(1980)
Dir - Kenneth Hartford/Herbert L. Strock
Overall: WOOF
Shot in New Mexico and Columbia presumably several years before it was released, Monstroid, (Monster, Monstroid: It Came from the Lake, The Toxic Horror), is some dog water crud from director Kenneth Hartford. Co-screenwriter Herbet L. Strock allegedly also did some work from behind the lens and neither he nor Hartford were unfamiliar with low-budget genre offerings. On that note and of course, neither was John Carradine who shows up to voice his character's complaints as a priest that warns his congregation of the invading influence brought on by an American chemical plant polluting the village's waters. Because we all know how these stories go, said pollution is the cause of the mutated monstrosity of the title which makes almost no screen appearances throughout. There is a psyche-out moment early on where someone is wearing a monster mask at a bonfire, causing the audience to gasp not at its scariness but at how awful it looks. Once we see the actual monster properly, it not only comes off no better than the aforementioned mask, but actually worse. Who cares though when we have local politics, religious mumbo jumbo, and a love triangle to focus on instead?
(1983)
Dir - Fred Olen Ray
Overall: MEH
Opening with a shirtless guy in gnarly makeup immediately beheading another guy and then ominous keyboard music accompanying an archeologist looking at rocks while someone in an animatronic tiger mask opens their arms Christ-like in the desert, Fred Olen Ray's Scalps at least grabs your attention from the onset. Unfortunately, the movie's lack of budget stalls the whole proceedings from there. According to Ray, the distributors re-edited the finished product to smithereens, so maybe the wild opening and various other moments that interject gory scalpings of the title were thrown in to improve an otherwise sluggish viewing experience. In any event, this is an inconsistent watch at best. Ray's cast of no name white people spend nearly all of the running time in the woods, and their inevitable death scenes are awkwardly staged to the point of surrealism. The persistent musical score throws in some foreboding ambiance and Native American chants, plus every shot we get of one of the shirtless characters who becomes possessed, rapes a girl, and then has a crude mask on are jarring, which creates a tone that is equal parts silly and freaky. Still, awful pacing, awful acting, and awful day for night sequences undermine such a low-scale production, but at least it achieves some semblance of wacky memorability.
(1984)
Dir - Paul Leder
Overall: MEH
Cleverly utilizing the title Vultures, said movie is in fact NOT about a pack of wild birds who terrorize the countryside but is instead a bog-standard tale of family members bickering with each other and getting picked-off so that someone can inherent all of that delicious money. Written and directed by Paul Leder whose resume is hardly exemplary, the film makes the grievous error of having a few punctuations of sensationalized violence in an attempt to lure in the era's gore hounds, but in fact this is just a long-winded melodrama that should cater much more to soap opera fans. It fails in this respect as something that can appeal to more than just a single crowd since slasher aficionados will be turning it off within the first tortuously boring act, (and it does not get any more engaging from there), and anyone who just wants to watch a bunch of rich white people talk and talk and talk some more may be put-off by the few gruesome murder sequences. As forgettable and drab as the whole thing is, it does have a lone quirky element in that drag performer Jim Bailey appears in a number of different roles. Still, a movie that is all blabbing and nearly no action can only do so much with a famed Las Vegas impressionist donning disguises, but at least it gives the audience member something to look out for since Satan knows that everything else going on here is snore-inducing balderdash.
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