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Charles E. Cullen
Started as a local Virginia cult entertainment phenomenon, but the circle of his uniquely strange and stoned forms of entertainment is slowly growing. Cullen is an ex-chicken farmer that mixes slow-paced country humor with rural drug-culture and a love for cult, bizarre, trash and horror b-movies. Like a freaky country carnival, he expresses this via many forms of entertainment, including movies, weird country music, puppet shows, home-made TV shows, and so on. The resulting movies are slow-paced and stoned b-movies, or trash and cult material for drug-addicts and bums, with an indescribable mind-melting effect. Early movies are like hillbilly versions of John Waters with inoffensive trash and gore, and later movies just have fun with b-movie cheese, puppets and stoned humor. The movies are unmistakably bad and he knows this, but the uniquely bizarre, unapologetic and unpretentious cheap approach may get to you in a soporific haze of pot and chemicals. Also uses puppets as characters in his movies, some animation and occasional smatterings of gore, although later movies replaced the home-made gore with really terrible CGI effects, and the cheapest monster and ray-gun computer effects you're ever likely to see. Basically an auteur that makes very bad movies on purpose. Reviewed until 2016. (Homepage 1, Homepage 2) I don't know why I'm not dismissing this as more painfully bad Cullen rubbish and a complete waste of time. It's Cullen padded out to three hours for crying out loud, and that should be enough to make sane people tear out their hair at the thought. This one is about gay bikers, voodoo magic, a bigoted town, a crippled DJ, weird country music, a walking bunny skeleton, random violence, and pot. You will want to shoot yourself while 'gay bikers' stare at each other for minutes on end, but you'll be too braindead to pick up the gun. And then there's the gay sex scene which will make your head explode: It involves abuse with a 3-foot prosthetic, a masked gimp-biker playing a theremin, a flying insect puppet, psychedelic colors, zebra pants, and the graphic swallowing of a balloon. Speaking of exploding heads, there's one of those too. And a voodoo roadside attraction involving a wheel of misfortune and shrinking of heads, and 15 minutes of watching a 'cripple' make his way down some stairs, and 15 minutes of gratuitous over-the-top violence against a cripple as he is killed several times, and a country song about being a homosexual and wanting to touch testicles, and so on. Painful & bizarre entertainment for stoned masochists. This is possibly some kind of masterpiece of spaced-out, really bad, zombie b-movie. A minister raises the dead with some really bad Spanish 'incantations' that get broadcasted over the radio, bringing the dead back to life. The dead include Roy Stone, a lovelorn country singer on a mission to get whiskey. The government and some scientists try to fight the dead with traps from a zombie-trap book and a ray gun, while Cullen wanders around eating random people, singing and asking for whiskey. There are a couple of random splatter scenes, puppets, comic book scenes, spaced out camera-work, and the cheapest ray gun effects you'll ever see. Country-zombie badness with the immortal dialogue: "You're going to eat me aren't you?", "I live on brains, Frank. You ain't got any." Now this is the kind of material almost worthy of cult status. Cullen transcends his usual limp, terrible and slow-moving camp to almost meditative, terrible slow-moving camp. A crotchety old man comes to town to entertain and scare the children, leaving behind a killer puppet called Mr. Stitches. Stitches likes to insult or traumatize youngsters and children before he gorily kills them, and the local brain-dead law enforcers have to recruit a strange girl to help them fight the puppet in a Western-style showdown. Features terrible acting, CGI effects that look like they came off a Nintendo game, and an ultimately bizarre scene where a kid fights off CGI vampire bats with kung-fu brought on by a didactic, evil puppet. Cullen makes a splatter movie about witches that concoct a brew to turn the bums into zombies. Most of the movie consists of vignettes as the bums drink and defecate, turn into zombies and gorily tear apart tree-hugging girls, the local law enforcement folk, a mother and her baby, etc. while the mayor tries to avoid his cross-dressing wife and clean up the town, the local puppet proposes a venom-cure and the narrator gets high. So lame and campy that it's kinda funny, with a centerpiece involving a bat attacking a baby before bum-zombies tear the baby apart. For gorehounds. A cartoonish trashy movie about an ex-farmer who moves to the city to take home-made heavy drugs and become a superhero, violently killing all criminals in the city for the mayor. When he comes up against Light-Bulb, Bucko the Clown (who kills scores of children at a birthday party), and the Boogieman (who emerges from closets and slices up little kids), things get out of hand. Although it features chainsaws and lots of head explosions this is more of a dumb comedy than a campy gory movie, with the hero having conversations with puppets, practicing lame kung-fu, participating in courtroom antics and saving ladies from muggers then stealing their money from them. Cullen's most popular movie. One of Cullen's early efforts is a simple affair featuring a man in a mask running around killing everyone in sight in gory ways while the local law recruits several people to hunt him down. The film is in gritty black & white and includes a mystical witch-doctor, and a bounty hunter as poser tough-guy hunters. Otherwise, this is just an endless sequence of limp dialogue and killings with extremely cheap effects, featuring Cullen's favorites of chainsaw killings, exploding heads, messy hit-and-runs, and hammering a baby. The sequel is even more limp, featuring endlessly long scenes of 'Vietnam buddies' getting loaded and reminiscing of their Vietnam days when they used to get loaded, while the Boogieman rises from the dead and runs around disemboweling people and babies. Another Cullen backyard, spaced-out, pocket-change, 'special effects' extravaganza. Unlike the just plain silly monster-movie Ray the Rooster though, this one goes for spaced-out weirdness and camp comedy. There's flying decapitated heads vomiting goo all over children turning them into live skeletons, flying fish creatures and skeletons, a government official barking orders into a microphone from somebody's basement, a conspiracy freak in his own TV show showing pictures of UFOs providing such silly speeches that he can't stop laughing, and then there's Cullen as an insanely jealous redneck boyfriend of a girl with hairy legs who is inspired to tap dance, and rob a government kid from his ray gun by strapping a bomb to his head. It's too spaced out to come together into some kind of plot or cult movie though, and you'll be not too happy to know that there's a sex scene. Cullen's take on the afterlife is a tedious, tedious drugged-out outing where Cullen probably took some drugs and just slapped together an hour's worth of home-made computer effects with 20-year old software. After a very spaced-out diner scene, a hot-rod racer is hounded by the evil sheriff into an accident, and he finds himself in the Judgment House, a place between heaven and hell ruled over by Cullen himself who sends the superimposed 'running' man into 'rooms' with themes of 'cigarettes', 'marijuana', 'rock-n-roll' and 'physical pleasures'. Cullen throws together strange (think chicken-farmer-strange, not Lynch-strange) superimpositions and effects, including flying Python-esque decapitated heads, animated cardboard vampires, a stop-motion scene of a man and his animated pliers, flying crashing cars driven by chickens, kids climbing cliffs or dancing, people being tortured in hell, endlessly droning preaching by an old man (heaven?) in some stock footage, and other oddities. It's as painful as it sounds. Despite the name, this doesn't have much to do with the kult movie about vicious alien klowns. Instead, this is another typical brainless Kullen outing about drug-addict rodeo klowns and a big chicken that get some krack from some puppets and go on a killing spree. They murder a little girl, chop up some boy's father, and take a bite out of a hamster, while being chased by a sheriff (Kullen) and getting entangled with a local kult. A slight touch of lame gore, the violent bits often shown as trippy animations, lots of puppets, and overall, very slow moving. Sanchez is a 19th century outlaw about to be hanged, who travels through time to the modern world after eating a tequila worm. He and his gang form a band, attempt to make it big in Nashville with their music, leaving behind a wake of dead bodies on their road trip while law-enforcers from both time periods pursue. A very slow-moving and limp movie that makes no sense, lacking even campy laughs (unless you count the rocket launcher made out of a water pipe), with not even a minimal attempt to portray or explore a man from the past. The focus is on random violence, a killing spree, and weak but ample gore, with very cheap exploding heads, chainsaw splatter, and geysers of blood, and the occasional annoying country music. Cullen takes on the evil Santa sub-genre. He doesn't do much with it though. There's a sequence of kill scenes, then a scene with an overly happy family that buys huge darts for Christmas that feels like 20 seconds padded out to 20 minutes. The mother also gets to perform a gratuitous vomiting scene that has no purpose. Otherwise, Santa kills children, retards, drunks, angry bartenders, and cripples with various weapons in extremely cheap gory ways while a pouncing, giggling, freaky elf giggles to no end. The end. |
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