The Spooktacular Eight #34: Violent Shit (1989)

Ah yes, the other German horror director from the age of video nasties, of when video recording technology becoming affordable alongside a cheap and affordable format for home usage led to some people just shooting the shit on the digital camcorder in their hometown on very low budgets.

I will come forward and admit i haven’t seen any of Andrea Schnass films, i’m quite familiar with Jorg Buttgeireit works on the flipside, but i felt it made sense to start tackling his fellow German DIY horror director, starting from his most well known film, the original Violent Shit, which spawned few sequels, and make clear once more than censorship of this kind will be at best circumnvented, at worst will just force fans of the genre to do what many German horror fans did back in the “video nasty” age, just straight started making these themselves in their backyards.

Figures we eventually feature Schnaas, and i don’t think i did fill the “80s German ultra splatter low budget slasher” slot in my bingo card before on this rubric.

So what is the plot of Violent Shit?

A boy, Karl, comes home a bit late, he gets beat up by his mother, then in revenge murders her with a cleaver.

20 years later, Karl is being moved from his prison to somewhere else by the police, but kills the officers, manages to escape, and with a cleaver (which i guess is a thing growing wild in the Gothic II forests) he goes on a killing spree on the West German countryside, indulging himself in some cannibalism while he’s at it.

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[EXPRESSO] Her Private Hell (2026) | Kojima-ing In The Darkness

I don’t think Her Private Hell is a bad film, and i usually like his stuff, i loved The Neon Demon, but it’s a special kind of disappointing, as this feels Refn trying to imitate itself more than anything.

And not doing it that well either, to be brutally honest.

It’s definitely his vision, no mistake, but one that feels like he’s trying to recapture the old spark…and again, coming off as a self-imitation more than anything else.

The premise sees Elle, the daughter of wealthy man, trying to reunite with her stepmother (by shooting a movie in a luxury motel), but warned about a supernatural legendary serial killer, Leatherman, whom appears when the fog permeating this Blade Runner-esque city grows even thicker, its diamond fists shining in the darkness,

She ends up crossing paths with an american GI agent that has lost his daughter to this entity, and is desperately searching for a way to get her back…

Even more than before, it’s all about the vibes, the feel, as the hyperstilization here belies little for the audiences to care about or hold onto, the cinema pastiche of sci-fi, comic book, samurai and giallo cinema, one that does look good in screenshots, but lacks the strenght it had before, so you end up just kinda tolerating more than looking forward to see where it’s all gonna go.

wondering why should even care about anything, since the plot is more of a vague outline than something worth discussing, i’d complain about the characters… if there were any (aside the stepmother), these are ideas of characters, and the movie overall is just lacking much substance – or impact – to back up its pretense and stylization, so you end not even intrigued or curious to know more about this sci-fi world.

Sadly disappointing.

Slotherhouse (2023) [REVIEW] | Slay Queen

While i’m sure i can find more old 80s school themed/adjacent slasher, this September we’re doing something a bit more recent for a change, from a chronological standpoint, by unearthing from my Blu-Ray collection 2023’s Slotherhouse.

And yes, indeed, this is a 10/10 title for you killer animal slasher film.

It really is indeed about a killer sloth, and the house is not any common house, it’s a sorority house, where Emily Young, a college student brings a three-toed sloth from the jungle, thinking it can work as a “house mascot” and hence help her be elected as the sorority’s president.

But of course things go awry as a series of sorority girls is being killed, and all the evidence strongly implicates it’s actually the cute sloth the one doing all the murders…

I’ll be honest, the promo material made it look like it was chomping off the modern “retro 80s trend”, specifically aping Happy Death Day…. but i was mistaken, this isn’t the case, as Slotherhouse – aside taking place in modern times – is oddly not even that much interested in aping other slasher films. Not too specifically, anyway.

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Shark Exorcist 2: Unholy Waters (2024) [REVIEW] | #thesharklist

I make no secret that i veheemently hate Shark Exorcist, i’ve always hated it well before i re-reviewed it for the blog “shark month”, and while i’m not making a “Worst 10 Shark Films” listicle because there’s always something worse i haven’t seen or that just released that would make that obsolete very fast, if i did, i would put Shark Exorcist as the reigning champion of shit.

Not that Donald Farmer was ever a good director, he always made trashy B to Z movies, but this one i believe was maliciously made extra bad by design, but then again having 40 years of experience in trash cinema doesn’t guarantee you’ll retain any know-how, or care to even put on a semblance of any competence you’ve gathered, as it was frankly barely indistiguishable from crap like Jurassic Shark, made obviously by a bunch of kids with a camera and zero experience.

Again, it took some nega-effort to make Mark Polonia look like Spielberg in comparison, but Shark Exorcist was indeed something special, not your everyday homegrown Z-grade shark trash.

So when i learned last year Donald put out a sequel, Shark Exorcist 2: Unholy Waters back in 2024, 10 years after the first one…. i knew i had to cover it, and i’m not gonna let it fester too much in my mind this time, we’re doing this now so we can move on.

Here i’d discuss the plot but we already did the bit on the review of the first Shark Exorcist, which had a premise, an idea of a plot, not really an actual plot besides the first 5 minutes, or any actual structure, just random padding, “plot lines” that go nowhere, even calling it a “narrative gibberish” it’s too kind in hindsight, since it honestly doesn’t even have an ending or a proper resolution…. it just kinda stops, and reaches a runtime of 74 minutes just because of random post-credit padding.

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Netflix’s One Piece (Season 2) Into The Grand Line (2026) [REVIEW] | Baroque Works Begins

As promised, here is my review for the second season of Netflix’s One Piece live action series, which i now fully realize isn’t gonna be a few season thing, as in, it became clear it wasn’t after the first was a success, and the second too, but i guess it took time for me to properly sink in we’re gonna have One Piece live action material… and that i was actually looking forward to it.

If you told me this even just 10 years ago, i would have spat or laughed in your face, but what can i say, the future can be a foreign country as the past, in its own way.

Season One of “Netflix Piece” was indeed the freak surprise of that year for me, i’ve talked about that enough in the old review, so time to move on!

This second season (after a handy recap of Season 1) basically covers the Alabasta/Arabasta arc from the beginning in Rogue Town, and then up to Drum Kingdom…but as with the first season, this live action adaptation does make a notable amount of changes and additions.

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The Mouse Trap (2024) [REVIEW] | Unhappy Mappy

I swore this off when it came out, even more since i did end up covering all the 3 fucking Popeye slashers that came out last year, but we’re getting at least one more of those, and apparently more of “Steamboat Willie as a horror movie” as a sequel for this was greenlit very soon (one month) after this one dropped in August 2024.

Plus this showed up today on my Amazon Prime Video feed, and since i’ve basically done the same with the Winnie The Pooh horror films, i guess it was indeed inevitable, so consider it a bonus review to excuse the Global Defence Force Tactics retrospective piece getting bumped to August.

I’ve already said a lot of what i thought about these kind of productions in my reviews of both the aforementioned Winnie The Pooh Blood And Honey films and the various Popeye slashers, but in case you weren’t aware, this is actually “patient zero” for this new trend among the bottom feeders of the indie horror scene, as in, waiting for a specific work’s copyright to expire and as soon as possible jump on its new public domain status to do a quickie cashgrab in the form of a cheap low budget slasher flick; the virus might mutate but so far this is the route chosen, as it’s easy, obvious and so brazenly shameless it will put eyes on your piece of shit.

More specifically, this exists because the famous Disney short featuring Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie, fell into the public domain on January 1, 2024, just that, meaning THAT Mickey Mouse’s appearance was “fair game”, not the other interpretations/designs/incarnations that followed, as Disney owns the copyright to those.

And Canadian filmmakers Jamie Bailey and Simon Philipps were eager to cash that “mouse money”, as they announced the film (as Mickey Mouse’s Trap, as if they ever expected that title to actually pass legit) on the very same day Steamboat Willie’s became public domain material.

More unbelievable was that this was supposed to get a theathrical release… it didn’t.

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A Murcielago anime in this economy, Steel Ball Run actual release schedule, the new GITS anime, Tanya Degurechaff is back, AOT 3 and the Mini Summer Of EDF delay

So, Murcielago is a manga about a super serial killer woman with 715 homicides to her name, Komori (she the titular “bat”, since “murcielago” means exactly that, but in Spanish) gets her death penalty halted due to the city being overrun with crime, and Komori gets into assisting the Japanese police in tackling other murderers and criminals that the regular police force fails to catch, helped by the expert driver Hinako and the daughter of a yakuza boss

Komori is also a super lesbian and she basically tries to get into the pants of the many extrabosomed female characters, and even without her there’s a lot of nudity just shy of scissoring because i don’t think you could get away with that on Shonen Gangan. not quite.

It’s delectable action yuri exploitation trash, i love it, i’ve been following and buying the volumes for the past years, but given there’s so much premarital selbian gex and hyperviolence, i never really expected it to get an anime adaptation, heck, it’s ridiculous how much difficult is to see new horror anime exist, which is why i’m not really expecting a Franken Fran adaptation or something.

Yet, a few days ago a teaser trailer for the Murcièlago anime just popped up, and yes, my birthday was earlier this year, but whatever, it may be on time for that since is slated for a generic “2027 release” and i guess will stream on HIDIVE in US territories, we don’t have that here..

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Jack Frost: The Amytiville [MANWHA REVIEW] | The Teen Hellsing Years

This has been on my bucketlist for a while because it was such a transparent case to me.

As in, sometimes you have comics more or less explicit in showing their inspiration, their model to copy and emulate, happens a lot in shonen manga but it’s not always what one would assume

Sometimes it can be just a conflation of this kind of comics being very iterative and built (like most books and movies, for that matter) on clichès, on proven formats, time-tested formula, so similarities are often more coincidence than deliberate emulation of a specific series among the sea of many similar ones, expecially when in turn they influence each other as they go, and in time are themselves taken as examplse to follow.

But once i laid eyes on this manwha (a “korean manga”) by Ko Jin-Ho, Jack Frost: The Amityville, aimed at basically the same demographic of an edgy Shonen Jump series, then red the first volume, i was kinda happy in how immediatly obvious it was to me what this wanted to be.

As in, a more shonen take on Hellsing, the renowed pulp classic by Kohta Hirano about vampires, guns bigger than people, religious freaks with knives that double as lances and undead nazi cyborg monsters.

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[EXPRESSO] 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) | Charity Zombies

Second part of the 28 Years Later trilogy, The Bone Temple follows up the honestly incredible ending of 28 Years Later, which revealed the “Jimmy” name written on corpses and houses as the namesake for – basically – a posse of cultish killers, like if the droogs from Clockwork Orange were based on reviled UK media personality Jimmy Saville.

This sequel follows up on them, but it’s also quite focused about the character of Dr. Kelso, which makes sense since he was the best part of previous film, as he tries to experiment on a specific “alpha zombie” he dubs Samson, while Spike is forced to enter the “Jimmies”…

it’s an interesting sequel, in the sense it does capitalize on the more interesting and unique parts of the previous films, Kelso’s “bone temple” and the “Jimmy gang”, as director Nia DaCosta (Candyman 2021, The Marvels) leans further with the juggling of different tones, with a scene that borders on being a Rob Zombie-esque delirium, and almost feels “out of place” , even if conceptually on the same vibe of “smoking a morphine joint with my zombie broski”.

This comes at the cost of somewhat downplaying the zombies, in a way, and a film that somehow feels a bit safer than the previous one, even though it arguably has a better pacing and could be argued it’s better than 28 Years Later.

It also feels like what it indeed is, the second part of 28 Years Later “part 1”, as the two films do indeed complete each other, making me wonder if the third and final entry (with a returning character appearing here at the end) will indeed feel as such.

Regardless, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple it’s still quite good, even with some questionable choices, i absolutely recommend it.

Iced (1989) [REVIEW] | Ski Slash

Last year’s review of the original Until Dawn on PS4 did left me with a peckish for icy, wintery slasher flicks, i did mention this in the review itself, so instead of The Chill Factor, we’re doing Iced, a forgotten slasher that i’m surprised doesn’t have an Arrow Video rerelease.

That’s because Vinegar Syndrome did release this one on Blu Ray (via their sub-label Degausser Video) last January, though i wouldn’t mind an import friendlier option later down the line.

Iced definitely doesn’t wanna reinvent the “slasher wheel”, as its premise it’s indeed pretty typical.

A group of friends are mysteriously invited to a ski resort, only to be systematically stalked and killed by a masked serial killer.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with how one of their friends, Jeff, died 4 years ago in a nightime skiing accident after being dumped by his fiancèe.

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