 

Jack is still tracking Angela since he botched up killing her.  Jack and his group of bad guys mess with Alan's medication and give him penicillin which he is allergic to and he ends up in the hospital. He starts to recover but is then killed. He was the last person who could verify her identity, since her mom has Alzheimer's.

Angela is arrested and tells her story to her court appointed attorney, who doesn't believe her anyway. She is released from jail by a supposed FBI agent who turns out to being working for Jack. She manages to escape the clutches of the fake FBI guy and hitchhikes to San Francisco to the Cathedral offices to figure out who is behind the Pi symbol. She gets into the office and forces everyone out with a fire alarm. She finds out that Jeff Gregg Microsystems guy who created the whole Gateway security system included the Pi back door to manipulate information and people. She copies the info and runs to the Pan Pacific Computer Convention that just happens to be going on down the street. She finds a computer and emails the info to the FBI. Jack finds her chases her onto a cat walk where she hits him with a fire extinguisher and he falls, presumably to his death. The movie ends with her and her still Alzheimer's afflicted mom back at her house. She got her identity back, she is Angela Bennett again.

One of the funniest parts to me is when Jack is flirting with Angela at the Mexican resort. He traces her accent to Southeastern Colorado, which to my knowledge is not a region specific accent at all. Jack also call Angela a clever girl just like in Jurassic Park.

While Jack is still trying to seduce Angela and they are walking on the beach at night she gets cold. She is only wearing a crop top and Jack has a casual suit jacket on. Instead of offering her his jacket, her pulls a large napkin out of his pocket and ties it around her waist. 

It was alright, but overall too long. The pace could have been sped up. The hacking and internet stuff was pretty realistic. She ordered pizza on the net, which is something you can do today. It could easily be remade, the same security issues exist, but that doesn't necessarily make it a compelling movie.

Hard to Kill

Watched August 16, 2015

1990
Starring: Steven Seagal, Kelly LeBrock, William Sadler, Frederick Coffin

Mason Storm (Steven Seagal) is a tough cop who is on a stake out one night. He videotapes a mob/Senator conspiracy to kill the Senator's competitor. He calls in to the station with the incriminating information to his officer friend, but a corrupt cop who is also working for Senator Vernon Trent (William Sadler) overhears their conversation. 

With the conspiracy on both video and audiotape Mason goes home to his hot wife and young son. But the bad cop has sent some henchmen to take out Mason. The evil guys break into Mason's house, kill his wife, shoot him and try to shoot his son who escapes out the window. Mason is taken to the hospital and initially declared dead. It turns out that Mason is just barely alive but in a coma, his partner Kevin (Frederick Coffin) asks them to not reveal that he's alive to the press. Now identified as John Doe,  Mason is taken to the L.A. Coma Center. 

Seven years later, Mason is still in a coma. His nurse, Andy (Kelly LeBrock) brings a kitten to try to get him out of his coma. It's either the kitten or Andy admiring his dick that wakes him up from his coma. Once he is awake, Andy calls the police because she was given a code number to call in if her ever awoke. Unfortunately the same corrupt police guys hear the call and head to the hospital to kill Mason. Even though Mason has little muscle strength with Andy's help they escape the coma center. 

Andy drives them to Ojai, she has been house sitting for a friend but no one knows she is there so it'll make a good safe house. Mason begins to build up his strength with acupuncture and martial arts training. Andy helps him find out some information about what happened the night he was shot. It turns out his old partner Kevin has been raising Masons son, who survived and his son is safe from the bad guys at a boarding school. Andy and Mason begin a romantic relationship.  The bad guys are still after Mason, they manage to find Andy and track her back to the house. Where there is a crazy shoot out, but Mason and Andy escape. Mason's old house has been sold but it's being remodeled. He sneaks in and breaks open a secret panel to get the evidence of the Senator's conspiracy with the mob. 

Even though his son was safe at the boarding school, Kevin brings him to meet his dad. Mason has a fight with some more of the bad guys and saves his son from them. Due to the Senator always saying the same phrase, Mason recognizes his voice from the audiotape and puts it all together. Mason now has his target. He goes to the Senator's house and surprises the Senator's evil henchmen. Mason kills the corrupt cop who has been trying to kill him this whole time. He finds the Senator but doesn't kill him, instead he is arrested. Mason is reunited with Andy and his son, the new family will live happily ever after.


Steven Seagal in his prime, pretty fun action stuff. The kitten at the coma center is very cute, the fact that there is a dedicated coma center is great. Steven wears these tight light blue jeans that leave little to the imagination and it's too much. There are multiple camera shots where all you see are the crotch of those jeans. Both Steven Seagal and Kelly LeBrock had some crazy outfits and it was fun to find out in the credits that they're outfits were by Armani.