It was a chilly night in Los Angeles, California and I was sitting in a cemetery preparing to watch a horror movie that nobody had seen before. That is right, I said a cemetery. The Hollywood Forever Cemetery to be exact, and tonight’s guests were Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Adam Rifkin and Tim Sullivan.
For those that do not know about this cemetery, the greats like Bela Lugosi, Mel Blanc and Johnny Ramone all rest here, and during the summers, you too can rest here at night, with a film and a drink.
*Editor's Note: This review contains some plot spoilers.* Sitting in my lawn chair, I was a few feet away as Adam Green came up to the microphone and told everyone how amazed he was that this film was even made. Also, that he was expecting to be arrested by the end of the night due to all of the fluids and nudity that would splash across the screen. Informing everyone to be loud and drink heavily, he bowed out and the other three directors came up and told the crowd how much they appreciated all of us for coming.
With the directors now in their seats (some in the lawn with us, others in special seats to the left with the actors) the movie began. The movie starts off with a guy in the cemetery trying to get a last piece of his deceased wife. However, when he tries to make the move on her, she comes back to life and promptly bites his genitalia off and that begins the Zom-B-Movie roller coaster, or main segment of this film.
This segment takes place in the Cecil B. Kaufman Drive-In (named after Lloyd Kaufman of Troma) being shut down for business and this being it’s final night. Ed Ackerman from Hatchet 2 plays the ticket taker and is absolutely hilarious in the two short sequences he has in this film. Slowly we learn about some of the characters. Like the father who brings his newborn child to the splatterfest movies with his wife, the typical jerk guy who brings his hot blonde girlfriend to the final screening to make sure Mr. Kaufman doesn’t try anything funny seeing as how he has bought the land and will be bulldozing it promptly in the morning. Finally, the semi-main characters of the Zom-B-Movie show up and they are: Tobe, Mayna and Miller. With the main characters in place, the first movie begins and it is a fluid splatter of a good time.
Wadzilla, directed by and starring Adam Rifkin, looks and feels like a cheesy 1950’s monster movie and is about an individual who goes to see a sperm doctor and finds out that he only has an extremely low sperm count. How low do you ask? He has one living sperm and even that is barely moving. Seeing this, the doctor (Ray Wise) decides to give him a new medication that is not government approved and should help with his problem. After taking the medicine anytime he gets turned on, he suffers a great deal of pain in his testicles, which is hilarious to watch. We come to find out that the drugs are radioactive and are causing the single sperm to grow at a rapid rate. This particular segment of the movie is hilarious and extremely gross. If you are squeamish with bodily fluids, mostly sperm and sex jokes, this probably wouldn’t be for you. I personally thought this was hilarious seeing as how it doesn’t take itself seriously and looks so horrible. It was my second favorite short of this film.
With Wadzilla ending (or is it?) They go back to the drive in theater where Miller is going to go get some snacks before the next movie starts. He primarily goes here to hit on the counter girl who is talking like a 1950’s girl from Grease. During this segment the individual who is turning into a zombie decides to put butter on his severed genital area and in turn begins to infect anyone that gets popcorn with butter on it. More on that later!
The second film titled I Was A Teenage Werebear was directed by Tim Sullivan and is honestly my least favorite of the shorts. This is about a kid in high school who is questioning his sexuality and turns to the “wrong group” to figure out what he wants. When I heard “WereBear” I assumed the kid would turn into a teddy bear werewolf of some sort, but I was wrong. The high school kid actually turns into a Werebear after being bit in the butt by one the leader of the "wrong group. For those that do not know, a bear is a term for someone in the gay community and in the case of this movie, is hairy and wears leather pants. That is not the problem with the movie, however, because that could have been hilarious if the jokes were approached the right way, but they weren’t. The jokes in the short seem to repeat themselves, so by the time the ending came around, I had lost interest in the storyline because it was too repetitive and the jokes just began to fall flat. This short did get a huge crowd reaction, but I am not sure if that was for the film, or if that was because a lot of the cast members and their friends were in the audience. I would suggest giving this a view though so you can make your own judgment on it. I may not have enjoyed it, but you might.
Once this film is over we get to Adam Green’s Diary of Anne Frankenstein. Honestly, this short was by far my favorite due to the wrong humor and constant jokes. Myself along with most of the audience, were laughing all the way through it as Joel David Moore (Hatchet, Avatar) portrayed Hitler. We are introduced to the film as Anne and her family is hiding out in the attic as Anne reads the diary of Frankenstein. Here we find out that her name was originally Frankenstein but to hide the shame, they shortened it to Frank. Throughout this short there are plenty of terrible jokes, gags and Joel as Hitler making up random phrases that sound German. Kane Hodder (Hatchet 1 and 2) plays Meshugannah aka Hitler’s Frankenstein monster. Kane portrays this character perfectly and leads to some great laughs with the gore gags.
With this film ending we go back to the drive-in where we see the audience has turned into horny flesh eating zombies. We get to see a wide variety of individuals ripping corpses apart then ravaging them sexually in a hilarious way. Mr. Cecil Kaufman (Richard Riehle) tries to defend his drive-in theater as he spouts off classic movie lines ranging from Robocop to Die Hard. The film ends with two of our main characters about to have sex and make him a man before he dies, as the zombies circle around the car thrusting into anything they can get their genitalia into.
Besides I was a Teenage Werebear, I loved this film. It is a classic B-Movie but at it’s finest. Watching the film you can tell the actors, directors and everyone that is involved is having a great time with it. They are not taking themselves seriously and it shows with some outrageous scenes that I do not want to spoil for you good reader. So when Chillerama shows up in your town (it is on tour) make sure to go see it. It is a movie that will make you laugh, make you scream and make you throw up in your mouth a little bit with some of the sick body fluid sequences, but in the end, it will leave you satisfied and with a smile on your face.
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