Combat Shock

Check out this bleak and hopeless flick about a Staten Island-livin' Viet-vet. It's full of cheaply recorded misery, despondency, and dreariness, but for every truly effective grimy broken-down homeless man scene there's at least two others bookended with the worst bargain-basement Carpenter-aping synth score you can imagine. Sure it was the early-mid-80s, but that stuff was inexcusable, inappropriate, and just plain bad. Really, how am I s'posed to be repulsed over seeing a gutter-bound junkie pour heroin into his bleeding abscess when ten seconds later I'm listening to some struttin' Moog vibrato?

Combat Shock is the type of flick that actually deserves its Kaufman-awarded "Troma Classic" status and we're darn certain that had Buddy G gone onto other big-time pictures you'd hear about this one soooo much more. Dude, the last scene is a guy shooting both his pregnant wife and crying mutant infant son (the Lynch has to be gettin' a cut)! Then he drinks down last year's chunky milk and pastes his gray matter on the filthy kitchen wall!

Classic cinema.

Last House on the Left

I've got this article that calls this Wes Craven-Sean Cunningham picture one of the most disturbing of all time. All time, people! Right up there with the Nekromantik. Sure, it's a sleazy one. One full of some implied rape scenes, a don't matter just don't bite it sequence gone wrong, and a chainsaw-slicing handgun suicide finale. But what we liked most of all about this was that you could totally write your entire cinema studies dissertation on shit like this! We're certain lots of folks already have. Welcome to the bleak end of the hippie era! Hello, Cambodian invasion. Hello, Watergate. Goodbye, unrealistic and naive ideals. And take those goddamn beads with you. The world belongs to the PTS-riddled degenerates now, fuckers. You've been warned.


This is the kind of flick Zombie wanted Devil's Rejects to be: sixty uncomprimising minutes of Manson family psychopaths humiliating nice girls who were just out for some harmless sex, drugs, and rock and roll followed by twenty vengeful minutes of a middle-aged mom and dad going ape-shit crazy on your mothertrucking ass. So great. Even Fat Ebert loves it!

Also features Martin Kove! And a ridiculously awesome Lightfoot-folky score!

Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood

The rumor is that Charlie "don't call me Estevez" Sheen nabbed a copy of this way back in '85 and then narced to the Feds thinking it was an actual snuff movie. Now that's a story that's waaaay too good to be true. Come on, dude, a snuff movie? You honestly think you could get your hands on pure cinematic death? Of course you couldn't! And if you could it sure wouldn't look like this. Sure, this whole thing looks like every shitty Korean program on your UHF dial, but we're saying that a real deal snuff flick would have one static camera and maybe some POV. It sure as hell wouldn't have close-ups of syringes pricking latex skin and it surer as hell wouldn't cut between limb severing and the severer's maniacal grins. Jesus. And it'd be at least a fifth-generation VHS dub by the time you saw it anyway. Fuck you, Sheenie. Get a clue.

Flower of Flesh and Blood is only worth if for you Rick Baker Jrs to ooh and ahh about. So much grossness and so many impressive effects! Here at the Highland Cinema we especially enjoyed that scene where the dude evicerates a bound, gagged, and unconscious lady and yanks out her intestines right as she spits up blood! Great, right? You'll probably walk away remembering other choice scenes like the eyeball spoon scoop, the severed head smooch, and the bloody fishtank of floating hands and forearms. Doesn't this sound even better? Everything you wanted to see in one easy-to-find flick! And no pesky subtitles or bad dubbing to get in the way. Have your J-pop friends translate and double your viewing pleasure.

The World According to Sesame Street

Jeepers, how much weepy nostalgia does the S-deuce conjure up? Too much, we say! Don't know what it is, but whenever the Cinema sees some foam rubber puppets acting and singing we get some teary smiles a-goin'. Must be something inherent about those ping-pong eyeballs and bargain-basement carpets 'cause it can't all be sadness over our deceased childhood. We darn near cried right there in elementary school when Big Jimmy bit the dust and that's no lie.


This Sesame Street flick isn't about our 'Pets experience at all. It's really just a ninety minute commercial for the international wing of Henson Enterprises and how great they are for their respect and compassion for all them distinct sub-cults within each of them different worldly cultures. Noble, indeed. But we're too cynical for it all. More puppets! Less neo-lib, post-post doctoral-Age of Aquarius jibber-jabber!