NOW YOU SEE ME, NOW YOU DON'T Movie Review

NOW YOU SEE ME
NOW YOU DON'T (2005)

Little Alex is excited to have his father return home from the lab, and is quite curious as to a metal box he has brought home along with a cage with two mice in it. The following day, Alex’s mother discovers to her horror that Alex has become invisible. As fear and panic set in, she begs and pleads for her husband to undo what he has done, for she is positive it has something to do with a breakthrough at the lab. All of her horrors are realized though when he forlornly replies “I can’t.”

Read my full review on Geeks Of Doom!

CANNIBAL FLESH RIOT (2006)

Stash and Hub are two ghouls, who roam graveyards at night looking for the freshly buried corpses to dig back up and chow down on. These two, who bicker and argue like a married couple and are more friends due to circumstance, have chosen tonight to feast on the recently deceased Mr. Hickle. As they make their way through the patchwork of tombstones looking for the plot, they make idle chat. But when Stash and Hub finally come to their destination, they soon discover that some cemeteries aren't too keen on letting their permanent residents be taken away as a late night snack!

While the current trend in horror has been to cull through 70's shock cinema, writer and director Gris Grimly goes back to the spooky and gothic low-budget flicks of the 50's and even the 30's to bring his twisted and comical tale to life. The movie, while shot on video, is put through the "grindhouse" wringer to give it a wonderful and inviting feel. Through post-production work, the black and white film is laced with scratches and dirt specks and frames are purposefully removed to give the film a jittery motion. Grimly incorporates the classic yet underused iris shutter to fade out and into one scene to the next, cue cards to move along the narrative, and even Tex Avery style sound effects to give a cartoonish tone to the rather morbid material.

Grimly further takes this stylized approach with both his set decoration and camera work. The graveyard is littered with oddly shaped tombstones with even stranger fonts marking the grave's occupant. The graveyard is also inhabited by comical bats brought to life by string and more rolling fog than even John Carpenter would have the nerve to use. Grimly's camera is often off-set at an acute angle, and uses fish eye lenses to give a twisted and warped view into the fiend-filled world.

The protagonists here, Stash and Hub, take their comical appearances from Laurel and Hardy, after of course being given a greasy southern gas station attendant overhaul. The pair even look like they could've just walked off a Cramps record album. Grimly's rotted humor shines magnificently through the pairs' dialog, as much of the film is just them wandering through the PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE inspired graveyard talking with one another. And just what do two ghouls who've been creeping around for decade discuss? Well, Stash speaks of the culinary variety that can be had with a finely carved corpse, especially with the almost limitless amounts of spices and condiments available in the world. Hub meanwhile, seems fixated on commercials that present anthropomorphic food like the California Raisins to make the product more appealing.

Rounding out the fiendish short film is a musical score by Peter Sandorff of Nekromantix and Denmark's Hola Ghost, which further cements this movie as being a psychobilly's ultimate wet dream. Gris Grimly has set up massively cool project here, which will be sure to please fans of horrific 1930's creepers and grim 1950's horror. CANNIBAL FLESH RIOT is currently making the festival rounds, with a full package DVD release planned for July.

NIGHT OF THE HELL HAMSTERS Review

NIGHT OF THE HELL HAMSTERS (2006) On a dark and stormy night, Karl arrives at the house where his girlfriend Julie is babysitting. When Julie discovers that Karl has forgotten the Ouija board he promised to bring, she simply makes a makeshift board out of an alphabet puzzle, a shot glass, and a drop of Karl's blood. Karl calls upon a spirit with what he believes to be a made-up nonsense name. Unfortunately for Karl, his choice brings about a demonic force that possesses the family hamsters, and turns them into blood-thirsty critters with glowing eyes and a mischievous laugh. Karl is quickly taken out of commission, and Julie must take up the mantle of "final girl" if she is to survive the razor-sharp incisors of the hellish housepets!

In this ridiculously fantastic splatstick short film, first time director Paul Campion (whose visual effects resume includes work on LORD OF THE RINGS and SIN CITY) pulls out all the stops to weave elements of THE EVIL DEAD 2, THE BIRDS, GREMLINS, and especially the brief "killer rabbit" scene in MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, all while taking production cues out of the official Ed Wood Jr. playbook. He even gets a little character development out of his actors before drenching them in red food colored karo syrup.

Now, Paul O'Neill and Stephanie Ratcliff to a fine job in their roles here, but it is the hamsters who obviously are the objects of affection in this little production. Post-possession, the real hamsters are replaced with obvious furry fakes, who are animated by easily visible fishing line and the puppeteering abilities of O'Neill and Ratcliff as they wrestle with the critters. These little furballs are not without a sense of humor either, as they laugh at Julie as she stumbles around trying to find them, or are compelled to roll around in a hamster ball before going in for the kill.

Minute for minute, HELL HAMSTERS holds up on the gore-o-meter with the likes of Sam Rami's DEAD trilogy and Peter Jackson's early film entries, as fingers are bitten off, hamsters are squashed and decapitated, and poor Julie gets a hemoglobin facial that would make Ron Jeremy or Peter North envious.

Campion has a winner on his hands here which has been making the festival rounds for eager fans waiting to get a glimpse at the madness he has built up. This will hopefully lead to more good ol' fashioned splatterrific fun or even a feature length redux of this short film. Hopefully this will find its way onto a short film compilation. This needs to be seen and lauded, as there are not very many things out there that only last fifteen minutes which are more enjoyable than.... NIGHT OF THE HELL HAMSTERS!

(NotHH Official Website)