Not so long ago, a couple of months in fact, I bought Schlock -sorry- Shock-o-rama, a 4-disc set of Piper's movies on the Independent Cinema label and enjoyed them so much, I ordered these four, three of which predated his IC work. Piper even sent me a comment. Okay it was only two lines and one was a quote from me, but it's still flattering that he even noticed a lowly blogger like me and he's obviously got a good sense of humour.
But Brett, if you're reading this, stop now as none of these are as good as your IC stuff.
Warning: spoilers.
Arachnia was the best of the four and ten minutes in I remembered that I'd seen if before some years ago and probably on the Sci-Fi channel. That I remembered it all was a good sign as I've got a crap memory and have bought the same DVD on more than one occasion in the past. It stars Rob Monkiewicz whose limited but good-humoured leading man charms are beginning to grow on me. There's some nudity and a lesbian scene with two bimbos (it's the same scene). There's the no-nonsense leading woman, the smart crusty local, and monsters -giant prehistoric spiders in this case. And some effective stop-motion. All the usual Piper ingredients in other words. The gore is minimal -and I'm not counting a stop-motion puppet getting dismembered as gory- but there's more than enough going on to keep the viewer happy. Okay, this one is as good as his IC stuff.
Drainiac and Psyclops are the sort of horror movies that begin fading from your memory moments after you've put the disc back in the case. It's only weeks since I've watched them and I can hardly remember a thing about them. They weren't awful but to call them barely adequate entertainment is to damn them with extremely faint praise.
Muckman, however, is memorable but for all the wrong reasons because it's so very annoying. To be fair, I don't blame Piper for this. While I don't know the details, I can make some assumptions for which, if they're completely wrong, I apologise. Like all of us, Piper gotta work to eat and in this case it meant taking an offer from the Polonia Bros who wanted parts in the film (overacting terribly as two idiot locals) and one to co-write the script.In words, just because it's crap doesn't make it Piper's fault. You can only work with the tools you're given.
The plot, basically, is a documentary director who films 'monsters' is exposed as a hoaxer but convinces his producers to give him one more chance to find a real monster which he is convinced exists. But really he's just planning another hoax with the help of three locals and his woman in front of the camera. The two male, two female crew are in the dark. Of course the monster turns out to be real and there's also a giant monster to boot as well as little squiggly things (its babies). And everyone gets what's coming to them.
Anju McIntyre stars as the lead bitch. Anju is also known as AJ Khan one of the stars of Seduction Cinema's lesbian soft-core porn movies. Like fellow actress Misty Mundae/Erin Brown, Khan is presumably trying to go straight (sorry about that). Lots of luck.
On the DVD cover are certain phrases (see above). The beautiful bikini babes brawl for an extremely out of character reason, especially as they seemed to be friends. Could it be a feeble excuse to have beautiful bikini babes brawling? Surely not. The unspeakable violence isn't unspeakable -it's barely violence and the gore is faked within the context of the film so it's not 'real' gore and looks it anyway. The terrifying monsters aren't exactly terrifying, though they aren't bad despite one being the obvious man in a suit (but then I'm a Godzilla fan), and the other stop motion animation (of which, in the unlikely event you hadn't guessed, I'm also a fan). Also: no-one dies and no-one gets their tits out, not even AJ/Anju. Being a Piper movie, it has its moments but it's still a pile of crap.
Never mind, I'll still be keeping an eye open for whatever he does next.
Here's a few stills.
Muckman -the idiots abroad
Drainiac
I'll let you guess which one these two are from.
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