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Dustin Mills
Independent maker of pocket-change gory horror movies that managed to make a name for himself in underground circles with some slightly unusual elements and a prolific pace. A unique specialty is the use of puppets or animations in some of his movies. One of his strengths is that he doesn't repeat himself, but tries a variety of horror styles and ideas. He also gets pretty good performances out of his amateur actors and actresses. No doubt the constant nudity also made his movies popular, and he often features female killers. But his amateur movies are still immature, simplistic and lack character, depth or interesting ideas. Earlier movies were more about cheesy horror fun with some bad home-made effects, later movies got nastier. Reviewed until 2016. Gory horror muppet movies are still quite rare, so there is still room for entertaining movies in this genre. Unfortunately, this one is more like a juvenile campy horror movie with muppets rather than a demented, depraved and splattery movie in the likes of Meet the Feebles or even Team America. The plot involves a group of punks and geeks staying at a 'haunted' mansion occupied by a mad scientist. Sure, it has a mad Nazi scientist, farting bunnies, evil penguins, and a hungry monster, but the humor is mostly juvenile horny and fart jokes. It has over-the-top muppet splatter, but this is mostly limited to one scene of carnage and it isn't creative like Peter Jackson's work. In short, a bad movie, but mildly amusing only because of the novelty. The plot is obviously copied directly from 'The Fly', but the monster and gore-concept is reminiscent of 'The Incredible Melting Man'. A scientist thinks he found a cure for cancer, but the results are not quite what he expects, much to the horror of his female friend. As he deterioriates into a gooey, mutated and cruel monster, the bodies pile up in ultra-gruesome fashion, and his feelings mutate along with his body. Mills gets another pair of quite-good performances from his amateur cast for this pretty effective, gruesome, but derivative, low-budget horror film. A horror-comedy satire on extreme racism by way of puppets. 'Puppets' have become accepted in society so much so that even pornographic actresses are accepting them, and women are marrying them out in the open. Enter one man who will stop at nothing to end this depraved deterioration in society. He launches a brutal campaign of murder and torture and posts his ideas on the internet, drawing fangirls. Features graphic and gruesomely gory dismemberment, disemboweling, an autopsy, and genital mutilation, as well as extreme violence against small kids. Some (human) pointless sex scenes go on for far too long, but otherwise this is a unique, moderately amusing, albeit very simplistic, splatter satire. There's also an amusing twist ending. Early home-made movie by Mills is almost one of those really terrible but fun horror movies that don't take themselves seriously, but not quite. It's just really sloppily made and it tries to do too much without achieving much of it, with uncharacteristically bad acting to boot. The zombie outbreak, as the title implies, is by military-grade 'bath salts developed into a weapon, then sold by drug dealers. Problem is, drug addicts that take the drug, rip people's faces off, then must have more of it when it wears out (temporary zombies!). Which doesn't make sense for the drug dealers since it's bad for business. Enter an ex-military fighting man working for the DEA who launches one-man war against the new drug. The gore is a mix of bad CGI with really poor home-made splatter (red strings and rubber). Features some zombie face-ripping moshing, a blowjob gone bad, nudity, lots of face-ripping and chewing, an animated sequence, and an over-the-top bloody fight turned into a cartoon. Another one of those clueless modern movies that wants to be edgy and extreme by piling on the gruesome, but is never even believable enough to be disturbing. It's a plotless 50 minutes of footage of an interview with a female 'serial killer', spliced with footage of her carving up one of her live victims, slowly. Her face is never shown (as if that makes her more believable and scary) the footage is heavily altered with fake film distortion effects (as if that makes it more realistic and edgy), yet, stupidly, the footage of her victim is left digitally clean. The interviewer keeps making statements about what a strange case she is (yawn), she answers in serial-killer cliches about a being (a puppet) that made her do it, and in between statements, we get to see her take apart some guy with the use of a tool-belt, including very graphic eye-gouging, disemboweling, face slicing and more. And some pornographic necrophilia is thrown in for good measure for no good reason. This is the kind of thing that gives extreme cinema a bad name. It takes much more than special effects to make a disturbing movie. Another female serial killer and abuser of women, but this isn't as extreme as Mills previous Her Name Was Torment. In fact is is very much like a Japanese Pinku, featuring a photographer who gets paid to photograph snuff and various abusive fetishes. The gore quota is low, but the abuse and exploitation fills the whole movie with constant nudity and sleaze. In the middle of the movie, the photographer shares herself in a bizarrely atmospheric masturbatory fugue and dream-sequence, then it's back to business. Basically a slightly more extreme, but uninteresting amateur-made Pinku. Misogyny'r'us. This movie alternates between nude girls, and girls being tortured and killed in sadistic ways, because, evidently, that is all you need to make a movie nowadays. The masked killer hunts down some girls that seem to be expecting trouble, except they don't do anything to prepare for it, but wait for him then try to beat him in some badly filmed fight scenes that try to enhance the girlie fight. Once he gets them, there is sadistic torture with knives, or ripping a face apart with brass knuckles. The only point of interest is an insane girl that likes to urinate in public, stink herself up, and hang out in the woods. The back-story between the killer and the girls is never revealed until the twist ending, which makes you wish it had stuck with the mystery, and which turns the whole movie into nonsensical garbage with gratuitous sadism. |
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