“It’s Evil Dead 2, Braindead, and the Matrix…times ten, turned up to eleven!” (DVD tagline)
After watching the first half of the Chinese film Riki-Oh, I contemplated not being able to appropriately label a review of the film as “craptastic”. Also, I contemplated not being able to hold my bowels. I found myself through the duration incredulously gasping “Holy shit!” and thus, could not decide if it was a fair that such a strong visceral reaction could warrant a review that would fit into the same category as those of Grizzly Park, DIEner, and Mega Piranha. However, after the title character Ricky (Riki) punched through yet another face as if it were made of wedding cake, I realized that this film was a redefinition of ‘craptastic’: loose plot, campy acting, and grotesque physical effects combine to deliver a highly entertaining romp through a futuristic 2001 (remember, the film is from 1991) Chinese prison.
The plot revolves around Ricky (Fan Siu-wong), sentenced to who-cares how many years for murdering the crap out of a guy who gave Ricky’s girlfriend the drugs that eventually led to her suicide. While rushing at said murdered guy, Ricky takes five bullets in the chest. No big deal. Did I mention that Ricky has super human abilities? No? Well let me explain…
Ricky is a bad mother. Through the movie, he routinely calls on supernatural forces that are never explained besides some references to the devil inside him. This results in punching through body parts, reattaching, then using, severed arteries, and, well, I don’t want to give up too much. Depending on the cut you can find (I found it on Netflix instant stream), the movie is rated NC-17 or R. Netflix has the R version, which obviously means I missed out on more ridiculous gore. ‘Tis a shame. ‘Tis indeed.
The plot continues as Ricky realizes the injustices of the prison he occupies, and he sets out to make changes to the order and mistreatment to his fellow, weak, inmates. (Side note: except for Ricky and the antagonists—the Gang of Four and the Assistant Warden—every other character would be someone’s girlfriend in the US prison system) The result is an explosion of outlandish fight scenes and visual effects that have surpassed the film in fame. At points the make-up and transformations made me directly think of 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China. You know the guy that puffs up and explodes? Yep. Delightful.
For those of you old enough to remember someone other than Jon Stewart as the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, you may remember that Craig Kilborn’s version of the show routinely used a head smashing scene from the movie, seen here:
If that isn’t enough to motivate you, try this stellar use of dialogue:
After Ricky disembowels an enemy, the same guy uses his intestines to strangle Ricky (no, disembowelment is not enough to kill him silly) and the assistant warden cheerily yells, “You’ve got a lot of guts, Oscar!” I hope that was just poor translation.
Anyway, I give this Craptastic movie a three out of five g-bears.
Whoooooooo-eeeeee! You smell that? It’s the overflow coming from this craptastic piece of garbage. Seriously, I was hoping to be pleasantly entertained by a piece of intentionally bad cinema. But this flick was too atrocious for me to even stand! Check out the trailer for Assault of the Sasquatch before you read the review:
A simple story of course; An “awesome” bear poacher named Terry Drake, and his two stereotypical, inbred, redneck cohorts are having a fun night of….checking bear traps. When one of the rednecks, we’ll call him Bubba, because I didn’t care to remember his name, goes to check one of the bear traps it’s revealed to contain a Sasquatch! Mr. Sasquatch promptly assaults Bubba by ripping half his face to shreds, but before he can eat him, Drake and Redneck #2 show up to shoot the beast. Somehow that tranquilizes the ‘squatch and Drake and Redneck #2 wheel it to their truck to make a shitload of money off of their catch. Eye-patch Drake coldly leaves Bubba to die, stating that “he hates wasting bait”.
Honestly, the movie only gets shittier and shittier while it tries to create a subplot about a police officer – Ryan Walker – involving an apprehended criminal he and his family had a run in with in years previous. This fails miserably because I’m honestly just interested in seeing some f–king Sasquatch assault and the only thing I’ve seen up to this point is one face gouge, and the stomping off an ankle biter dog. That was in an apartment the Sasquatch sneaked into. It should have been funny watching the dog get stomped because I hate tiny dogs for the most part, but it still sucked. Not to mention there is a rap song playing the entire time, talking constantly about a chick popping her booty. Check out the music video for it below. It will give you an idea of how un-terrifying the Sasquatch in this movie is. He looks like some overweight turd of average height:
All of that nonsense and the inclusion of the moron in the next video made the movie over the top annoying to me. I really hope this walking waste of space is in no more movies… ever. EVERRRRRRRRRRRR!
Overall I have to give this movie a Craptastic one Bear out of five. I put it above zero because even though it sucked, at least most of the deaths were on-screen, unlike some movies. (Looking at you GRIZZLY PARK!)
Oh my, you can never get enough of what I call ‘Monster Mash’ horror movies, where some sort of predator is oversized to the max, or even better when two predators are combined into a hybrid killing machine. In Mega Piranha the predators in this case are…. you guessed it: mega-sized piranha.
“Heyoooo!”
This crap-fest starts out like a cheaply made rap video. A bunch of hussies in bikinis and two fat dudes drinking champagne on a boat headed downriver. But these aren’t rappers my friends. It is none other than the Venezuelan Prime Minister, and a U.S. Ambassador. Amidst their inane babble, one of the chicks on the boat freaks out and points at something away from the boat, and soon all of the girls on board are freaking out (for no good reason at this point). It turns out to be an alligator’s severed head slowly bobbing up to the surface. One of the boat hussies even obviously states to all who will listen, and I quote – “Oh my God! What could do that to an alligator.” Then the very crappy looking CG Piranhas attack, looking not so mega at this point. They not only attack the bottom of the boat, but these little bastards are launching from the water into the boat to take people out. Inexplicably this causes people on the boat to jump into the water to their deaths.
Senor Feetch, played by Paul Logan
At this point, we are introduced to two characters. The first being our main hero Jason Fitch, who is only described as “being” special forces. (That’s right, the main character in a movie about killer fish is named Fitch). The other character is Secretary of State or Defense Bob Grady. I can’t remember which secretary he was because I was so thrown by the fact that it was the oldest kid from the Brady Bunch – Greg Brady. (aka Barry Williams). So Greg Brady is now Bob Grady…yeah. Anyhow he sends Fitch to Venezuela to investigate the U.S. ambassadors death.
Now we are introduced to possibly the three worst actors ever who play our scientists, and they are responsible for creating the mega piranha with their evil science and good intentions! Sarah the geneticist (played by 80’s Pop-Star/Has Been Playboy Model – Tiffany), Eli the marine biologist and Brian the microbiologist.
Right now I have to point out that this movie has some of the worst acting that I have ever seen, but I expected no less. A lot of it was to the point where I couldn’t help but laugh out loud, so this will actually help the movie get a better grizzly score at the end.
Sarah Played by Tiffany
According to the “scientists”, the piranha are getting bigger and bigger every few hours because of their genetic tampering. That also means they are becoming even more and more mega. (I’m trying to see how many times I can fit the word mega in this review. I think that makes it six so far.)
Once Fitch arrives in Venezuela he is introduced to ‘Colonel Diaz’ who is super bad ass and obviously hates Americans. I couldn’t help but chuckle every time he says Senor Feetch! throughout the movie. So from this point on, I will also call him Senor Feetch for the rest of the review.
Senor Feetch knows that Diaz doesn’t like him and is letting him stay on base to keep an eye on him. So Senor Feetch sneaks out of the army base in broad daylight, but still stealthy as Hell. The couple minutes of his sneakiness are run together shots of him ducking around corners, rolling under cars and walking cautiously past the backs of Venezuelan soldiers. Senor Feetch is obviously the best special forces guy ever, and it is proven a hundred-fold in the next scene.
Feetch goes scuba diving near the boat wreck site to check things out. What ensues is a knife fight between our boy and a slightly mega piranha. He manages to cut it and distract the others as they feed on their friend and he makes it ashore.
You can’t hide from the Mega Piranha Greg Brady!
By now I’m in desperate need of a horror movie kill and starting to grow bored with the movie until this happens:
Senor Feetch is on shore catching his breath. Cut to the water where a mega piranha shoots into the air in slow motion, almost twenty feet to the shore to attack Senor Feetch. Senor Feetch owns the piranha with his blade before calling Grady and saying exactly this over the phone:
“I’ve figured it out, sir. It wasn’t an explosion, it wasn’t terrorists. It was giant piranha.”
Seriously, who was the scriptwriter for this one? Improv would have been better.
So the scientists explain how it’s a good thing that a natural dam is blocking the piranha from spreading downriver, and it’s the only thing as well. Funny how that can stop the mega piranha when only five minutes before one jumped thirty feet out of the f–king water onto shore! Oh buddy, huge plot hole!
Colonel Diaz in the midst of spouting off a huge “SENOR FEETCH!” (David Labiosa)
In a stunning display of Venezuelan military power and terrible special effects, Colonel Diaz takes three helicopters in the middle of the night and randomly fires machine guns and missiles into the river, destroying mega piranha left and right. Surprisingly they are not all dead.
The movie has a couple of piranha kills that are pretty generic, with the pool of blood bubbling up from the water with a lot of screaming and splashing. Nothing too exciting. I was expecting some spectacular piranha chomping, but was left high and dry.
The movie trudges along and before we know it there are mega piranha the size of cars launching themselves out of the water into buildings and everything in sight, one even impaling itself on a telephone pole. It truly keeps getting better as Senor Feetch bicycle kicks the shit out of almost a dozen launching piranha, like so:
The length and music weren’t in the movie unfortunately but you get the gist of it.
Throughout the rest of the movie, we are introduced to even more mega-sized piranha who launch themselves into battleships, withstand nuclear bombardment, and eat people on the land whole. I will tell you so you can sleep tonight that eventually, the piranha are indeed defeated.
One of the best parts of Mega Piranha involved the epic death of Colonel Diaz. I only wished he had yelled “FEEEEEEEEETCH!” before biting the big one. Or the big one biting him I should say:
Well, that’s it for the Mega Piranha. If you don’t want to sit through an hour and a half of crappy deaths by fish then simply watch the short version in the video below:
Out of the three Craptastic movies I’ve watched this one was probably the most entertaining even if it wasn’t great.
– Generic Piranha death scenes – A letter “e” missing out of the subtitled word “Something” + Flare in the mouth leads to exploding head death scene + Terrible acting that made me laugh + Cheesy action music + Funny ass looking mega piranha launching from the water into buildings
For those reasons above I give this craptastic movie 2 and a half grizzlies.
Craptastic Bonus Fun Fact:A well-fired flare shot in the mouth can cause a man’s head to explode.
If there is anything I like more than a crappy horror movie, it’s a crappy horror movie title that plays on words. For example, Santa’s Slay portrays a man dressed as Santa, slaying people. Or The Gingerdead Man who is a dead killer resurrected as a gingerbread man who continues to make people dead.
With the movie I am reviewing aptly named DIEner, I expected no less than a diner where people die. Little did I know I was about to be served with zombies as well. Synopsis follows below:
Ken (Josh Grote) is a wandering and unassuming serial killer who enters a forsaken and empty diner during the graveyard shift. After a long conversation with the diner’s lone waitress Rose, (Maria Olsen) Ken kills her and promptly delivers the same fate to the diner’s cook Fred (Jorge Montalvo). As Ken cleans up the bloody mess and deposits Rose and Fred in the walk-in freezer, company arrives. A young, unhappy married couple Rob (Parker Quinn) and Kathy (Liesel Kopp) stop by the diner, only to be followed by the arrival of Sheriff Duke Purdett (Larry Purtell). Ken now finds himself in the middle of a rousing game of cat and mouse which he manages well until the unthinkable happens. Back from the dead, Rose and Fred emerge from the freezer and start walking around! Once an unflappable serial killer, Ken now holds the young couple and wounded sheriff captive, trying frantically to escape the zombie predators!
I was expecting a very low-budget zombie horror film that tried to be a horror movie but failed. It was instead a terrible horror/comedy(?) with no zombies showing up until about 20 minutes in. I suppose I should have watched the trailer first.
Much of the 75-minute piece of refuse was taken up by the first 23 minutes introducing us to characters we couldn’t give a dead moose’s last shit about. I loved how the first five minutes we had to hear the horse-gummed waitress tell the killer her life story before he slow-mo kills her, and owns the cowardly cook with a knife throw to the back. We are also served a couple of nearly five-minute long flashback scenes trying to make us somehow sympathetic to the comic serial killer. I might add, the little serial killer in the flashback is approximately 10 years old and wearing the exact same shirt as the 30 something, grown up a serial killer. Great wardrobe department.
Ken – Our Killer. “No, I’m serious. I think we should duct tape this Zombie to the kitchen floor.”
When the zombies do show up, they are a complete joke. The three principle characters were able to dodge around them like kids playing freeze tag in elementary school. The young couple, Rob, and Kathy, decide to just go right along with the serial killer’s brilliant plan of detaining the zombies. Tying one to a flimsy coat rack, and duct taping the other one to the floor the greasy kitchen floor. You know, as opposed to trying to kill said zombies, or even just simply leaving.
The actors had about as much life in them as the dead mouse that my cat dropped off at the doorstep this morning. And the soundtrack- oh the glorious soundtrack! – organ music. We were also treated to some tunes during the flashbacks; they sounded like a monkey on LSD trying to play a guitar while kicking bells across the ground and wind chimes flailing about. At this point, Grizzly Park was Academy material compared to this scum sucking piece of garbage paste.
The being said, I highly recommend it to anyone looking to ruin their life for 75 minutes.
Bad acting (a given)
Bad Music
Not many zombies until the end
Nothing funny
Nothing remotely entertaining
For those reasons I award DIEner with a score of Zero Grizzlies, and may God have mercy on the souls of those who created it.
– Craptastic Bonus Fun Fact: the word diener is derived from the German leichendiener, which literally means corpse servant. Coincidence or DIEner writer genius? I’d put money on coincidence.
First off, let’s not associate any name resemblance between this rancid dog turd of a movie and our beloved Grizzly Bomb.
One is awesome, one is not. Grizzly Bomb is beautiful; Grizzly Park is ugly as sin. Understood? Good, then let’s start, shall we?
*Spoilers like a mother effer – because you shouldn’t care*
Ok, so here is the official synopsis:
Eight troubled young adults are sentenced to a week of community service in a remote California forest range called ‘Grizzly Park’. Under the supervision of the stalwart Ranger Bob, the group is given the opportunity to seek redemption on their journey through the forest. While Ranger Bob seeks to provide guidance to the young adults, an escaped serial killer with an insatiable blood-lust has also found his way into the park with every intention of disposing anyone in his path. But he is not the only predator in these woods; a nine foot tall, thousand pound ravenous Grizzly bear has also set his sights on stalking the group and attacking them one by one, leaving the group to face their ultimate challenge…survival.
Some nights when I’m writing I like to turn on a random, bad horror movie on NetFlix.
Well, tonight it was Grizzly Park and damn was it bad. I usually like to have a laugh during B movies, but this one couldn’t get one chuckle out of me. The most famous person in the movie was Glenn Morshower who starred in minor roles in both Transformer movies, and also played ‘Secret Service Agent Aaron Pierce’ on 24. In Grizzly Park, he plays ‘Park Ranger Bob’, the man in charge of overseeing the group of the young imbeciles who are doing community service. These morons are responsible for misdemeanors ranging from computer hacking to prostitution.
For some integral-to-the-plot reason, they are doing their community service picking up trash in a very remote forest where no other campers or hikers are to be found…so there is a lot of trash.
There is also an incredibly unnecessary subplot about an escaped serial killer being on the loose in the woods. Funny thing is, he doesn’t kill one of the community service kids because he instead tries to have a knife fight with a killer bear. Brilliant, brilliant man. The bear wins big time eating the serial killer’s face off, much to my delight. The rest of the movie was a ‘paint by numbers’, one-by-one kill fest.
All of the offenders? Eaten by the bear. However, four of them were actually killed off-screen, which needless to say, was quite disappointing.
Actually, take that back, there was one huge twist; the first girl to die was run down and killed…by a wolf. A fricking wolf. I thought this was Grizzly Park?
Other notable kills included…
A guy wearing a sweet bear suit getting the top half of his head knocked off by a real bear.
Girl getting the bottom half of her body completely devoured.
A guy being pulled out a window by the bear, resulting in the girls trying to pull him back in coming away with his severed arms.
“Excuse me good Sir, can you spare a cup of sugar?”
Probably the most unexpected way of someone dying occurred in the last minutes of the film: One of the girls, Bebe, was questioned in a brilliantly acted scene by the guys if her boobs were real or silicone. She awesomely replies with, “Silly cone?”, and insults women everywhere with her stupidity. So after talking to someone on the phone about how everyone was dead and she didn’t give a rat’s ass or learn anything, she walks outside to find the bear waiting. The bear takes a swat at her hitting her chest, and a bloody “Silly cone” implant flies and hits a tree. She, of course, dies from that.
Thank you Grizzly Park, because the whole movie my only questions were “Are Bebe’s boobs real?” and “Why am I watching this movie?”.
The very last scene reveals that the bear killing everyone is, in fact, anger Bob’s pet and buddy. He takes criminals out to pick trash in the woods hoping they will change, and if they don’t he has his effing bear kill them. CLASSIC! Now I must go vomit.
If this sounds awesome, maybe I described it wrong. I’m not saying don’t watch the movie, by all means, do, you may get plenty more out of it than I did. But you’ve been warned.
I understand what they were aiming for, but they just didn’t get there. This movie gets a well deserved 0.5 of 5 on the Grizzly scale. It earns this dismal score for the uninspired agony it put me through, and the most off-screen deaths I’ve seen in a horror movie! Scandal!
Grizzly Bomb 