Director: Charles Band
Year released: 1999
THE CHARGE: This master of puppets is charged with pulling strings, twisting minds and smashing dreams, and probably imbibing too much whiskey in the jar-o.
THE EVIDENCE: Not many people know the name Charles Band, but his name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as renowned low budget horror veterans like Roger Corman and H.G. Lewis. Since the early 70s, Band has produced almost 250 films and directed over 30. He also has an odd preoccupation with dolls, which appear in many of his films like Puppet Master, Dollman, Demonic Toys and Dangerous Worry Dolls. But Blood Dolls might be the craziest of them all.
Directors: Ray Dennis Steckler, Ted Roter
Year released: 1965
THE CHARGE: Creating short films 50 years ago with humor that went out of style 80 years ago.
THE EVIDENCE: Ray Dennis Steckler is something of an icon in the B-movie business, having directed such notorious films as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies and Rat Pfink a Boo Boo. The Lemon Grove Kids were a lesser known creation of his, an attempt to emulate the classic humor of the Bowery Boys with a dash of The Little Rascals thrown in for good measure.
Director: Jake West
Year released: 2005
THE CHARGE: They're aliens and they admit they're evil. It's right there in the title.
THE EVIDENCE: It's been said that the really great movies are the ones that teach us something about ourselves. By that definition, Evil Aliens is a really great movie. But I can't say it's a good one.
Directors: Jesse Holland, Andy Mitton
Year released: 2010
THE CHARGE: Being yet another "creepy things in the woods" movie and paying attention to the man behind the curtain.
THE EVIDENCE: Once in a while, a low budget horror flick clearly aspires to be something more. It doesn't intend just to scare you, it wants you to think about why you're scared. When it succeeds, it’s a magical masterpiece of creative film making that not only raises goose bumps, but flexes your mental muscles as well. Yellowbrickroad (yes, one word) wants to be recognized as part of this rare breed, but it never quite gets there.
Directors: Yoshihiro Nishimura, Naoyuki Tomomatsu
Year released: 2009
THE CHARGE: Stealing classic monster mythology and infusing it with an unhealthy dose of Japanese WTF.
THE EVIDENCE: If I could sum up Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl in one word, it would be “ridiculously”. No adjective I could use to describe this film would be complete without it: ridiculously violent, ridiculously campy, ridiculously offensive, ridiculously enjoyable.
Director: Paolo Heusch
Year released: 1961
THE CHARGE: Solicitation of horndogs who demand more negligees in their werewolf movies.
THE EVIDENCE: A werewolf. A girls' dormitory. Two great tastes with the potential to go great together, like a lycanthropic Reese's cup. But the combination turns out to be not as great as one would hope. It's decent enough, but it coughs up a couple of furballs along the way.
Director: Simon Hynd
Year released: 2008
THE CHARGE: Impersonating films like Saw and Hostel and combining it with something even scarier: politics.
THE EVIDENCE: What do you get when you infuse a standard torture porn story with political and socio-economic commentary? Somebody decided to try it out a few years before the 2016 Presidential election made such ideas commonplace, and the result is Senseless.
Director: Steven R. Monroe
Year released: 2005
THE CHARGE: Title ambiguity and unnecessary use of Dennis Hopper.
THE EVIDENCE: Marketers are soulless creatures devoid of conscience. That’s the only conclusion I can come to after comparing the marketing description of House of 9 to the actual movie.
Director: Freddie Francis
Year released: 1970
THE CHARGE: Contributing to the delinquency of a minor by forcing her to interact with manic scenery-chewing thespians.
THE EVIDENCE: Girly lives with Mumsy, Sonny and Nanny in a large estate in the English countryside. Girly and Sonny love to play games and sometimes invite new friends to their home for play dates. These friends become part of the family and if they break any of the family's rules or try to run away, Mumsy gets very cross indeed.
Director: Chad Ferrin
Year released: 2009
THE CHARGE: Disturbing the peace and refusing the use the damn doorbell.
THE EVIDENCE: If you ever watched a horror movie and thought, “this flick could really benefit from a few guy-on-guy rape scenes”, then have I got the movie for you!
In Someone’s Knocking at the Door, a group of medical students fond of sampling various illegal and sometimes experimental narcotics find themselves terrorized by a psychotic couple who were held for observation at their med school three decades ago, but who disappeared after killing their psychoanalyst.
Director: Peter Mervis
Year released: 2006
THE CHARGE: Taking a bad movie and making it even worse by utilizing a budget probably found under the producer’s couch cushions.
THE EVIDENCE: In the realm of b-movies, there are films so bad that they end up being remarkably entertaining. This is not one of those movies.
Then there are films so utterly terrible, that you actually hate yourself for watching them for more than five minutes. This is not one of those movies.
Finally, there are films so stupefyingly awful that they’re not just a train wreck, they’re a train slamming into the hull of the Titanic which has just been set on fire by the Hindenburg... and you become so mesmerized by the sheer atrociousness on display that you just can’t turn away from it. Snakes on a Train not only falls into this category, it may very well define it.
Directors: Pasith Buranajan, Kongkiat Khomsiri, Isara Nadee, Seree Phongnithi, Yosapong Polsap, Putipong Saisikaew, Art Thamthrakul
Year Released: 2005
THE CHARGE: Doing that voodoo that you do so well.
THE EVIDENCE: Art of the Devil II is a vibrant and erudite examination of the mainstay of religious fervor in Thailand and the effects that old ritualistic practices have on modern society, carefully straddling the fine line between condemnation of the stubborn tenaciousness of an aging society and admiration for its ability to remain relevant in an increasingly technological world.
Director: Sofian Khan
Year Released: 2008
THE CHARGE: Pandering to the B-movie crowd by coming up with one of the best titles in recent exploitation cinema.
THE EVIDENCE: I’ll admit it: the title sucked me in. A title as lurid as Destined to Be Ingested had me expecting an exploitation flick along the lines of Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox. Hell, I half expected a repackaging of “Ferox” with a few extra minutes of ultra-low budget footage shoehorned in. After all, if you’ve seen one cannibal movie, you’ve pretty much seen them all. Right?
As it turns out, that’s not the case. “Destined” manages to do something different with the genre. But it also proves that different doesn’t necessarily mean better.
