John’s Horror Corner: Chillerama (2011), a raunchy horror-comedy anthology.

MY CALL:  This aptly named episodic doesn’t take itself too seriously—or seriously at all, really.  Its highly inappropriate gross-out humor smacks of Kaufman’s Troma films.  So don’t go watching this with your mother.  The dialogue is littered with poorly executed horror clichés-gone-wrong, blatant sexual innuendo and raunchy harbingers of T’n’A to come.  You know this is going to be awful, but you also know that the filmmakers were intentionally making something awful.  The question is whether or not they succeeded at making something so bad it’s good.  Not really.  I laughed here and there, but mostly felt guilty for watching this smut.  I’ll say it again just so that you truly understand what this is: filthy SMUT!  IF YOU LIKE THIS, THEN WATCH:  Troma films or Tokyo Shock flicks (e.g., Helldriver).  WHAT TO WATCH INSTEAD:  Trick ‘r Treat (2007), the Creepshow series (1982, 1987, 2006), and HBO’s Tales from the Crypt (1989-96) all deliver episodic horror with decent writing and a good sense of humor—oh, and they don’t rely on smut.

This is pure, trashy nonsense.  In the intro scene a man digs up his dead wife to get some “dead head,” but he gets more than he bargained for when she zombie-chomps his junk off.  This guy, now penisless, goes to work at a drive-in theater where they’ll be showing the other featurettes comprising this movie.  This side-story, Zom-B Movie, continues between and after the featurettes.

Wadzilla is our first featurette and it copies the “giant monster” fad of the old days.  It’s about an average Joe with abnormally few, large, and sluggish sperm.  After a consult with a doctor at a sperm bank, he agrees to take Spermopropene, a drug which may increase his sperm load.  They make this every bit as idiotic as you’d think they could.  The drug makes his sperm into giant sperm (i.e., two inches of disgustingly inappropriate sperm wriggling across the floor like a slapstick nightcrawler).  The short film continues and his sperm size grows to a foot long.  He literally battles one in a bathroom prior to a blind date.  This rogue sperm grows rapidly, tries to rape a woman, eats a chihuahua and beheads some chick in a sock-hop skirt.  This gamete-gone-wrong gets so big that they use claymation to present it to the tune of Beetlejuice’s sandworms.  It continues to kill and grow.  Just as this Wadzilla is humping the sultry Statue of Liberty, which gives us a striptease by the way, General Bukake (Eric Roberts) initiates “operation money shot” to save the day.

Hey, let’s tell this story with a few pictures…Sperm monster is born and man tries to flush it down the toilet.  Evidently he never heard of the Alligator in the Sewer movies.

Sperm monster, in true Roger Corman spirit, succumbs to the biological imperative.

Sperm monster grows and finds new, larger mates.

Sperm monster gets nuked.

I Was a Teenage Werebear borrows from the beach movie craze of the 50s and 60s and even has a few painful musical numbers.  This homoerotic tale is initiated after a bite to the ass from a blond, Elvis-ish greaser.  Once aroused, such men transform into plus-sized, unmanscaped beasts.  The make-up for this is utterly terrible.  This is much less entertaining than Wadzilla.  In the end, the recently-turned star of the story slays his maker with a big, chrome…well, you know what…to the…well, you know where.  Just tasteless.  Next to this, Zombie Strippers starts looking like a solid film.

I had no idea that Wilmer Valerrama was twins.

The Diary of Anne Frankenstein is in black and white, and German!  These short films just seem to get worse and worse.  So Adolf Hitler kills the Frank family, shortened from Frankenstein, and steals the journal of Dr. Frankenstein.  Now armed with the secrets of creation, Hitler goes all mad scientist and creates a Jewish Frankenstein played by Kane Hodder (Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13^th parts VII-X).  This was funny and the least inappropriate of the shorts.  If you make it this far into the movie, listen for all of the non-German nonsense dialogue.  It’s loaded with random movie references—in fact, the whole movie is filled with seriously out of place movie quotables.

After all this, Zom-B Movie comes to its horrendous conclusion with something of an exploitative nymphomaniac zombie orgy complete with necrophilia, sexualized gore and member dismemberment.

This movie, for its style and quality, has a disturbing number of recognizable actors.  It’s filmed and scored as if mocking 50s-60s era horror and sci-fi and was clearly made to give exploitation film fans a satirical period piece.