Woof, not only do today’s movies have nothing to do with each other, aside from being not great films, but today’s experience almost made me drop the whole idea of doing Halloween Scene Double Features for the rest of the month. The closer we get to Halloween the more I want to watch movies that I actually like like Halloween or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I’ve already reviewed those (holy crap, I just realized I haven’t reviewed the original TCM or Jaws so get ready for that). I’ve come up with a few ideas, though, that should be pretty fun. Anyway, let’s get along with the reviews. I don’t expect these to be very long.

Goth Kill actually surprised me. I expected to hate it thanks to what looked like pretty low production value. Instead I found some surprisingly fun elements in this tale of a man named Nick Dread who makes a deal with the devil to grant him long life in exchange for him collecting  a bunch of souls for the devil. Played by a guy named Flambeaux, Dread is actually a delightful and surprisingly layered character to watch, considering he was a priest during the crusades, called the church on murdering women to get their money and was burned for it.

Most of the action takes place at a Goth club that a pair of friends go to. The douchey guy who runs the club accidentally does a real spell when he’s really just trying to make it look good and causes Dread to come back from hell (after being killed in prison as part of his master plan) into the body of one of the girls. After that we’ve got lots of cuts between Dread as a man and as a woman with no real rhyme or reason. There’s some pretty shitty action scenes with laughable choreography, but I did appreciate that every single person in the club gets murdered (I think we’re told they’re not good people, so you don’t have to feel too bad. Also, if you feel bad after watching a movie called Goth Kill, don’t watch movies like Goth Kill).

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a GOOD movie. There were good elements and I was surprised at how much story the filmmakers got into the film considering what looked like a pretty low budget, but it’s also plagued with bad, lazy actors and a lot of Goth stereotypes that feel old by now. The combination of a story I haven’t seen a million times and at least one standout performance lead me to like this movie much more than I thought I would and keep it from landing in the Bad category. That’s reserved for the next movie.

I wanted to punch something about 10 minutes into Subspecies, but considering I had already turned off another crappy horror movie and I wanted to get today’s post out of the way, I powered through it. The reason I even added this flick to my Netflix Instant was because Phantasm‘s Angus Scrimm was supposed to be in it. Guess how long he was in the damn movie? Five, maybe ten minutes. Trickery!

So, the plot of this movie is basically Dracula or any other number of vampire movies. You’ve got girls from another land going to Europe where they get wrapped up in some centuries-old vampire nonsense. Blah blah blah. The only interesting things about this movie are the weird little demon guys you can see in the poster that were performed by puppets against a screen and the fact that the bad vampire’s brother fell for the main girl. Aside from those very few elements, the rest of this movie is just tired and boring. Oh, there was a pulsing finger that was kind of cool, but that was during the Scrimm stuff, so it was already cool. Don’t bother with this movie, I’m not even going to bother with the trailer. Boo, hopefully tomorrow will be better.