SHOCKTOBER SPECIAL: BEST WORST MOVIES
In honour of Halloween, we're taking a special "Shocktober" break from the Time-Out 100 Best Horror films, to focus on some of the worst...
When a liquor store owner finds a crate of an unknown drink, Viper, in a hidden compartment in his cellar, he decides to sell it at $1 a bottle to the local homeless population.
One problem... Anyone who drinks the Viper, melts into neon coloured slime.
2 weeks ago, when I reviewed
Night of the Lepus, I mentioned the problem with movies specifically made for the "so bad it's good" market (i.e. They just end up bad). This is exactly the type of movie I was talking about.
It has some nice set pieces, the hobo melting into the toilet for one, but it lacks any story elements to bring it together.
When the first bum starts to liquefy, I thought this was going to turn into a monster movie, with the viper creating monsters... But nope, he just melts.
The whole film is just a collection of moments, bum buys drink, bum either drinks drink, has drink stolen by another bum, or tricks another bum into drinking it, bum melts, lather, rince, replete.
In top of that, the acting is atrocious across the bird; Stir in genital mutilation, necrophillia, sexual assault, and attempted rape (all played for laughs) and the whole thing is just a mess.
There's no attempt to explain where the viper came from, why it melts people... Nothing.
The closest thing this movie has to a plot, is some in-fighting amongst the homeless, who live in a scrap-yard, and have a "king" of sorts that they all live in fear of - a crazy nam-vet with a knife carved from a human thigh-bone.
That said, the set pieces were cool enough that is actually like to see this one re-made; with a back story, and some kind of actual plot, a body-horror movie about booze that reduces people into a day-glo puddle could be a fun movie.
As it stands though, I'd give this one a wide birth.
