The B-Movie Shelf

The giant, man-eating Graboids are back and even deadlier than before, terrorizing the inhabitants of a South African wildlife reserve as they attack from below-and above.  REVIEW: Tremors 5: Bloodlines was the first Tremors movie in 11 years, and it seems like it's quite the divisive entry, but I must say that for me, personally, I love the absolute hell out of this one, right up there alongside the first two movies , though perhaps just a small peg below. The main thing everyone seems to hate is the new remodeled designs of the Graboids and Assblasters, but I'm perfectly fine with them. They have an in-movie reason why they look different, and in the case of the Assblaster I actually think this new design is a huge improvement on the original design from Tremors 3: Back to Perfection and the TV Series , which I thought was a really silly and stupid design. I am disappointed this offshoot of them skips the Shrieker phase though, but the new Assblaster a...

A prequel to Tremors , this movie tells us about how the town of Perfection, Nevada became founded and how they defended it against the original Graboids with the help of Burt Gummer's ancestor, Hiram Gummer. REVIEW: For Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, we go back in time to the wild west days, when Perfection was a small mining community called Rejection, and the first batch of Graboids are born, causing havoc. I love wild west horror movies, especially creature feature ones, and I really think that after the last couple Tremors movies and the TV series , this back-to-basics approach was the best angle for them to take. Just like with the original movie, we have only the initial Graboid form here, and honestly that works just great. Going back to keeping it simple and straight forward, but in a time where heavy artillery was not quite as readily available. Michael Gross returns, but this time he's playing his character's ancestor, a very selfish, lazy, anti-gun ...

Perfection Valley, Nevada is a quaint little town. The inhabitants live peaceful, tranquil lives. Most of the time. Perfection is home to the Graboid, El Blanco. El Blanco is a thirty-foot worm creature who hunts prey by sound. It is an endangered species, so as long as El Blanco is around, Perfection can't be bulldozed by any greedy developers. To protect their home, the people of Perfection must co-exist with El Blanco, dealing with him when necessary, as well as other strange situations and creatures that come their way. REVIEW: Back in 2003, long before Kevin Bacon tried (and failed) to get his own out-of-continuity Tremors TV series off the ground, there was another Tremors: The Series that existed. Picking up right where Tremors 3: Back to Perfection left off and continuing with some open plot threads from that movie, we got the short-lived, 13-episode Tremors: The TV Series, which aired on Syfy before they cancelled it, but not before they aired episodes out...

Burt Gummer returns to his hometown of Perfection, Nevada for the first time in years, but the deadliest Graboid evolution yet forces him to save the town he swore to protect.  REVIEW: After two amazing, perfect, movies , Tremors 3: Back to Perfection came along and ruined the streak. Michael Gross returns yet again, this time as the main focus of the movie (and from this point onwards in the franchise) and he remains the shining point of this movie. There are other returning characters from the first movie as well, as this returns to the original town of Perfection from the first movie, and their original actors return to reprise those roles for the first time in 11 years, but none of them, nor any of the new characters, are acted all that well aside from Gross as Gummer. Hell, everything about this one is just... less . The acting, the directing, the story, the level of threat in the movie, and the embarrassingly-bad special effects - all of it is just......

Natives of a small isolated town defend themselves against strange underground creatures that are killing them one by one. REVIEW: My reviews for Tremors and Tremors 2 are being posted together into one post because, well, what’s there to say about Tremors that hasn’t already been said at this point? It’s pretty much the go-to perfect creature feature B-Movie and it's been covered by thousands of people in thousands of other reviews. Awesome unique creature? Check. Great creature effects? Check. Really fun and well-acted characters? Helll yes , double check. Add to that the perfect mix of serious horror/suspense and light-hearted comedy, and throw in some fun as hell chase and attack scenes. Sure, it might be a bit slow at times in the middle, but the mystery of what’s going on (for a first viewing anyway), mixed with the really fun characters, keeps your attention quite well, despite the slower pace. This entire series is pretty much my all-time favorite ...

There is a new species occupying the ocean: the 5-Headed Shark is all heads and teeth. Shaped like a demented starfish, this monster terrorizes the open ocean before invading the beaches of Puerto Rico, endangering a once peaceful beach-side paradise.  REVIEW: The first two movies in this series, 2-Headed Shark Attack and 3-Headed Shark Attack are among my top favorite Asylum movies. Unfortunately, 5-Headed Shark Attack was a huge step down. The first two movies were each pretty unique and did some good stuff to set themselves out from the hundreds (or close to it) of other SyFy Channel/Asylum shark movies. They were the first to go the multi-headed route, they had pretty good plots, used interesting locations (a small island atoll and a research station in the ocean), and they actually had some decent plot twists and unexpected deaths. This one though doesn't really have any of that, and other than the fact that the shark has multiple heads it's pretty much the...

In the middle of Antarctica, a highly maximum security prison called New Alcatraz is fully operational. When a mining crew inside the prison runs across a strange rock formation. What they don't know is that a giant, violent prehistoric snake is inside the formation. After it breaks out of the formation, the snake goes on a killing rampage inside the prison.To get help, scientists and a group of soldiers must eliminate the snake before it takes over the prison, leaving the humans on the bottom of the chain. REVIEW: God, I miss the early 2000s/late 90s for these cheap Creature Feature flicks. Sure, we still get them from time to time, but not nearly in the quantity that we did, and usually not nearly as much fun as these were. I keep finding myself revisiting these older ones way more often than I do most recent ones.While Boa, also called New Alcatraz in parts of the world, may a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to Creature Feature B-Movies of that time, it is more...

Lost Tapes is a Faux-Documentary TV show that depicts traumatic scenarios where people are attacked and/or killed by mysterious, dangerous, deadly, savage, and ferocious paranormal cryptids. Review: I've never hid the fact that here at the B-Movie Shelf we love us the found footage genre. Sure, there are some big stinkers to come across , but when done right, that style of filmmaking can be effective as hell, plus cheap to produce, so everyone can win. A few years ago I previously reviewed Season 1 of the B-Movie-esque found footage TV series Lost Tapes and, despite a few clunker episodes, overall I really enjoyed it. Now, having been put out by Animal Planet of all channels, you can assume correctly that the episode-to-episode budget on this show is pretty minuscule, which means hardly even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it glance (if even that much) of the creature-of-note each episode, but luckily most times they make up for that by at least having some good tension-fil...

Shortly after delivering a patient to an understaffed hospital during the graveyard shift, a police officer experiences strange and violent occurrences seemingly linked to a group of mysterious hooded figures REVIEW: The Void is a little horror movie that came to fruition thanks to online crowdfunding campaigns. The creators of this movie, Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, have worked on many infamous Astron-6 productions in the past ( Manborg , Father's Day, and the Bio Cop faux-trailer), and even though Astron-6 did not make this movie, it still feels very much like they could have (which as far as I'm concerned is a great thing, as I love all of Astron-6's productions thus far). These two guys posted up concept art and a basic sales pitch via Twitter and other social media to interest horror fans and then took to crowdfunding in order to get this movie made, and guess how it turned out? Damn fine. Really damn fine. And I'm not one of these people that...

Claire and her husband find themselves moving back into Claire's childhood home only to have the abusive and traumatic memories of her mother come back to haunt her. As her husband starts to get more work, Claire finds herself mixed up in a fog of past and present with a mysterious figure haunting her memories. Why is her childhood imaginary friend trying to reach out to her, and what does it want?   REVIEW: I'm pretty cautious when it comes to doing a review for an Uncork'd Entertainment movie as usually I'm not a big fan of their work, however I saw that James Cullen Bressack was attached to Bethany as its director and I've enjoyed his previous work on movies such as 13/13/13 , Blood Lake , and Pernicious , so that put my mind at ease a bit more, giving me hope that this would be one of the Uncork'd movies I actually enjoy. Also helping was the fact that this movie has a pretty all-star cast with Tom Green, Shannon Doherty, and Zack Ward, so for t...

Two estranged brothers reunite at their missing father's video store to liquidate the property and sell off his assets. As they dig through the store, they find a VCR board game dubbed 'Beyond The Gates' that holds a connection to their father's disappearance and deadly consequences for anyone who plays it.   REVIEW: I was pretty excited when I got to finally sit down and review Beyond The Gates, a recent horror movie I've heard nothing but great things about. Jumanji was one of my favorite movies as a child, I would watch that VHS tape so much I wore it out. With that in mind, it's pretty easy to see why I would get excited to watch, essentially, what is a horror movie version of that idea. A mystical and mysterious VCR board game that can manipulate real life based off your moves in the game? Count me in! To my disappointment, for a horror movie I felt it don't go nearly far enough with that awesome Jumanji-style idea, nor does it even incorp...

Facing certain defeat, Merlin banishes the evil enchantress Morgana, and her son Mordred, to the ends of the universe. Vowing revenge, Morgana and her son finally return to Earth 1500 years later, hell-bent on destroying every last modern day descendant of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. REVIEW: The Asylum's upcoming movie due out May 2nd, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, an obvious mockbuster on the upcoming Hollywood movie starring Charlie Hunnam, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, is a similar idea to some of their other movies where they take a classic story or legend and update it to take place in the modern age. Movies like 3 Musketeers , The 7 Adventures of Sinbad, 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 2010: Moby Dick, and most recently Sinbad and the War of the Furies are just a handful of their titles that were all done like that, to varying degrees of success. Out of all those types of movies by them however, this just may be my personal...