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The Setup

Horror movies derive a great deal of their tension from our darkest fears of everyday places and things. In this case, those very things are the fauna of Mother Nature herself. That’s right. Our pets, our animal bretheren, and those cute fuzzy creatures that always populate the background of the latest Disney animated “classic.” These films seek to prove to you just how…terrifying a fluffball of fuzzy furry fury can truly be.

Squirrels are adorably harmless creatures that populate our back yards and woodlands. But what about rabid squirrels? Dear god! That’s scary!!! But wait, what if they were wait-for-it. . . Radioactive Rabid Vampire Squirrels? That’s our movie! R.R.V.S: Curse of the Blood Acorn

Every era has a flagship “Killer Animals” movie, in which animals are corrupted by whatever the culture was afraid of at the time. Radiation, disease, communism, technology, fast food, etc. turn animals into some sort of rabid killer…or otherwise piss them off so much that they decided-collectively or on their own-that they’ve had enough.

The Formula

Take the cutest animal you can think of. Now expose it to a nuclear, biological or chemical agent that makes it more blood thirsty than a drunk hockey fan snorting a fistful of speedballs and ground up PCP. Stand back and watch the fun. Additionally, every Killer Animal movie will have one of the following scenes:

• “Awww. .  . how cute. .” Some idiot will attempt to pet, snuggle or capture the now amazingly dangerous animal and loose a limb, possibly their life.
• “Dear God, They’re everywhere!!” It will turn out that either one animal is so fast it’s everywhere at once, or it spreads it’s ichor through the local animal population turning them all against the humans.
• There will be an “Expert” Someone who has dealt with this of thing before, back in the 50’s, but it was covered up by the government.
• KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!: At some point one of the formerly domesticated monsters will be set ablaze.

The Menu

In addition to our typical selection of chips, beer, liquor, and snacks-there will be:

The Booze: Wild Turkey, Warm Woolly Sheep

Because in the face of such terrifying and horrible movies, we need a warm glass of milk to calm down our nerves (mixed with booze, of course).

The Food: The Flesh of Deadly Animals! Or, you know, Peeps

That’s right: BEEF JERKEY to prove who’s at the top of the food chain, and marshmallow animal effigies for ritual burnings.

The Movies

Night of the Lepus (1972): A regular feature of Sunday afternoons in the 80’s, this movie proves that with good sound production, you can almost make rabbits scary. Almost. The beasties terrorize a barely populated western town for an entire evening.

Black Sheep (2006): Chris Farley is back from the grave and looking to eat EVERYONE! No. Wait. Even scarier! This movie is about killer sheep rampaging through the gorgeous landscape of New Zealand. It has everything: flesh-eating zombie sheep, flying Terry Tate sheep and…wait for it: WERESHEEP. Already a cult classic everywhere else in the world, we’re going to give this movie its due.

Suggested Alternatives

Orca (1977) : A strange fever dream of a movie, whose lesson is this: DO NOT KILL BABY WHALES, or their parents will hunt you to ends of the earth.

Tentacles (1977): Wow, ’77 was a year for movies about dangerous marine life, eh? An “all-star cast” (read: Henry Fonda) are terrorized by a giant octopus. The IMDB error page says it all: “Factual errors: Octopuses don’t roar.”

Slugs (1988): Cavalcade Staff Writer John Higgins was seven when he first saw this movie. It was funny even then.

This article was co-authored with John Higgins.

It’s about goddamned time I had fun watching a movie. The Hollywood adaptation of 80s TV staple The A-Team is a laugh riot, and in a good way.

We start it off right, somewhere in Mexico, where we meet Hannibal (Liam Neeson), B.A. Baracus (Quinten Jackson), Howling Mad Murdock (Sharlto Copley) and Face (Bradley Cooper) in a completely silly but awesome sequence. We jump ahead 8 years (and 80 successful missions) to the final days of withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, meaning it takes place in the future, I suppose.

The boys are tricked by a barely competent, completely evil C.I.A. agent named Lynch (Patrick Wilson),  who dupes them into . . . standing too close while someone else blows up some counterfeit money and the team’s commanding general. That someone else is, in fact, the ultra-competent military contractor Pike (Brian Bloom), the first villain since Ledger’s Joker to pose a credible threat to a protagonist. He’s just a great screen presence and actually presents a real menace.

The plot really isn’t worth mentioning, as it’s poorly done and more than a little silly. There’s actually a reveal that’s straight out of Scooby Doo . What is worth mentioning: this movie is freakin’ hysterical. At it’s heart, The A-Team is a comedy, but unlike most comedies, things explode a lot. There are scenes that are just sublime in their humor, especially those devoted to making fun of the CIA and their legendary incompetence. Between Pike being a rather scary guy and Lynch being arrogant, yet incompetent in a way we haven’t seen since Cobra Commander, their dynamic yields as many laughs as the heroes’ shenanigans.

Patrick Wilson does a fine job as Lynch. He’s the sort of guy you just want to punch in the throat. At one point, he says a video of a building actually being blown up looks just like Call of Duty, which is something a strawberry douche would say.

The action set pieces are absurdly awesome, as well. We’ve all seen the tank falling out of the sky via parachute in the preview, but how they get out of it is a site to behold.

Really, the best part of this movie, much like the Losers, is the characters just being goofy despite their lives being in constant danger. The real fun of this film is the endless string of great lines and the dynamic between the four main players. Even Quinton Jackson does a great job as Baracus, and well, I don’t expect much from MMA guys after the tragedy that was Universal Soldier: Regeneration.

Overall, this movie is worth the price of admission, but only if you approach it in the way it was intended. It is a comedy through and through. Although, unlike the original show, it does have a body count …the 80’s were, of course more innocent times. Couple this with The Losers, and it’s a recipe for a Cavalcade about people who just can’t take being shot at seriously.

If you’re interested:

CAVALCADE OF SCHLOCK PRESENTS SUMMER OF SCHLOCK OPENING EVENT!

MISFITS, MONSTERS AND MAYHEM!

Summer of Schlock will take place at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Gallery located at 8230 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, one block from the Silver Spring Metro, on Saturday, June 26, 2010. The first film will start at 9pm, to be followed by a brief intermission leading to the final movie of the double feature. For more information on The Cavalcade of Schlock, contact Micah Pearson or John Higgins.

Pearson was initially surprised by the interest others had for the Cavalcade “When I first came up with the idea for this thing, it was just a way to get a couple friends together and have a few laughs. But after the first few meetings, we couldn’t fit all the people in my apartment anymore!” It was then that they found their current home at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Gallery.

A combination of book club, drive-in cinema, and performance art, the Cavalcade of Schlock seeks to bring together the joys of bad movies and good friends in a pop-culture extravaganza. All summer the brave volunteers will select a theme and choose 2 films from a vast array of nearly forgotten cult classics of exploitation and B-movie cinema. They then, as a group, provide food and beverages along said theme. It’s an interactive, raucous experience that evokes the anarchic energy of a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening while taking advantage of the nicer weather in the summer months.

The Cavalcade of Schlock, the brainchild of DC Metro area resident Micah Pearson, hosting an outdoor event showing both the classic movie The Goonies (1985), a tale of adventure and friendship shared by a band of misfit kids and the lesser known Monster Squad (1987), also about a band of misfit kids, only they fight monsters! This even is the first of a three month long series: The Summer of Schlock.

Details Below:

The Goonies is a 1985 American adventure-comedy film directed by Richard Donner. The screenplay was written by Chris Columbus from a story by executive producer Steven Spielberg. A band of kids from the “Goon Docks” neighborhood of Astoria, Oregon, hoping to save their homes from demolition, go on an adventure to find the buried treasure of One-Eyed Willy, a legendary 17th-century pirate.

The Monster Squad is a comedy/horror film written by Shane Black and Nicholas Hill and directed by Fred Dekker (who also wrote/directed Night of the Creeps). It was released by Tri-Star Pictures on August 14, 1987. The film features the classic monsters (re-imagined by a team of special effects artists including Stan Winston), led by Dracula (Duncan Regehr).

I’m going to level with you guys:  Black Dynamite may, in fact, be the greatest movie ever made, and thus, the following review will not do it any sort of justice.  Much like The Matrix (1999), no one can be told what Black Dynamite is, you have to see it for yourself.

Directed and co-written by Scott Sanders, Black Dynamite is a hilarious movie, and the parts that aren’t funny are totally badass…and the parts that aren’t badass, are even MORE BADASS.  Yeah, it’s like that.  A send-up of the Blaxploitation films of the ’70s, it could easily be compared to Keenan Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka! (1988) .  But while Wayans’ film is also rooted in the Blaxploitation genre, it’s really in the style of the Zucker Bros. parodies like Airplane! (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988). Black Dynamite on the other hand, turns Blaxploitation conventions and clichés up to 11, goes beyond mere parody, and in turn becomes the purest Blaxploitation film ever.

Michael Jai White stars as the titular Black Dynamite, the baddest mofo in the history of bad mofos.  When he isn’t running his nightclub, pimping hos, avenging his brother Jimmy’s death, protecting the weak, or simultaneously sexually satisfying three women at once; he does what he does best: TAKE IT TO THE MAN! This time, though, he’s got his work cut out for him.  In under 90 minutes, Black Dynamite has to clean up the streets, exact bloody vengeance, protect a foxy female force for change in the community, thwart a government plot to shrink black mens’ pride and joy and, as mentioned above, stick it to The Man.  While it’s a good thing Black Dynamite also just happens to be “the greatest CIA agent the CIA ever had in the history of the CIA,” it’s fortunate he’ll also have some help from an assortment of a few of the goofiest of Black militants and baddass pimps (including Arsenio Hall and Bokeem Woodbine)!

The driving force behind the whole picture is Michael Jai White.  It was his vision and utter commitment to badassery that makes this film a sheer joy to watch.  You’ve loved him in such films as Spawn (1997), Universal Soldier: The Return (1999) , both The Toxic Avenger II (1989) and III (1989) , and The Dark Knight (2008) .  Can we all just agree that he’s the man already?  Or at the very least, can you all go out and watch the highly underrated Thick as Thieves (1998)?  It’s also directed by Scott Sanders, and is the best low-budget crime flick I’ve seen that didn’t have a “written by Elmore Leonard” credit. However, you should definitely check out Black Dynamite first…

…and do not interrupt his Kung Fu.

Third movies are tricky, even when filmmakers have a trilogy planned from the start.  As it stands, I have yet to see a third superhero film that was anything less than dreadful.  Spider-man III and X3 , I’m looking at you!

Unfortunately, it is no less difficult with the third film in a horror series (though oddly enough, the 4th is usually a better one in the series), and it’s usually after a great second film.  Most do not appreciated Saw III, everyone hates Child’s Play 3 (even the director), and need I even mention reactions to Halloween III?  So, when a filmmaker nails a third act as Sam Raimi does with Army of Darkness, it’s worth noting.

By the beginning of AoD, Ashley J. Williams (Bruce Campbell) has already had a rough couple of days.  On the first day of his vacation, his sister, girlfriend and two other friends all become possessed by Kandarian demons who can only be stopped through total bodily dismemberment.  I’ve heard worse Spring Break stories.  After barely surviving that, he had to cut off his own hand, deal with more possessed people and summon the inner strength to become the baddest-ass force for good in horror film history

After “defeating” the evil in the present, Ash was sucked back in time to medieval England, which looks an awful lot like California.  Cavalcade Fun Fact: England, medieval or otherwise, has never had deserts!  Ash is tasked with defeating the Deadites, including an evil version of himself, in the past in order to return to the future.  It’s a good thing he had a chainsaw attached to his right arm and his trademark “Boomstick.”

One cannot undervalue the skill of Sam Raimi as a director.  After showing what he could do with a budget on Darkman , Raimi was able to command just a little bit more money to bring a “big” budget Evil Dead to the big screen.  All of Sam’s trademarks are present: “Sam-O-Cam,” “Ram-O-Cam,” excessive amounts of blood, and, of course, entirely too many Three Stooges references.  To be honest, AoD does suffer in comparison to the earlier films.  Where Evil Dead was “the ultimate experience in grueling terror,” and Evil Dead 2 is one of the greatest horror-comedies produced, AoD is really just a comedy.  Granted, a comedy with chainsaws, but still, the movie is not neither scary nor particularly gross.  This is not necessarily a complaint, but for those that enjoyed the horror elements of the previous two films, AoD could be viewed as quite a departure in tone.  However, this drawback is more than excused since it allowed an even bigger, crazier performance by our hero.

Despite his every effort, most of us recognize that Bruce Campbell is Ash.  Well, he would be if he were put in that situation…and exposed to gamma radiation.  More than any other role, Campbell is identified as Ash with no small part due to his performance in AoD.  Playing not only Ash, but also Evil Ash, Campbell makes almost every line of dialogue quotable with his trademark sarcasm and over-the-top awesomeness.

I highly recommend watching the first two Evil Deads so you can get the full effect of Campbell and Raimi’s development of the character and mythology, but AoD is one of those sequels that can truly stand on its own.  Which is impressive for any third act in a trilogy.

How do you fight undead robbers?  With undead cops, of course!

Treat Williams plays L.A. police detective Roger Mortis (No, really, that’s his name) with partner Doug Bigelow (Joe Piscopo!) as they investigate why they can’t seem to kill the bad guys as effectively as they used to.  These investigations lead them to Dante Laboratories, which has developed a process for resurrecting the dead for twelve hours.  After a losing fight with the fattest zombie this side of Zombieland, Mortis is killed.  But, then brought back to life by his coroner ex-girlfriend (Clare Kirkconnell) and the most user-friendly resurrection machine ever.  Now, Mortis has twelve hours to solve the case and avenge his own death in a Hawaiian shirt.

Written by Terry Black , Shane’s brother, Dead Heat has a similar action/comedy feel to his brother’s Lethal Weapon, but with zombies.  And such zombies they are!  The opening jewelry store heist features two punk zombie robbers wearing BDSM leather masks!  (Their safe word is “Braaaaaaiiiiinnnnnssssss.”)

But this is nothing compared to the undead hijinks that occur at a Chinese restaurant.  You know all the dead ducks that are hanging in the window?  Or the pigs?  Or the sides of beef?  Yeah.  Good times.  Wait, no, I mean gross times.  Very, very gross.  How do you kill zombie animals with no heads?

Throughout, Williams grounds the whole movie with the ability to take anything that is thrown at him seriously.  The man is not phased by anything.  This is a valuable skill when Joe Piscopo (with an 80s mullet) is delivering some of the best wise-ass remarks in the history of motion pictures.  Watching this film, it’s hard to understand why Piscopo did not fare better in Hollywood.  The man is a scream.  Especially during an exchange with Williams that shows the deep, profundity of cross-dressing jokes between two partners.  Police partners, I mean.  Heterosexual police partners, I mean.  You get the idea.

Added into the mix are performances by the always entertaining Vincent Price(!), Darren McGavin, Keye Luke , and Robert Picardo.  These appearances are almost cameos but they’re all memorable.

In fairness, the movie does play more like it was made for TV, as opposed to a big budget feature but I think this adds to its charm.  Similar to Creepshow .  Dead Heat is a great little horror flick to enjoy on a Saturday afternoon.

This is precisely the sort of movie I would make if I wanted something kids could watch in awe, while the adults laugh themselves silly.

Starting out with some SETI-style researchers-who only took the job because they wouldn’t have to do anything-end up having their plans foiled when they detect a U.F.O. It turns out to be a meteorite that crashes into Earth, specially on top of Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon), turning her into a 50-foot-tall woman.

Oh, and ruining her wedding.

In short order, the usual black helicopter goons show up and whisk Susan off to the secret government lab, where she meets all the great b-monsters of the 1950’s. B.O.B the blob (Seth Rogan)-a lovable pile of sentient goo, Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie )-a not-too-subtle reference to The Fly, The Missing Link (Will Arnett)-who is more Creature from the Black Lagoon than walking ape, and Insectasaurous-the requisite giant monster that resembles nothing less than the product of an unholy union of a gerbil, a puffer fish, and a ladybug. These characters are wardened by the hysterically funny Gen. W.R. Monger, played with verve by Keifer Sutherland-who, quite frankly, sounds like he wrestled a bull by the horns, took said horns, and carved them into the microphone he used to record his voice over.

Apparently the Monster crew has been sequestered for some time, only to be released when the world is accosted by the (slightly) intelligent alien warlord, Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson ). Their mission: Defeat Gallaxhar’s terrifying probe robot, then his army of very stupid clones, and finally Gallaxhar himself. I’m not really spoiling anything when I tell you they win. It’s a kids movie after all. That’s not really the point, it’s not that they win, but how.

Full of hysterical sight gags, clever bits of dialogue (“This place is an X-file, wrapped in a cover-up and deep-fried in a paranoid conspiracy!“), a dash of satire, and a surprising number of adult contemporary hits. Phrases like “Code Nimoy! Code Nimoy!” are frequently mixed-in with references to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Beverly Hills Cop-nevermind the fact that the entire movie is a nod to Dr. Strangelove. Even so, there’s a good balance between the referential pop-culture humor and jokes that stand on their own. It doesn’t hurt that the supporting voice cast is top notch as well, with Stephen Colbert, Paul Rudd, and Ed Helms all contributing.

The icing on the character cake is Susan, who does the full Sarah Connor/Ellen Ripley Hero’s Journey: going from delicate flower to destroyer of robots and stomper of alien ass. More importantly, she realizes she doesn’t need a man to make her happy. You go, girl!

We don’t do “family” movies on the Cavalcade often, but when one comes down the pike that has so many nods to the movies that inspired our love of schlocktacular cinema, we have to take a look. Fortunately, this movie’s great on all levels. If you were to Cavalcade it, feel free to mix and match it with one of the fore-mentioned 50’s romps, Monsters Inc., or Bolt-which has even more nods to Hollywood b-movies.