Tag Archives: horror movie
Weird Movie Recommendation: Residue (2017)
Welcome back, gang, to my weird movie recommendation series! I love doing these and they tend to be among my most viewed articles on the entire site. I’m stoked to share my weird finds with you guys because I know you love screwed up obscure flicks as much as I do.
So Residue. I saw this weird ass flick floating around on Netflix and it caught my eye because the description tells of a cursed book which damns all who read it. Also the thumbnail pic had a bitchin’ looking monster. A prosthetic monster, mind you. Not CGI.
My love of demonic occult books and practical monster effects had me clicking play faster than Charles Band can make a Puppet Master sequel! I planned to give it the ole 10 minute try before sending it off into bullshit boring waste of time obscurity when the thing just blasted right off with the kind of old-school Stewart Gordon Lovecraftian flavor that I thought had been forgotten in the early 1990s.
Right away we meet a crazy scientist dissecting some little practical effect monster thingy when some weirdo busts through the door demanding answers and then gets eaten by a tentacle monster! Holy shit! I’m hooked! Tell me more! Go on!
What follows is a blustering hour and a half of creepy, paranoid delusional whackiness that is equal parts crime noir, Lovecraftian nightmare and time travel paradox all rolled into a compact, low budget flick with more heart and gore-boners than it has any right to possess.
Throw in cameos by cult character actors Matt Frewer AKA Trashcan man AKA Max Fucking Headroom and William B. Davis, he of the Cigarette Smoking Man X-files fame and the breathtakingly beautiful young actress Taylor Hickson to anchor leading man James Claton’s hard boiled P.I. character Luke Harding and you’ve actually got yourself a helluva cast for an obscure little horror flick.
In all honesty it’s hard to follow what the hell is going on with this flick for about the first 30 minutes. It takes a while to fall into its delusional groove. But if you give it time, the movie pays off every one of its seemingly nonsensical story-lines, all replete with horrific violence, monsters and plenty of gooey, drippy gore!
Did I mention the practical effects? Yeah, well, I can’t stress enough how important practical gore and monsters are in modern horror. Prosthetic appliances have weight, substance and can be lit properly, allowing a flick to not only stand the test of time, but often times to live in ambiguity as to its release date. RESIDUE could have been shot in 1994 as easily as 2017 because of the filmmakers’ decision to shoot practical.
In the end, RESIDUE is not only a great love-letter to monster movies of a bygone era, it also stands firmly on its own two gore-soaked feet as a Lovecraftian monster movie with great writing, great acting, and great effects. All parts of modern horror film making that are often forgotten in the era of micro-budget, straight-to-streaming video dreck that often clogs up our “recommended” lists on our favorite streaming services.
I give RESIDUE a solid 5 out of 5 occult text Strangeheads for scoring every point that matters on the low budget horror movie scale. I cannot recommend this movie enough to fans of the Gordon/Yuzna Lovecraftain film era. You can do much much worse than adding this little weirdo gem to your to-watch list on Netflix. Tell em Strange sent ya!
Kevin Strange’s Weird Movie Recommendation: Thankskilling 3
Reply
The Thankskilling series is very much like the Gingerdead Man series. The first film in the franchise is a super low budget, barely passable little horror movie with indie heart and determination. And both series fly right off the rails with their sequels. Using the source material as nothing more than a jumping off point to tell off-the-wall, barely-connected-to-the-original stories with much higher budgets and ambition.
Where Thankskilling 3 (there is no part 2, that’s part of the joke) sets itself apart from the Gingerdead Man series is just how FAR off base the sequel goes. Like into outer space far. Like the opening of the movie is literally set in space with a female astronaut floating around with her tits out. Yep. With her tits out. It’s THAT kind of movie.
And I fucking love it.
Thankskilling 3 is like an episode of Sesame Street on acid. Like John Waters or Lloyd Kaufman showed up on set one day and took over the camera. Or Peter Jackson decided he needed to finally make a spiritual sequel to Meet The Feebles.
And I must reiterate this. If You saw the original Thankskilling and thought it was just amateur trash, you STILL have to give this crazy fucking movie a chance because it is nothing and I mean NOTHING like the original.
For example, Turkie the killer turkey is the only puppet in the first film. In THIS film, ALL the characters are puppets or people in giant monster costumes. Only one human character appears in this film. Everything else is a puppet.
Thankskilling 3 is a puppet movie.
What’s it about? It’s fucking about how Turkie is hunting down the last known copy of Thankskilling 2, a film so bad, teams of goons are sent out to burn any copy they find out in the wild. Turkie wants to use it to curse all mankind for killing Turkeys on Thanksgiving or something. It’s a fucking meta puppet movie with tits and gore. Who gives a fuck what it’s about?
Ok, fine. I’ll try to contain this batshit tornado of weird into a couple paragraph synopsis. *Deep breath* Here goes!
So some bizarre alien puppet named Yomi who has literally lost her mind and takes off in search for it shows up for some reason. Then Turkie murders his wife and kid (he’s apparently married now,) only to put his kid’s soul into that last DVD copy of Thankskilling 2. Then a whole bunch of other shit happens including our introduction to the only human character in this whole god forsaken weird mess. He’s a dude named Uncle Donny, the inventor of the Pluckmaster 3000 (a giant Rube Goldberg contraption that you just KNOW will play a huge role in the climax), and his hand puppet rapping grandmother Flowis.
Flowis the rapping grandma puppet. Moving on.
Then there’s some big robot and a talking worm with a mustache named Rhonda. I’ve seen this movie like three times and I still don’t have ANY fucking idea why they’re in it. Donny runs a theme park called Thanksgivingland. Everyone ends up in Turkey Hell for a little bit.
Look, story goes out the window rather quickly once puppet grandma fucking shows up and starts dropping bars.
What we get is one of the absolute weirdest movies I’ve ever seen in my life. There are scenes of dialogue intercut with judicious use of dubstep music and sound FX over some fantastic looking puppet action and violence.
I’m telling you, this flick actually has a budget and 100% of it was used to create awesome puppet creatures and weird landscapes with a positively psychotic meta storyline. If you’re a puppet movie fetishist, or you’re the kind of person who enjoys torturing themselves with horrifically bad cinema on Friday nights, this flick is for you.
Five Strangeheads out of Five for sheer imagination and poor taste.