Really Awful Movies

What in blue blazes? A streaking comet flashes across the sky and lands in the nearby woods, attracting a hick farmer, his dog Pooh-Bear and the attention of aging college students at Make Out Point, known here as Top of the World.

Amorous co-eds Mike and Deb, who’d been downing champagne in an inflatable dinghy in the backseat, decide to go off and investigate and ask the inevitable question, “what’s a circus tent doing way out here?”

Killer Kowns from Outer Space; a great title that delivers everything it promises.

Anyway, the big-top is not some kind of “new wave European fantastique” as Mike puts it. Nor is it Cirque Du Soleil even if it came from our solar system or beyond.

They investigate inside and meander about this M.C. Escher-esque Barnum and Bailey tent, stumbling upon poor Joe Lombardo, who’s dead and spun into a cotton candy cocoon of sugary death.
(Editor’s note: this is the second best use of a Really Awful Movies critic’s surname in popular culture after Professor Lombardo, Marge’s art teacher with impossibly low standards on The Simpsons).

Sheriff Curtis Mooney of nearby Crescent Cove California, (John Vernon) a gruff Gene Hackman type is just sick and tired of all these college kids partying it up in his town and he mocks colleague Officer Dave Hanson hen the duo run into the police station trying to explain what they just saw.

Of course, they’re paid no heed.

Meanwhile the giant Killer Klowns are venturing outside of their big-top and shooting the townsfolk with giant cotton candy laser guns before taking Deb captive in a balloon.

We half-recognized Mike (Grant Cramer) from his role as Derek in New Year’s Evil. Killer Klowns is a pretty fun flick with a truly catchy killer soundtrack. There’s also one of the best decapitation scenes in film history.

***1/2 (out of 5)

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The Ebola virus is terrific fodder for horror. C’mon, you bleed internally and externally and your liver is rendered barely functional. With the weekend damage we’ve done to that organ, it’s something our immune systems shouldn’t’ be tasked to battle.

So it’s not surprising that this viral hemorrhagic fever spawned, well, at least a couple of movies. Here, it’s Ebola Zombies but it’s the globe-trotting proto Global Village bio-horror of Ebola Syndrome that put this horrible disease on the cinema map. And THAT’s the one everyone should see, not this cheapo, billed as “Dawn of the Dead meets The Raid: Redemption.”

There’s no redeeming it.

In 2003, we had the SARS outbreak….

In Toronto, we know all about the panic surrounding that global pandemic. We were practically Ground Zero here.

The outbreak spread fear all over, even if the virus (thankfully) didn’t spread too far itself…Local hospitals cut off visiting hours, and our city’s subway commuters were often sporting surgical masks.

It killed only a few dozen, but 25,000 Torontonians were quarantined. We did get a free mega-concert out of it, featuring AC/DC, the Stones, Justin Timberlake and Rush. We’d say, all things considered, a fair trade (forget coffee beans).

Ebola Zombies ups the gross ante by adding zombies to the mix. That seems a bit redundant given you’ve already got a disease where sufferers vomit blood.

And while this may seem like a terrific premise…living up to the stone-cold classic Hong Kong exploitation feature Ebola Syndrome is a tall order.

Three Hong Kong gangsters plot a jewelry heist and storm a store in the basement of an industrial building. They get more than they bargained for: catching the store boss in flagrante delicto with a secretary under his desk, as well as nunchuck-swinging security guards who mount a defense.

But things take a turn for the worse.

In the same complex, there are strange experiments taking place — on human corpses.

We find out a mad scientist is working on a vaccine for Ebola as his daughter is a carrier. Soon, one of the robbers stumbles upon the makeshift lab, and she bites him…causing the goon to transform…into a zombie!

The cinematography is the stuff of HR training videos, the acting the stuff of boiler-room telemarketing hard-sells.

* (out of 5)