BA_Harrison

God of Pain might have worked as a series of short webisodes, but as a full-length feature it is extremely repetitive, with virtually nothing in the way of plot progression, making it quite the tedious experience.

The film is set in the near future: murderers and sex offenders are taken to the 7th terrace, where an injection in the eye transports them to another realm to be punished by Algea, The God of Pain (Jason K. Wixom), who forces them to relive their crimes (shown in flashbacks) before making them suffer for their sins.

This set-up is repeated several times over, getting more and more tiresome with each subsequent instance. In an effort to switch things up a bit, writer/director Jd Allen has two of the prisoners vindicated, one compensated for his trouble, the other offered the opportunity to work alongside Algea as a punisher, but it does little to improve matters - it's still very mundane.

Rather than eliciting a feeling of pure terror, Algea is a rather laughable specimen - a scrawny fellow wearing a cheap-looking Halloween mask, who talks in a very silly voice. And he has large rubbery hands. There's a bit of splatter for the gore-hounds, but nothing particularly remarkable.

My rating is 3/10.

Poor John Carradine: in Ted V. Mikels' The Astro-Zombies, the horror icon is reduced to tinkering with cheap-looking laboratory gadgets while spouting ridiculous technobabble to his mute assistant Franchot (William Bagdad).

I saw The Astro-Zombies over the course of two evenings because watching the whole thing in one sitting would have been too much of an ordeal. It's a shoddy z-grade sci-fi horror from the '60s that rivals the work of Ed Wood in terms of sheer ineptitude.

Carradine plays mad scientist Dr. DeMarco, who is creating super humans who can be controlled via thought wave transmission. Tura Satana, buxom star of Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat... Kill! Kill!, plays villainous Satana, who wants DeMarco's secrets. Meanwhile, a pair of government scientists and a redhead lab assistant try to solve the mystery behind several grisly murders. Or at least I think that's what the film is about: the plot is so poorly written and the direction so sloppy that it's hard to tell. Or care.

The acting is terrible and the pacing is very uneven, with some scenes that don't know when to end: DeMarco messing with a piece of equipment, Franchot draining the blood from a body, a topless dancer in body paint gyrating to a bongo beat in a nightclub.

Fans of really bad drive-in schlock might find that there is just enough trashiness to make it worth a go: Mikels delivers some cheap titillation, his Astro-zombies tearing off women's clothes; Satana hams it up a treat as a sadistic killer; a sexy babe in a bikini is strapped to a gurney in DeMarco's lab; and the ending gives us a smattering of gore, as an Astro-zombie goes berserk with a machete. But be warned... as much fun as all of this sounds, the sheer shoddiness of proceedings makes it tough to sit through.

The Toxic Avenger was actually made in 2023, but - according to IMDb's trivia - 'producers failed to secure a distributor for some time due to the film's violent content'. Yeah, right! Terrifier 2 & 3 did just fine with much more violence. I think most distributors passed on the film because it is pure garbage, easily one of the most moronic Troma films I have ever seen, and that's saying something.

I gave it a shot because I found the original The Toxic Avenger to be fairly fun, was intrigued by the impressive cast (Peter Dinklage as Winston AKA Toxie, Kevin Bacon as the villain, Bob Garbinger, and Elijah Wood as Bob's brother Fritz), I thought that the trailer looked promising (hinting at plenty of over-the-top gore), and I thoroughly enjoyed director Macon Blair's I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Unfortunately, nothing about this film works. Blair attempts to replicate Lloyd Kaufman's trademark lunacy, with plenty of colourful characters and general craziness, but it all feels so desperate: the gags fall flat and the chaotic direction is loud and obnoxious. The splatter is okay, but nowhere near as excessive as the trailer suggests (and too reliant on CGI).

I tried very hard to get into the swing of things - even forced myself to smirk a couple of times - but if truth be told, it wasn't long before I was praying for the film to end. The Toxic Avenger should have stayed on the shelf. 1/10.