The Omicron Killer has a few interesting ideas, and nothing ever comes of any of them.

The story begins with a flashback. One year ago, The Covid Killer was cornered and killed by the police. Today, a copycat killer operates, one who is known by the media as … The Covid Copycat Killer. One of my little guilty pleasures in this movie is watching the actors say “The Covid Copycat Killer” time and time and time again. It isn’t until the movie is almost over that they start calling him “The Omicron Killer” instead.

Our Killer is hospitalized early on in the movie, but escapes pretty easily. While he is hunting people down and killing them, there are three other groups at work.

The first group working against him is the police force. The police captain is a woman — but in all other ways she is your stereotypical older sweary type. Our protagonist officers are a streetwise cop and the dopey cop he is saddled with as a partner. They spend actual movie time workshopping their catchphrase for when they catch Our Killer.

The second group working against him is a group of plucky kids. Specifically, plucky kids whose parents Our Killer has killed. They plot against him and eventually strike in a half-assed way. Like a grimdark version of The Goonies, poorly written.

The third group is working perpendicular to the main plot. They are a group of witches (and one token priest) who are striving to resurrect The Covid Killer. The priest is the sad sack of the group. He was supposed to pay off the cemetery groundskeeper, but he didn’t. As a result, the groundskeeper reported them to the police. The head witch rolls her eyes at him. “Steve!”

There is also a random guy who wears clown makeup and wields an axe. He never kills anyone onscreen, but attacks Our Killer in his dreams.

The police mostly just want to ask questions of the witches, but have trouble catching them. They also interview random people, all of whom seem to know exactly what The Covid Killer and Our Killer look like. None of these interviews are helpful.

Our Killer doesn’t speak, and isn’t very creative in his killing. His weapon is a crowbar. And when I mentioned this to Amy, who wisely chose to skip watching this movie, she came up with some creative ways to kill someone with a crowbar. Our Killer just stabs people with the pointy end. That’s it. When a victim is getting a lap dance, he kills two people at once, but that is the extent of his imagination.

The final confrontation occurs in the hospital, as Our Killer attempts to kill the sadistic doctor who treated him in the early parts of the movie (and who, frankly, Deserves It). The Covid Killer is not raised from the dead. The kids are not successful in killing Our Killer. Nobody really gets to use a cool catchphrase.

No lessons are learned, except maybe don’t take your eyes off Amy if she is wielding a crowbar.

Death Metal Zombies starts out with a man in a Richard Nixon mask killing people bare-handed. Then the credit sequence hits, and he basically disappears from the movie.

Brad is the biggest fan in Texas of the death metal band Living Corpse … and by extension, the world. Living Corpse announces a contest where the grand prize is a cassette with a unique song. Nowhere else in the world will this song exist. Brad bemoans his bad luck, but his girlfriend Angel and buddy Tony recommend that he enter anyway, because nobody is a bigger Living Corpse fan than he is. And he wins!

When the cassette arrives, Brad promises Angel that he won’t listen to the tape without her … but then he does, because she gets stuck working late. Brad and Tony and their buddy Kathy listen to the cassette, and its new song Zombiefied [sic]. Of course they get zombified, and the members of Living Corpse appear spiritually. The lead singer, Shengar, tells them to go forth and increase the number of followers. He also tells them to go forth and kill. These things are not as mutually exclusive as they seem.

Most of the rest of the movie is Brad and Tony and Kathy going around and killing people, several of whom rise as additional death metal zombies.

Angel comes home to an empty house with the garage door open. She goes out looking for Brad. She finds Brad. She runs away from Brad. She goes looking for the tape, but a dude named Tommy stole it. They bump into each other (literally) while escaping from the death metal zombies. They run to Tommy’s place, the zombies following behind. Death metal zombies are the slow-but-unstoppable kind.

Angel says they need to play the tape backwards. Tommy objects that he doesn’t have a machine that can play tapes backwards. But! He has a reel-to-reel. He can copy the tape to his reel-to-reel, then thread the reels backwards and play it that way.

How long will it take? Tommy doesn’t have high-speed dubbing!

The song is thirteen minutes long. Tommy and Angel will need to defend themselves from death metal zombies for thirteen long minutes using a mixture of country music and conventional weapons.

When they play the tape backwards, Shengar dissolves, and all the death metal zombies revert to their pre-zombified selves. All is well! Except for the people who got stabbed in the taint or punched through the heart or eaten alive or…. Those people are still dead.

Then ten years later, Richard Nixon mask guy converts zombiefied.wav to zombiefied.mp3 and uploads it to the early internet.

The best part of this movie (or worst, depending on your musical taste) is that it fully commits to the metal. The soundtrack is immersed in metal bands, primarily from Relapse Records. The movie credits mention eight different bands and 25 tracks.

In April, there was the in-person show….

The Elevator Pitch – Neil Stryker and the Tyrant of Time

WTF? – Full Metal Yakuza

Romance: DOA – Vampegeddon

Least-Special Effect – Captain Battle

Because I Could Not Stop For Death – Ozark Sharks

Nobody was Kung-Fu Fighting – Official Exterminator 4: Goddesss Mission

Over The Top – Blackjack

LOL – Neil Stryker and the Tyrant of Time

Featured Creatures – I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle

Mistakes WEre Made – Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper, Sword of Lancelot (a tie!)

Worst Acting – Shocking Dark

Worst Picture – Neil Stryker and the Tyrant of Time

Then, at the Remote Show in July, we re-ran Over The Top, showed a few additional categories, and did a tiebreaker for Mistakes Were Made

There were two shows, one at 7 PM, and one at 9 PM. We (the showrunners) voted the week before, and our votes are only included in the overall winner.

Hold My Beer – Robot Riot (7 PM), Raptor Ranch (9 PM) – Raptor Ranch (overall)

Wardrobe Dysfunction – Beyond the Trek (7 PM), Mirage Man, Beyond the Trek (9 PM tie) – Beyond the Trek (overall)

Songs in the Key of CMP – Neil Stryker and the Tyrant of Time

Didn’t See That Coming – Neshima (7 PM), Raptor Ranch, Scorpion Thunderbolt (9 PM tie) – Neshima (overall)

Over the Top re-run – Neil Stryker and the Tyrant of Time (7 PM), Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper (9 PM) – Blackjack (overall)

Mistakes Were Made tie-breaker – Sword of Lancelot (7 PM), Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper, Sword of Lancelot (9 PM tie) – Bigfoot vs D.B. Cooper (overall)

SCIENCE! – Shocking Dark (7 PM), Shocking Dark, Trog (9 PM tie) – Shocking Dark (overall)

All Bad Things – Full Metal Yakuza

Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy is a co-production between two countries that don’t exist anymore, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. That somehow feels appropriate for this movie. If I had watched it for a film class paper, the paper would have been about duality. Art versus commerce. Sex versus domesticity. Support for traditional occupation versus support for artistic career. It probably would have been a solid B+ paper.

Robert is working on his science fiction novel, while enduring constant interruptions — a neighbor with a dog, the neighbor’s son Tony, his girlfriend Biba. No one will give him the space he needs to write his tale about the android Andra and her young charges, the children Targo and Ulu. They come to Earth from the Arkana Galaxy.

In a bookstore, one of Robert’s colleagues recommends that he add a monster to his story. The most popular science fiction novels all have monsters in them. Robert decides to cut Targo from his novel and instead write in a monstrous pet.

That night, Robert hears a strange voice on a radio that calls him to a nearby island. It is the voice of Andra! He meets Andra, Ulu, and Targo … and also Targo’s pet Mumu, which can either be a small toy or a human-size monster. Targo knows that Robert tried to write him out of existence, and is a brat about it.

Robert doesn’t believe what he has experienced. He goes to see a psychiatrist. He tells the psychiatrist about how his mother died when he was younger, and as a baby, he caused his father to grow lactating breasts so that he could be nursed. The psychiatrist concludes that Robert is probably sane.

The next time Robert visits the aliens, he brings Biba. Robert accidentally destroys the spaceship, so Andra uses her navel to reverse time. Robert doesn’t destroy the ship the second time, but Biba freaks out, and so Andra turns her into a small cube.

When Robert returns to the dock without Biba, her older sister is furious with him. He tries to explain about the cube, and she knocks it into the ocean.

With the help of a diver, Robert is able to retrieve the cube, and Biba is returned to her humanoid form. This is good, as her cousin is getting married. Here is another dichotomy in the movie between her older, protective, suspicious sister and her younger, carefree sister, who literally steps out of the shower bopping along to music on headphones.

Townsfolk get wind of the aliens, and go to search them out in the caves on the island. One of them decides that in order to show good will to the aliens, they should show that they are not hiding anything. So the entire crowd of 20+ people take off all their clothes and go hunting through the cave … but the aliens have vanished.

They vanished to Robert’s apartment. Andra cleans for Robert. She cooks him a steak. He hears music when they touch. This is not a metaphor, but a literal thing — they make beautiful music together. And that’s the point when Biba walks in. Biba loses her temper, and strips naked at Andra. Can Andra offer Robert any of this eroticism? She cannot! Robert attempts to send Andra and the twins away psychically, but he cannot. Biba is still furious, gets dressed, and storms out.

In the emotional mayhem, Targo slips Mumu into Biba’s bag. Mumu grows to its monstrous form in Biba’s family’s apartment, spews goo all over Biba and her older sister, then walks downstairs. There is an amazing ten minute sequence when Mumu attacks Biba’s cousin’s wedding dinner as the guests alternately try to kill it and communicate with it. Heads are pulled off, guns are fired, a parrot says “Welcome,” plates are moved out of the way because they’re borrowed, the whole thing ends in flames, and Biba’s blind grandfather plays the accordion throughout.

When Robert finds out about this, he goes to Andra, who uses her navel to reverse time to the point where Biba comes into Robert’s apartment. But instead of catching Robert and Andra touching, Biba walks in to see the spaceship flying out of the window, as Robert leaves with Andra, the twins, and Mumu … to see the Arkana Galaxy. On his way off Earth, Robert works on his novel. Biba radios him to ask if he will be back for dinner.

The movie’s vibe is pure Stanislaw Lem, slow in places, yet unexpectedly entertaining in its weirdness. The monstrous form of Mumu is animated by Jan Svankmajer. This is not a CMP film, and I would definitely be willing to watch it again.

Marvel!

At dialogue such as “There is danger in the air. Like wood smoke from a distant fire.”

See!

The most desultory bellowsing ever committed to film!

Gawk!

At the wicker! So much wicker! ALL THE WICKER!

Be Confused! Or Bemused! Or Both!

At the worst Get Rich Slow scheme I’ve seen in a long time.

The King’s Sister has kidnapped all the richest princesses of the surrounding kingdoms. Her plan is to marry them to her drugged-up brother one-by-one. He will impregnate them, and she will kill them after they give birth. Then she’ll kill her brother and be the one with control over the children and their inherited wealth. And in the meantime, the princesses can work the royal silver mine! Nothing can possibly go wrong!

Most of the princesses working the silver mine carried one rock at a time. But when someone was sentenced to the mines as punishment, The King’s Sister said, “Make her work twice as hard!” And whenever we saw her after that, she carried two rocks at the same time.

I can recommend Slaves of the Realm if you’re a fan of wicker innovations in the fantasy silver mining industry. Or if you want to see a villain (The King’s Sister) whose actress appears to have some stage fighting expertise. Otherwise? Not so much.

Every time they cut to the mine, the soundtrack played a chord on an electric guitar, and Amy and I discussed whether it was more accurately described as a rock chord or a metal chord. Because the puns were more interesting than watching half-dressed young women carry rocks across a soundstage in the Czech Republic.