Shogun Assassin (1980), by Kenji Misumi/Robert Houston

I know what you're thinking. How could I take a website dedicated to the review of trash movies and have it feature a review of Shogun Assassin, a movie critically acclaimed all by itself, being in turn made from the first two films of the 1970s Lone Wolf and Cub series, which was comprised entirely of films that were all critically acclaimed? Well, I'm going to follow the Rule of Fun and treat this movie rather like a trash movie. I've always viewed it as such ever since it made the rounds a couple times with one of my friend groups in high school. Shogun Assassin is such an outrageously violent movie that it inspires the sort of hilarity that one often finds in the creme de la creme of trash flicks. It's also dominated by a sense of The Weird that similarly plagues or brightens the types of martial arts movies one would find in the gutter. (Some of which I'll hopefully get to soon!) Besides, I'm currently doing a Godzilla retrospective, and Toho was responsible for the Lone Wolf and Cub films, adapted from the Kazuo Koike/Goseki Kojima manga of the same name. I assure you, everything will work out! Now grab your best baby carriage and get running. The forces of darkness are not far behind, and vengeance is a long journey ahead!

In medieval Japan, a samurai works for a shogun who begins to go insane with old age. He helps the shogun carry out increasingly violent purges of the old man's supposed enemies until the shogun turns his efforts inward, and has the samurai's wife assassinated. The samurai, now calling himself Lone Wolf, goes on the run with his infant son--who partially narrates the story, by the way. The shogun also narrates, but he sounds eternally constipated. Because this is a Toho movie the American dub actors didn't take it fucking seriously at all. They may not have been paid enough to. Anyway, Lone Wolf accepts assassination jobs for money, and eventually gets orders to kill the shogun's brother, Lord Kiru. Lord Kiru is protected by three brothers called the Masters of Death. On this quest, he has numerous run-ins with ninjas, which quickly reveal that a lot of the budget must have gone into the literal gallons of blood that spray everywhere in this movie. And that is the primary crux of Shogun Assassin--endless scenes of blades, spears, or claws ripping flesh till everyone is a blood geyser. Even the Cub's baby carriage is a weapon--it has hidden swords in it that cut people's legs off! And a lot of stuff in this film is white, too. It was designed to show off a ton of blood, and tons of severed legs, noses, ears--the works. Somewhere, H.G. Lewis is blushing. Guess what, at the end, the hero wins, and the bad guys end up in piles of chunks. It is a movie with two options: life and death. Some receive the former--most get the latter.

The gore of this film is certainly one of its big selling points. I don't want to dwell on it, but it really is incredible how much work they put into making this film so shockingly violent. People get vertically sliced in half, jugulars are hacked--basically, think of anything horribly brutal a sword can do, and a sword will do that in this movie. That's all I'm going to say.

It is not a very dialogue heavy movie, but when people do talk, it doesn't sound natural. I already sorta touched on that. It's a hard movie to take seriously, from a dramatic perspective, if people are talking in a scene. But again, it is nearly silent. Ambient sound usually replaces music, and what music there is, is pretty awesome. And fortunately, the actor dubbing Lone Wolf is pretty solid, though in all fairness I don't want to seem quite so hard on the dubwork by and large. But when your two narrators are as ridiculous as the ones in this film you do have to joke a little.

The final showdown in the desert is great. One of the Masters of Death, the one with the garden rake/Wolverine claw setup, ends up finding a group of anti-shogun rebels by stabbing the sand with his claws on a whim. It turns out the rebels, who apparently don't need oxygen, are hiding under bamboo mats underground. He lifts him up by the head, and throws him around, and then does that to three or four more guys. Each of the Masters meet their fates in the most overdramatic ways, each losing about a bucket of paint in the process. Life is cheap and immortals are real in this universe. Lone Wolf proves that.

My one criticism of the film probably is that Lone Wolf is basically invincible. Yeah, he gets cut once and develops a fever from the infection, but he basically just goes into a coma for a few hours and is fighting again minutes later. As any action movie fan knows, it is pretty great to watch someone driven by vengeance cut a lot of people down. But at no point did I seriously believe Lone Wolf would meet his maker. Still, the thrill of seeing him wipe out hundreds of ninjas (contrasted to the mere dozens of something comparably crazy like a Godfrey Ho movie) really makes up for it. That's probably why I'm talking about it on this site, in all honesty--it is not bound to reality. We are not expected to view Lone Wolf as someone with ordinary skills, and that's what makes it a great watch.

Shogun Assassin has paled to me somewhat over time, but also waxed in its power to draw affection from me as well. It is no longer as shocking or gratuitous as it was when I saw it as a kid--I've seen much more insane and graphic films at this point, to be sure--but it also will always have a special place in my heart as one of the awful but astounding movies I got to see with some of my favorite people. Things were simpler then--I didn't have my student loans, my tight work schedule, my anxiety over the struggle of career success. Watching it can take me back to a time when I could laugh easier.

Having returned to it today, I'll be feeling good for a long, long while. And it'll make you feel good too.

ENGH-SkreeeoOOoonk: A Retrospective on the Godzilla Series, Part 1 (The Showa Era)

Recently I've decided to try to expand my tastes, so that I can look at some of my old interests in new light. At the same time, the general theme has been one of pursuing things that have a reasonable connotative link to the stuff I already like. If you've been reading this blog so far, I think you'll feel like my recent watching of Showa's Godzilla series makes sense. Godzilla movies are archetypically bad, but obviously still have a non-ironic following. As we will see, both sides of this dichotomy are true--yeah, they fucking suck, but they are also awesome. This will be my look back on the experience of watching these films; Part 1 will concern what's called the Showa Era (1954-1975), while Part 2 will examine the Heisei Era (1984-1995). Part 3 will talk about the Millenium Era (1999-2004) and affairs beyond, with Part 4 discussing some of the other Toho films that tie in, like The Mysterians and Gorath.

In general, I'd also like to take this time to announce that a new column will be appearing on this site after I have another run of ordinary A-List reviews. But let's not worry about that now. It's time to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the one of the most influential stories of all time: that of the radioactive King of Monsters.

Warning: As is the case for most of the posts on this site, there will be spoilers ahead.

Don't Worry...I'll Be Back.

Greetings, comrades. I haven't done a review in awhile, but that's simply because I've been so busy. Aside from my day job, I'm presently working on a pair of projects that are actually somewhat relevant to the present and future plans I have for this blog. Thou shalt know the deets soon enough. In the meantime, stay tuned, as I will be doing the first new special feature of the site, a series retrospective. It involves a certain King of Monsters. I think you'll love it.

Thanks for your readership thus far! I look forward to serving you in the future.

The Soultangler (1987), by Pat Bishow

"After life--after death--the madness begins!"

And what great madness it is. Long Island is a place I've never visited, but want to go to now more than ever. That may be odd for some people (including Long Islanders themselves), but I have always seen it as a faerie-tale world by way of infamous teenage director Nathan Schiff. Schiff, who will inevitably appear on this site at some point, created four films of bizarre and disgusting elegance, beginning with Weasels Rip My Flesh in 1979 and ending with Vermilion Eyes in 1991 (he did also make 1993's The Last Heterosexual and 2008's Abracadaver, but I haven't found the former and the latter lacks the magic). Schiff's films are surreal, intellectual, and vomit-inducing, and all of them have earned a special--or infamous--place in my heart. Long Island occupies that same place. Now, it seems to be a veritable nest of miracles, as today's film, The Soultangler, was also made in Long Island. It's safe that say that that particular part of New York is on its way to becoming the lunatic trash capital of the world.

Doctor Anton Lupesky has created Anphorium, a drug that allows people to transfer their souls into corpses and control them. The corpse must possess eyes for this to work, for after all, the eyes are the window to the soul. Despite his accomplishments, however, Lupesky is "evil...an agent of Sey-Tawn, if not the Devil himself," to quote his murdered lab assistant. Said assistant's daughter, Kim, tries to investigate the circumstances behind her father's death. Kim is an incredibly cool lady. When her boss at the paper doesn't listen to her, she hangs up his phone call to yell at him. She also smokes cigarettes, which the movie reminds us of many times. Slowly, we learn that Lupesky really is evil, as evidenced by the goofy faces he makes as he covers himself in skull-blood, and by the fact that believes by way of Descartes (?) that women have inferior souls. He explains the latter point when on a date with his boss. When Kim visits Lupesky he gives her Anphorium, causing her to hallucinate up some zombies. In the final showdown, almost nothing will be spared from a spattering of both gore and ludicrousness. There are zombies, including one who garrotes someone with his guts. All along the way we get a lot of talk about the soul that manages to avoid being all New Age-y and awful. I feel like it's a movie that tries to say something about the soul, but maybe doesn't.

Because of its metaphysical subject matter--or its attempts at such--Soultangler is an inherently surreal film. Shirtless men rub their hands over yellow walls. Closeups of eyes occur frequently. Stop motion abominations have tarantulas crawl on them. The stop motion in this movie, by the way, is amazing, and in fact all of the effects are. The film seems very professional: it has a full cast and crew, great cinematography, and experienced, if sometimes crazed, editing. There are still enough line flubs, acting failures, and awkward camera glances to make it clear that this was still a production made by one of us Little Guys, not a big studio. It is a mixed beast of the most entertaining sort, and it is a legitimately good movie that happens to be batshit weird. But it still all makes sense, even if you have to watch it a couple of times. But you should be doing that anyway!

I really can't allow myself to glance over the depth of the sheer oddity of this film. Much of the dialogue, especially Kim's father's narration, is incredibly over the top, to the point where it gives the movie an almost pulp-like quality. Actually, this would make an excellent villain pulp, with Doctor Lupesky, of course, as the villain. He has some creepy goons working for him, including a heroin addict who goes for the ever-creepy Texarkana Phantom Killer look from The Town That Dreaded Sundown (which, incidentally, was also used for Bruce from Nathan Schiff's Long Island Cannibal Massacre).

Then again, a pulp probably wouldn't have the trippy dream sequence where Kim is attacked by a zombie priest whose speech is slowed down and backwards. Even the Great Shit of Yore isn't perfect. And Soultangler isn't perfect either--there are some tonal transitions (usually in the form of oddly-placed comedy bits, including Three Stooges doorway schitck with Lupesky and the heroin addict), which may throw people off, even though they were great for me. And for me, at least, it probably is perfect.

It is a film that builds slowly, like a sports stadium built with too many taxpayer dollars. In the beginning, yeah, we do get Lupesky tripping the fuck out. But it has nothing on all of the chaos of the the finale, what with its plethora of cackling faceless corpses. It is never boring because there is always something else great on the horizon, whether it be the graveyard-monologue dubs or the out-of-control latex creatures that populate this fascinating landscape.

The world of this film is a place of madness. And the madness flows richly from New York.

Long Island or bust--I'll make it someday.

P.S. This movie has a pretty rocking soundtrack. Even if the end credits music is apparently just a recording of someone puking.


I'd like to give a special shoutout to Bleeding Skull and their amazing movie label, Bleeding Skull Video. Without Bleeding Skull Video I never would have seen Soultangler, and indeed, without Bleeding Skull's amazing reviews, I wouldn't have encountered the magnificent world of trash cinema. 

An American Hippie in Israel (1972), by Amos Sefer

I am a little worried this review may get me in some trouble no matter how I end up wording it. Let it be known that while An American Hippie in Israel may be the supposed "worst Israeli movie ever made," as far as I can tell, its internal politics are firmly of the hippie creed. I don't know anything about the history of the hippie movement in Israel but if this movie is any sign, it existed. The hippies didn't seem to be too keen on nationalism and so this movie is, in a lot of ways, pretty apolitical to modern contexts. (Plus, the name "Israel" is never spoken--everyone just says "our country.") At the same it is also very political, as it is probably the most stereotypical hippie movie possible. You want pot and acid? Check. You want ugly people getting naked? Check. People yelling from car windows about "BEAUTIFUL FEELING"? Check. Hideous and depressing pop song that worms its way into your head till the end of time? Check. Angry young people blaming the audience for 'Nam? Check.

Actually, the most stereotypical hippie movie possible would be less entertaining than this movie, because this is also the most awkward movie ever. But let's take it easy--I'll discuss the plot first, while reaffirming those theses self-evidently. Mike is an American hippie traveling in Israel. He meets an actress named Elizabeth who basically immediately wants to bone him. She does so even after he talks about how he started killing people in Vietnam when he was 19, and how he lost count of how many people he killed. Part of this speech involves breaking the fourth wall and yelling "YOU FOOLS! STOP PUSHING BUTTONS! FOOLS, FOOLS, FOOLS!" Mike and his new lady-friend then party with some more hippies for a long time while a song we get to hear many times cautions us, "Someday we'll have to pay / For taking time to play / Just when we thought we'd seen the day / We kept the wolves at bay." Yeccchhh. It's okay, though, because two mime-faced Men in Black show up and shoot all the hippies. This leads Mike and Elizabeth, along with two others, Francoise and Komo, to go on a fateful road trip...and the movie becomes something entirely other. Friends become foes, and morals become confused.

Along the way, there are plenty of cringeworthy and hilarious moments to supplement the freakshow gawker we all have. "I'll head out of here when I get what I want: pretty girls," Mike says. Both he and Elizabeth chuckle, then look away from each other with boredom in their faces. Later, as the hippies begin to turn against one another when they strand themselves on an island lake in an acidic attempt to build a utopia, there is a five minute sequence where Komo and Mike argue. Komo speaks Hebrew, Mike speaks English. This leads to Mike chanting, "I don't get ya, man! It's like Chinese to me, man!" The dialogue was written by someone hip to the hippie lingo, but who also wanted to insert some dramatic dinner theatre moments too. Plus, they probably didn't have too much of a brain. All the same, the awkwardness and the repeat head-bludgeoning of the hippie peace creed (to the point where even I got annoyed) make the film seem incredibly earnest more than anything else. I'm not the first person to say that, I know, but it is shocking how wide-eyed and inspired the film is. It is incredibly clumsy and hamfisted, of course, but in a way that is sincerely charming.

Which makes the ending really weird. Basically, Komo and Mike kidnap the ladies all Tor Johnson style and wage war on each other. Eventually a goat comes along that I guess they all want to eat, and while fighting over the goat, they rip themselves apart. Then, the two mime-faced guys, who are probably supposed to be Death, huh?, drive off. The ending is foreshadowed in silent psychedelic slowmo scenes that imply that Mike still loves killing and that he fantasizes about murdering his comrades. In a lot of ways, I take the ending to be a pretty intense anti-hippie message. That is to say that youthful foolishness stranded them on their island, and because they were pursued by the MIBs they were always doomed to die for it. Peace and love doesn't pay the bills and it doesn't get food on the table, especially when it gets you stranded on an island surrounded by sharks. (They coulda eaten the sharks. I don't like sharks being killed but there were a lot of sharks in this lake in the middle of the desert.) It also seems to be saying that those who seem to love peace the most may be the most violent. Someday they'll have to pay for taking time to play, indeed.

This movie was made in the '70s, right on the cusp of being hit with the tsunami of punk nihilism. It's funny to see this movie be so quiet with its apparently hatred of liberal ideals (for better or worse) when just five years later, Nick Zedd released They Eat Scum, a movie where leather-clad Nazi twenty-somethings cut off people's dicks and destroy cities with nukes. Instead of songs about paying for playing, it had "YMCA." (Is there any other "YMCA" besides THE "YMCA"?) It played while the Nazi punks were being torn apart by lobster mutants. That is, assuming that this movie does have a touch of bitterness to it? Because of how genuine and innocent this movie is in its first two-thirds, I have to question my own interpretation that it is bitter in the first place. I think it's actually rather confused about itself, in truth. Maybe someday I'll learn more about the production and that will solve the mysteries. For now, I apply to this film, my theory that confusion is the response of an audience that has encountered something genuinely artistic. An American Hippie is open to many contradictory interpretations. Therefore it is inherently valuable, entertaining, and "good."

"Good" in this case simply means that I like it.

This movie can be incredibly tedious. I can't watch it as often as I do many other films on this blog, because as a general liberal I find some of the dialogue in this film emblematic of the empty nonsense that a lot of the hippies (stereotypically) believed in. In truth it represents the fact that a lot of the hippies were hypocritical, and were in large part responsible for the elections of Reagan and Thatcher. But I am dipping into hypocrisy myself, by becoming political in this entry despite my concern of taking flak for that. Suffice it to say that yes, even I think hippies are/were obnoxious, even as someone who believes that love and peace are important things. Also, a lot of scenes are obvious filler. People sitting around shouting "WONDERFUL FEELING" comes to mind. And, you do hear that song a lot and it's such an earworm. So. Feel free to skip around, but please do make sure to have one watching where you endure the whole thing. It will reward you.

It is very dumb. It is also faux-artsy in a way that is still dumb, but also charming. It sticks for the wrong reasons, and it makes me want to probe further into Israeli cinema. After all, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Manos: The Hands of Fate, and Troll 2 are, despite the frequency of their reception of the title, not the Worst Movies Ever Made. Certainly not the Worst American Movies. So I hope sincerely that An American Hippie in Israel is not the Worst Israeli Movie. Because if it's not, that means I have something to look forward to.

(Yes, that really is the title card on my copy. N American Hippie in Israel it is, then.)

The Cross of Seven Jewels (1987), by Marco Antonio Andolfi

If you were to take Bryan James' Run Coyote Run, mixed it with bootleg Waldemar Daninsky, and featured the Bruno Mattei dub actors, you would get this movie. It is a werewolf movie with a sex cult in it. It's also an action movie with Mafiosi, car chases, and Caspar Gutman impersonators. This is another one of those movies where the writing committee all each liked different genres. It becomes simultaneously spooky, hilarious, and testerone-y to an extreme, even though one of those adjectives isn't exactly real. The plot is somewhat complicated, but here's what I know of it...

Marco (played by director Marco Andolfi) has his jeweled cross stolen by motorcycle bandits while he visits his cousin. Both the theft and the visit are bad because firstly, Marco wants to bang his cousin, and secondly, the cross is the only thing that stops him from transforming into a werewolf! A werewolf who is actually a nude man wearing half a Chewbacca mask. Apparently Marco's lycanthropy is linked to the BDSM sex cult seen at the beginning of the film. Yes, this movie has one of those too. There are many fights with various types of gangsters, some of which involving some badass cops who appear to have been transplanted in from another movie. Ah well. Things become more complicated when the underlings of a Senator show up to retrieve Marco, and when we find out that the werewolf god the cult worships killed Marco's witch mother by exploding her belly. Will the answer lie with "Amnesia the Fortune Teller"?

This movie is over before you know it, even though it also drags. It's full of creative ideas, and no wonder--it, like many other great movies, serves as a glimpse into a weird otherworld. Everything that comes at us in the film is nonsensical and foreign, and it slowly gains momentum as time goes on. In this world, zombie Vatican priests can lead werewolf-worshipping cults involving lots of leather and whipping. That's just how it is. Sometimes it takes a little while to get from idea to idea, but when they all line up it's remarkable just unfettered this movie is.

It is also ludicrously cheap, as evidenced by the Wookiee mask and furry cock-socks on display. I believe the movie went into the drugs that fueled the script, and also into shooting the movie on film. European film is great because even in 1987 they still resisted the VHS scourge (though many Americans did too). Thus this movie seems artsy somehow while also being incredibly sleazy and cheap. This is pretty light stuff, outside of a werewolf rape scene (obligatory, probably), and the cousin-flirting--there's no Joe D'Amato here. It feels actually pretty American, with the action sequence lunacy and with the Universal homage they do, aka the werewolf-makeup transformation sequence with the fades and whatnot. As in those movies, it goes on forever and becomes inane after awhile. It's not nearly as boring as a Daninsky film though.

Insanity is the peril of boredom. That's why so many of us become insane--because our lives are empty. Madness fills our lives in the form of great movies like this one. When we watch these movies, we believe in the impossible, even when we don't believe in what's happening on the screen. We are taken to a fantasy land where the ultimate escapism happens. It turns out at the end of the tunnel of escapism is love.

I love this movie and it reminds me of several other movies, because of course it does. Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead, William Edwards' Dracula, the Dirty Old Man, Nick Millard's .357 Magnum--these and many others come to mind. That means we're on the right path, probably. That it takes all those movies and adds even more influences to the cocktail is always truly impressive.

This was my first time seeing this movie, but I plan on watching it again sometime soon. Perhaps then I'll have more to say. I would like to apologize now for not having done a Christmas movie, but this movie has a cross in it, which Kirk Cameron would say is an empty Christmas tree. I think I may be getting that mixed up but Kirk Cameron Christmas doesn't play by anyone's rules, least of all Kirk Cameron's. As an aside, I watched God's Not Dead on Christmas. That will not be reviewed on this site because, surprise, it is not fun.

The Cross of Seven Jewels is fun. Go for that instead.

Beasties (1991), by Steven Paul Contreras

Over the years, I've been subjected to two particular movies repeatedly over the years: Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and Hobgoblins. They are staples of the University of Minnesota Morris Bad Movie Club, which I was Captain of for two years. Hobgoblins was the MST3K episode variant of course, but Hobgoblins is one of those movies that even MST3K can't save from being abominable. Killer Klowns is a legitimately good movie, but I can only watch a good movie every so often every handful of years. I hate good movies that I've overwatched. I start to see flaws in them, and unlike flaws in the sorts of movies this blog is about, those flaws are legitimate faults rather than great boons. In any case, I sometimes have wanted to see a Killer Klowns-type movie, and a Hobgoblins-type movie (that is to say, a Gremlins-type movie), that has trash-like qualities. I didn't think that two such beautiful potentials would be fused into one film. Thus the beauty of today's film is squared. I can only say now what I will inevitably say in the end: it must be seen to be understood, for it is an experienced (blah, blah). Let's get down to it, because the devil's in the details.

So this movie in which everything is wrong opens with some couples making out and fucking at a lover's lane. They are attacked by the Gremlins, Hobgoblins, Ghoulies, Beasties, and some of them are killed. We are introduced to the fact that this '90s (but shot-in-the-late-'80s) horror film has tits in it. This is proper. Also proper is the presence of kitschy houses where bored babes are menaced. The dialogue is suitably clumsy and radical alike, too, and the effects and sets are good but also noticeably shitty (delightfully so). Unlike most movies which present this much awesome awfulness up front, Beasties sustains this craziness throughout the entire film, which escapes the boredom that plagues even some of the best movies on this site. A member of the makeout gang, a nerd named Nelson, discovers that the Beasties are the spawn of a hideous telepathic alien who lives inside a bio-ship. In their quest to discover more, Nelson and friends are captured by a group of BDSM-style punks led by "Hammerhead," who has gotten mixed up in the cult of an evil alien or demon called Osiris. It becomes clear on the introduction to this that Beasties is in fact a three-headed film--it's made of Gremlins, Killer Klowns, and possibly Mad Max (though there is an equal chance of 1989's Games of Survival). It is a fucking insane film.

I don't want to spoil the fantastic ending of the movie. However, I also want to talk about how absolutely astonishing it is.

Basically it turns out that Nelson will end up working for a military corporation that uses his research to start a nuclear war. Nelson mutates into the creature on the bio-ship, and travels back in time to pass on knowledge of the future to his past self. Apparently, Osiris will be the Nelson-monster's enemy in the future. In order to change the timeline, however, future-Nelson kidnaps past-Nelson's girlfriend. But can the future really be changed?

Holy shit, I wish I knew. I so deeply wish there was a sequel to this movie, and my heart hurts over the fact that Steven Paul Contreras never made another film. Given the lack of credits for most people in this movie, it certainly comes across as a friend-group production that actually had some money behind it. That's shit I like seeing--friends hanging out, doing awesome artsy things together. Yes, I called Beasties art, but if you don't agree, you haven't been reading. And if you have been, you need to see the movie.

The best thing about this type of movie is how awkward it is. Awkwardness and amateurishness are a deadly but intoxicating combo. Voice cracks, flubbed lines, stammers, stutters--all are wonderful and show the humanity of the participants. This movie's Killer Klowns attributes arise most significantly amidst the most awkward moments, such as the bizarrely placed comedy. We literally get characters who utter, "It looks like someone had a snot festival!!" They are then Larry-Curly-Moe s-s-s-scared into running away as Benny Hill-esque music plays. This particular scene, albeit with different dialogue, happens about three times in this movie. What I'm saying is: a bunch of adults got together and decided to make a buck ripping off Gremlins. Only some of them wanted to make a comedy, and some wanted to amp up the sci-fi to Doctor Who levels of complexity. Finally, there was the faction leaning towards the literal cyberpunk genre. Somehow four or five scripts were edited down into one and set to an 80-minute film. And it was deemed okay to send to distributors.

Some people climb Everest. Some people make Beasties.

Suffice it to say that this movie is something of a testament to the power of Gremlins. There are so many Gremlins clones that it's not funny, and I've only referenced some of them throughout this review. There are a lot of similarities between Gremlins and Troll, and of course while Troll 2 would have been born without Troll (it had been in production under the name Goblins), I'm not sure it would have quite stood from the rest of the insanity of Claudio Fragasso's career if it didn't have that fake sequel nonsense attached to it. In a way, Troll 2 and Beasties are like second cousins, which I find appropriate. Troll 2 fans may not like Beasties, though, as they are from very different branches of the family tree.

But that sentence is also one of my jokes. Everyone would like Beasties. It is Gremlins unbounded, Gremlins on DMT. Watch it as a testament to creativity, a gem among gems of those movies that will do whatever with no regards to budget, profit, or relatability.