"Up From the Depths"(1979)d/Charles Griffith

Tonight's review is proof that by the end of the seventies, Italians weren't the only ones trying to cash in at the box office with cheaply produced 'Jaws' rip-offs, as if the misleadingly ambitious one-sheet above wasn't enough evidence for a conviction on it's own.The alternate one-sheet for Piranha(1978) called, and it wants it's terrified female swimmer back, guys.Helmed by Charles B. Griffith, the screenwriter behind such cult classics as It Conquered the World(1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters(1957), and Death Race 2000(1975), and produced by prolific Filipino filmmaker Cirio(Savage!, T.N.T. Jackson) Santiago, Depths is a mostly boring mix of the fiberglass, tits, wooden acting, and stage blood necessary to encapsulate the average Roger Corman movie experience, barely covering it's end of a double feature disc, as paired with Santiago's own rip-off of the same movie, 1987's Demon of Paradise, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, folks.One shitty Jaws rip-off at a time.The Phillipines-as-Hawaii backdrop is used here to weave the all too familiar "Resort-goers repeatedly dined upon by large aquatic predatory animal that's ignored by the authorities until they're forced to blow the thing up with explosives after the body count turns the ocean's tide blood red" premise, the frame dressed with the likes of Sam Bottoms, who'd just come off the success of Coppola's Apocalypse Now(1979), and lovely television actress Susanne Reed, and minimal creature/gore effects provided by none other than The Fly II(1989) director Chris Walas, fresh from his stint on Piranha(1978), another popular Corman production that unapologetically apes the earlier Spielberg adventure/thriller hit itself.

"Human entrails?Everytime I get in the goddamned ocean...Every goddamned time!" 
After an unusual oceanic current frees up a prehistoric man-eating fish, that either resembles a pilot whale with Eric Roberts' mouth, or an oversized lower intestine with a mean face on the end, depending on the positioning of the camera in the water, the hateful surfboard-with-teeth stakes a peckish claim off the remote beaches of Mahu(or the Philippines, whichever works best for you) where unsuspecting vacationers, which include bickering out-of-shape bathers, kids who take drinking glasses into the ocean while swimming(nothing beats a tall, midday glass of saltwater, eh, kids?), gangly British playmates named Iris Lee(Denise Hayes), a Japanese Samurai, and a scientist named Whiting(Charles Howerton) who happens to be researching deep sea fish.Add to the mix a gorgeous young public relations rep named Rachel(Susanne Reed) and her sideburn-heavy love interest, Greg(Sam Bottoms), and even an alcoholic beercan-chucking fisherman named Earl(Virgil Frye) and the lanky lightbulb-headed hotel manager named Forbes(Kedric Wolfe) he's eternally at odds with.Ol' Forbesy alternates between shirtless in a palm leaf hat and a groovy pink action suit while ignorantly denying the impending danger to all with hokey overacting zeal that Billy Shatner might be envious of.Whenever the predator strikes, it's a muddled mishmosh of shots of oncoming teeth, hunks of meat being shaken back and forth underwater, and the obligatory red dye emptying into the deep, 'whenever' in this instance meaning 'every single goddamned time'.

"This shark must've survived solely on Spielberg's '1941' box-office receipts..."
The fiendish fish eats a photographer(only after he's set his expensive camera down on the rocks in front of him, mind you) in about three feet of water, while Forbes stubbornly exclaims that there are no sharks in the Hawaiian Archipelago.Add 'marine biology' to Forbes' growing list of inadequacies.Several forgettable attacks later, the haughty Chrome Dome offers a case of rum bounty for any tourist willing to tangle ass with the hateful halibut, leading to a mad scramble of eager vacationers grabbing decorative spears off the hotel walls, somehow forgetting that the aqua-beast has been seemingly impervious to shotgun slugs and even 5.56mm rifle ammo up to this point.A wisecracking R. Lee Ermey(!) even shows up in Hawaiian shirt with homemade flamethrower, but to no avail.Earl loads his boat up with ammunition and beer, and joins the good fight himself.The beast rams into Dr. Whiting, who pleads, dying from internal injuries, with the others:" Don't throw me back in! Don't let it get me!", which his associates interpret as: "Please strap my lifeless corpse with explosives and heave it into the water as boobytrapped fishbait!", and do just that.Judging by the circle of red dye in the water, post-off-camera explosion(explosions are expensive to film, you dicks), the fish is effectively slain and life returns to normal for the survivors, even the comic relief Samurai who's been unable to get his canoe off the rocks for the past twenty-five minutes.Insert rimshot, roll credits.

Red Snapper for dinner tonight again??Eh, twist my arm.
Corman would follow tonight's review up with the equally Jaws-ish Humanoids from the Deep(1980), a much more polished and enjoyable movie, in your humble narrator's eyes, anyway.Griffith went on to helm the rarely-seen  Ollie Reed vehicle, Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype(1980), Smokey Bites the Dust(1981), and Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II(1989).After providing the effects for the U.S.-shot sequences on Sergio Martino's Isle of the Fishmen(1980), Walas would go on to score makeup credits in everything from Cronenburg's Scanners(1981), Caveman(1981), and Joe Dante's Gremlins(1984), while providing effects for Humanoids from the Deep(1980), Dragonslayer(1981), and Cronenburg's Naked Lunch(1991).Though you'll no doubt remember Sam Bottoms as Cpl. Lance Johnson in Coppola's war epic, he also turns in solid performances in Eastwood pics The Outlaw Josey Wales(1976) and Bronco Billy(1979), getting his debut in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show(1971), and dying prematurely at the age of 53 in 2008, while his striking co-star Reed returned to television, turning up on shows like Baywatch, Airwolf, and Knight Rider.On the scale, Depths rarely rises from said murky expanses, meriting a single Wop.It could've used a bigger boat, indeed.

"You're right, my balls do stretch out to here for expecting to be taken seriously while wearing this pink get up in public."

"Texas Chainsaw Massacre:The Beginning"(2006)d/Jonathan Liebesman

This movie has earned nearly forty million dollars at U.S. box offices.I just wanted to get that out of the way early, so you can keep it in mind throughout the following review of Jonathan Liebesman's 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre:The Beginning', a prequel to the 2003 remake of the original 1974 Tobe Hooper film.We all remember the original, don't we?For those of you that somehow don't, fret not.Tonight's entry covers all the exact same bases, albeit ineffectually, with a lazy script that caters to R. Lee Ermey's sudden injection into the murderous Hewitt clan geneology.I'm not sure what a slightly more psychotic Gny. Sgt. Hartman adds to the Chainsaw mythos, but producers Hooper and Kim Henkel must've dug the shit out of the idea.We're also treated to Leatherface's back story for some reason, as if a lumbering cannibalistic retard-hulk wearing a human skin mask and wielding a chainsaw wasn't self-explanatory enough.Liebesman, who's also directed 2003's Darkness Falls(liked a lot) and 2011's Battle:Los Angeles(fell asleep in the theater), doesn't seem too concerned with selling the prequel's 1969 aesthetic besides a bandanna here, and some Vietnam chatter there, handling the potential for horror and tension like a true fucking butterfingers, focusing his lens on ugly characters and uninspiring cookie cutter gore instead.So why did they bother with this one in the first place, if it had little chance of adding much to the popular horror series, which was pretty much past the exhausted point after the first sequel in 1986? For a definitive answer to that question, simply re-read the first line of this review out loud to yourself.Fortunately, my own Happy Talk cash never contributed to the film's gaudy theatrical run, which saw it finish second(!) to Scorsese's The Departed(2006)(!!) in it's opening weekend.I merely pulled four singles out of my wallet and flopped 'em down in the Wal-mart cashier's mitts, and in hindsight, may have overpayed by two or three of those.Towards...

That rotten rutabaga has a funny shape to it, huh.
After being bloodily shat out by a rotund meat processing plant worker, who abruptly croaks on the floor in a blecchy puddle in the melee, and rescued from being garbage-chucked, by Luda Mae(Allison Marich), who takes the deformed little bastard home as one of her own, we see a credit montage of a grown up Tommy Hewitt(Andrew Bryniarski) doing odd things to animals and their skins, in particular, as a newspaper headline tells us the town is going belly up, leading to lay-offs at the meat packing plant, where the repugnant-pussed Leatherface-to-be has great difficulty comprehending he's suddenly out of a job, despite the best insults of his employers.Next, we see Eric(Matthew Bomer) pirating around in a motel pool with a knife in his yap, before driving off to re-enlist for Vietnam with his younger brother, Dean(Taylor Handley), who's just been drafted, but secretly plans on ducking out on his responsibility to his country, to Mexico, somewhere along the ride.Meanwhile, back at the plant, Tommy pulverizes the boss' legbones with a sledgehammer before laying a serious Wile E. Coyote headshot on the whimpering floored coot, the same no good feller whut threw Ugly Tommy in th' traish, all them yurrs ago.When Sheriff Winston(Lew Temple) comes to the Hewitt's door with an arrest warrant, Charlie(R. Lee Ermey) tags along for the ride, later blowing the sheriff away and adopting his blood-speckled uniform and badge, and declaring the family's struggles over as they all sit down to eat Winston's remains.After a classic exploitative run in with bikers leaves one exploded cow and their Jeep totalled, Dean, Eric, and their respective arm decorations, Chrissie and Bailey(Jordana Brewster, Diora Baird), find themselves at the mercy of the faux-sheriff, who blows away a female biker and, after glimpsing Dean's partially burned draft card, orders the three wreck-battered youths into his cruiser, while Chrissie watches helplessly from the cover of some nearby tall grass.She stows away in Monty's(Terrence Evans) tow truck, while Charlie and his adoptive brother, Tommy see to their new house guests...

"Okay! Okay! Tell Gallagher II he'll get his money!!"
At the Hewitt's place, Eric and Dean find themselves strung up in the barn, while Charlie gleefully mocks and berates them, partially smothering Eric with a plastic sheet, and billyclubbing the fuck out of conscientious objector, Dean, as he tries to accomplish some freedom-based push ups(as if he was reprising some drill sargeant character he previously portrayed in some other movie, I dunno).There's an attempted escape that nets Bailey a meathook in the tit-shelf, Dean, a bear-trapped foot, and Eric gets K.T.F.O.ed with a shotgun, while Chrissie has enlisted the help of Holden, the biker who's unknowingly looking for his dead old lady, and the unlikely pair pay the Hewitts a social call that night.Chrissie finds Eric strapped to a table with a few bits missing as Holden straddles Tommy's buzzsaw to a minced up end.With Chrissie hiding under the table, Tommy does Eric proper with his soon-to-be trademark implement, spraying her with his lifestuff before removing the boy's fac-piece and wearing it like a mask.Charlie remarks that he likes Tommy's new toy and new grill, before ordering him to hack off both of Monty's legs when they look uneven after an impromptu single leg chainsaw amputation.Chrissie gets herself caught, and finds herself the centerpiece of an insane dinner(oh, sweet originality) complete with human entrées, throats slashed with scissors, busted fronts, and a chainsaw impaling, before the desperate girl can escape the carnage in a car that's parked out front.As she's coming up on a state trooper and a citation he's pulled over, Leatherface inexplicably pops up in the rearview mirror, running Chrissie through at the labonza with his chainsaw from the backseat, you know, the one she apparently didn't hear him revving up back there, causing her to plough into the traffic on the roadside in a brutal crash, from which he emerges unscathed, to walk along down the scorching Texas highway with chainsaw in tow, as we hear the narrator(John "Night Court" Larroquette, again, nice touch) attribute some thirty murders to the Hewitts(Weren't they the Sawyers?), and utter the titular line in describing them.

"This is for Archie Bunker, ya draft dodgin' pinko!", sez Leatherpuss.
Of course, a new Chainsaw pic is in the works, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D, scheduled for release in January of '13, from a screenplay written by Adam Marcus, who you might remember as the director of Jason Goes to Hell:The Final Friday(1993), though I'm sure most choose to try and forget(good thing we'll be covering it next here at the Wop, huh, kiddies...), and featuring John "Grandpa" Dugan and Bill "Choptop" Moseley, as well as cameos by Gunnar Hansen and Marilyn Burns.As unnecessary as it undoubtedly is, it'll probably do well at the box office, and I'll eventually see it, too, no matter how much I might piss and moan about it along the way.As exhausted as the whole premise is by now, I still don't mind seeing it from time to time, whether by revisiting the original, one of my all-time faves, or by enduring the latest overhyped sludgefest bearing the TCM stamp and hoping it's not a total scareless waste of time, you know, kinda like Beginning ended up being.I've written entirely enough about it, already.One Wop.

S'alright 'face(Andrew Bryniarski), my attention walked out about ten minutes in.