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Todd Sheets
A horror-movie and heavy metal fan who churns out very gory home-made b-movies for fellow fans. Hard-working, prolific, writes his own music and seems to have fun with what he does but most of the time, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have what it takes to make a competent, memorable or original horror movie. Still, if you can appreciate the work and passion that go into his movies you may derive some enjoyment from them. Several of his movies are extremely rare or unreleased. Reviewed until 2016. It's the same old group-of-different-kinds-of-people-hired-to-sleep-in-a-haunted-house plot-line but Sheets pulls out all the stops this time, with a confusing supernatural denouement concerning demons and ghosts, and a couple of nasty splatter scenes, one inspired by Fulci's intestine vomiting and the other seemingly by Schnaas' genital splatter porn. But basically it's a group of annoying youngsters arguing with each other and whining while figuring out that the scares are real while being disemboweled by various tools and organs. A mildly entertaining c-movie. Sheets returns with an upgrade in just about everything: The cinematography and picture quality gets a huge upgrade, there's a bit more story and plot than usual, and the acting varies, ranging from quite good (especially the baddies) to amateurishly poor and everything in between. The old-school splatter is also delivered in bucket-loads. This is one of those plots where a variety of people find themselves in the same place at the same time while all hell breaks loose: There's a girl in trouble with some drug-dealers, some pissed off drug-dealers, a dentists and his patients, and a guy returning to his home town and old flame amidst much drama. Along comes a devil-worshipper and his vicious side-kick to bring about the end of the world by summoning a bunch of demons, their minions, and a naked queen demoness. Suddenly the basement is turned into a hellish torture carnival with bucket-loads of splatter, dismemberment, drilling and slicing galore. Not a classic or a great movie, but still quite entertaining old-school horror, and definitely Sheets's best by far. Todd Sheets and friends direct a horror-comedy anthology with a variety of approaches and sub-genres, most of them amateurish and weak with a couple of moderately entertaining entries saved by elements of comedy. The wrapper story is a limp and uninteresting one about a hot baby-sitter and a little girl stalked by a killer. The first short is the goriest and is basically a haunted house/Evil Dead copy-paste job that is only interested in really gory fights between the ghoulish dead and the horny living. Next is an exorcist parody horror-comedy that starts as really uninspired horror, and ends on a much lighter and amusing note. Then there's a pretty gory dark-comedy about an arrogant horn-dog and a blind date that goes really bad. It gets much too silly for the next one which is a Blaxploitation inter-dimensional zombie sci-fi bad-ass pimp parody, which is mostly dumb but delivers a little punchline at the end. A Shivers-esque hallucination-causing parasite attacks a lady who is hounded by jerks everywhere she goes, causing gory mayhem. There's a quickie Tales-of-the-Darkside-esque tale of splattery comeuppance on the road. And finally, a creepy & insane pedophile gets a surprise when he kidnaps a young girl from the park. A 'Demons' tribute (or ripoff) featuring more random teenagers, friends and people off the street trapped in a decrepit theatre with an old insane witch who raises demons. Lots of fights, intestines, metal music and sauces mixed with porridge fly as they try to kill the witch and their bloodthirsty friends who are after their bowels and hemoglobin. Inept and instantly forgettable. Mistakenly listed as a short film, this schizophrenic 90 minute bad movie by Sheets starts off as a boring home-made crime movie with loser drug-addicts being violently killed by an over-eager sheriff and his buddies before involving a drug-dealer. They all then find themselves in a backwoods horror movie complete with cannibal, giggling, cross-dressing hillbillies and a trashy dinner table scene, then it suddenly changes into a Satanic zombie movie. Sheets seems to have forgotten to light the scenes he is filming, and the acting is expectedly bad. There are a couple of poor over-the-top splatter scenes involving chainsaw and knife torture, the rest of the gore is either off-screen or drowned in darkness. Sheets attempts a more serious vampire horror movie with a bigger cast and location shooting, injecting it with slight elements of camp and advertisements for his heavy metal band, and the result is one of those Ed Wood bad movies that are entertaining in their terribleness. The police are confused by a series of killings where victims are drained of their blood, and an old lady, whose kid brother became the vampire leader as a child, tries to help. Vampire hookers and evil heavy-metal band members add to the entertainment. Terrible acting, a Salem's Lot ripoff scene, and the gore is so weak this time it's almost a conventional horror movie except for a couple of long scenes of vampire flesh ripping. A group of hair-metal teens unleash an evil being in their house which starts to kill them off in gruesome ways one by one. That's the whole movie. The kills start to feel like an amateurish Toolbox Murders as the killer applies one tool after another to different parts of their bodies, including a drill to the eye, a poker up the butt, and a scythe up the genitals. The disemboweling is gleefully over-the-top but I found myself so bored I was wondering whether they re-use the same bucket of guts for every person or maintain gory hygiene. I suppose he got bored too because the ending suddenly becomes a zombie movie. Haunted house movies are difficult enough to do right as it is, but using the more-is-more approach has never worked for ghost movies since they require subtlety to be spooky. Sheets is used to making splatter-fests and whole movies with people running around getting massacred, which may work for demons and zombies, but not here. There's a new security guard of a building with a hidden dark past, a seance gone wrong, possessions, vicious ghosts popping up everywhere that turn people into buckets of goo with their bare hands (huh?), a demon, massacres, etc etc. And of course, lots of people running around getting knocked off in gory ways one by one. There are a couple of cult horror actors here mixed with some amateurs, and the result is very disjointed indeed. This one is just a mess that doesn't know the meaning of the word 'haunting'. Possibly Sheets' worst movie. Sheets and friends film in a wax museum, pretending to be either a deranged Texas Chainsaw type of maniac relative, or a victim. What about the plot, you ask? There is none. The museum horror items on display serve as cheap movie props, the acting is painfully terrible featuring bored amateur teenagers trying to act deranged, and in between lengthy inbred/redneck arguments and discussions meant to be campy but ending up lame or beyond the microphone's reach, the victims are randomly tortured and killed in order to make use of buckets of chopped meat and butcher leftovers. The plentiful but amateur gore includes sawing into a pile of ground beef, pulling a tongue out of a man's mouth, and a bad broomstick impalement. Painfully terrible. A group of people and a caretaker gather in a haunted house that seems to be filled with every form of evil and the kitchen sink. There are ghosts, poltergeists, demons, a portal to another world, there is even an evil plant that covers a man in goo until he dies, and another ghost that performs some form of lap-dance of death on a man in a wheelchair. The eclectic, character-less humans get picked off one by one or get possessed, usually in gory fashion, some being disemboweled or covered in goo, another gets tortured by a demon dentist, while a pregnant girl gorily gets rid of her own fetus while under the influence of evil. A confusing mess with sparingly used cheap CGI effects, and poorly lit with bad acting as usual. Sheets only wrote and produced this one, but he may as well have directed it as well since it's the same old crap. There's a gang war, and one gang leader decides to take his revenge by first visiting the local voodoo shop. Before you know it, out pop vampires that behave suspiciously like zombies, and carnage ensues in an endless stream of inept fighting scenes, prostitute killings, and a cliched siege of the survivors, this time in a video store. There are lots of repetitive, cheap but splattery intestine jobs, as well as good ol' knife-twisting-while-blood-splashes effects, and gooey meltings, while the youngsters try to act and look tough. Somewhere in this mess of a low-budget movie is a decent horror apocalypse movie about demons and evil taking over the world. Demons have invaded, both killing and breeding with humans while making a gory sport out of them and disabling most of the population with a drug called Rapture. Some cops and their families are on the prowl. This movie has so many characters and half-baked horror elements, it starts feeling like a series of violent and horror vignettes, with scenes featuring a demon-maggot infestation of a guy's head, the birth of grown anti-christ child from a human used for breeding, angel vs. Satan, a live show of gory art-pieces performed on live humans, drug-addicts crawling with worms, and much more. Unfortunately it's all over the place, the acting is bad and suddenly veers into camp at the end. Another labor of love by Todd Sheets, this time tackling aliens with his usual approach of having a bunch of amateur actors run around for the whole movie being chased by or fighting creatures. The gore is minimal this time for Sheets, with only a handful of scenes involving mutating flesh, decapitation and whatnot. There's a DJ that hosts guests that are into alien abductions, mutating vicious aliens with a variety of powers, men in black, humans possessed by aliens, and lots and lots of home-made fights and stunts. It never rises above its home-made feel and its budget and acting limitations however, and it's not a good sign when the best actor is a child. This feels like a movie-fan worked really hard to reproduce cool scenes he saw in many other movies and TV shows (X-Files) together with his friends using a darkly-lit home-made camera and really cheap home-computer effects for the aliens (not the gore). There's hard work, but no escapism for the audience. Yet another nuclear-plant-gone-wrong-producing-zombies movie consisting of nothing but endless chases by weak zombies, 50 of which can't even get a grip on one person, and excessive, cheap gore, most of which is the obvious pig-guts-and-blood-strewn-over-the-skin kind (with one or two notable splatterific exceptions). Cheap, truly dismal acting, and no plot or comedy. An evil cult, escape from prison, home invasion, a siege of zombies, zombie chases, lots of gore, and an Antichrist scarecrow that can raise the dead are somehow all tied together in this energetic zombie b-movie that would be a moderately entertaining Fulci-esque flick if not for the dismal acting and dialog. So on the one hand, the over-the-top intestine splatter has improved and the entertainment factor has increased, but the acting is something out of a John Waters movie and the dialog is so bad it makes this hilarious in an Ed Wood way. Also includes unsuccessful Stanze-like editing tricks with slow-motion and black & white. A step back in the level of entertainment, and the gore is back to the same old ripping-guts-out-of-bodies-and-munching-on-them. This time the zombies come from the future and overrun a high school populated exclusively by very annoying teenagers who spend the whole movie arguing and shouting at each other over idiotic issues while running away from the undead. An earlier home-movie from Sheets has a raw feel to it that lends a good, gritty atmosphere to the gory rampage. The amateur actors seem to be improvising and the editing is very choppy but what kills this one is the incoherency. Dialog is drowned, gangs appear out of nowhere and fight each other while running away from zombies that appear out of nowhere, and dozens of forgettable characters keep popping in to contribute some random drama or action. Maybe Sheets put up a sign saying 'Zombie movie here', pointed the camera, and let anyone off the street do anything they want. Features a taboo-breaking scene where zombies rip apart a baby and eat it. |
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