Gory greetings horroryearbook alumni! Welcome to another edition of IT CAME FROM THE MAILBOX, an exciting new column where your old pal Brain Hammer reviews whatever random crap the good folks at horroryearbook decide to send my way.

This time around I tackled a terrible trio of independent horror epics from Down Twisted Productions. The man behind the madness is writer/director/producer Sonny Fernandez. Sonny was nice enough to recently send along three of his most brutal and bizarre offerings to hyb for review. Apparently these flicks were too much for the tenderfoots to handle because they eventually wound up in my mailbox. It’s dirty work but someone has to do it. I decided to watch all three of these bad boys back to back.

The evening began with THE ABORTED. With a title like that I was eagerly anticipating some fucked up fetal festivities. I wasn’t disappointed. The plot is fairly simple: the malevolent spirits of aborted fetuses seek revenge against the mothers that shunned them, the deadbeat daddies that impregnated the mommies, and the goth chick who performs the bathtub abortions. The brother of one of the victims teams up with his nerdy best friend in a NOFX hat and investigates.

I thought THE ABORTED was the best of the bunch by far. This flick has a distinctly homemade feel about it, but still manages to be watchable and entertaining. The fetus monsters are really silly looking paper mache creations, but that was part of the charm. It’s hard to take this sort of thing too seriously but I would imagine that was the point. I was especially glad to see there weren’t any attempts at heavy handed pro-life morality. I noticed Sonny labels himself as a Christian on his myspace page so I was worried this flick would be a bunch of preachy bullshit. Lots of blood and guts along the way but not much in the way of scares. I thought the scariest thing in the flick was all the soap scum clearly visible in the shower death scene. Icky.

Next up was the oddly titled BLOODGOD. I have to admit I had a hard time getting into this one. A dude mutates into a monster, his girlfriend worries about it, and a doomsday cult kidnaps him to usher in armageddon. He’s not just a monster you see, he’s the BLOODGOD! Or not.

Where to start with this one? It’s an indie flick so any complaints about bad acting seem somewhat idiotic. But yeah, the acting was wretched. The monster makeup wasn’t very convincing looking either. The transformation sequences were sort of cool, but the final result was less than impressive. The worst part of this flick was the way the lead actor’s dialog became garbled and unintelligible when he had all that crap on his face. Everything that comes out his mouth pretty much sounds like HMPMMUNAGAHRUH. It would have been amusing if it weren’t so annoying. Sorry Sonny.

Finally, I sat through COLD BLOODED. Sonny mentioned in the letter that he sent along with the package that COLD BLOODED was the closest that he has come to making a standard horror film. This didn’t exactly fill me with gleeful anticipation, but I’m a hard nosed reviewer damn it. This is what I do! A group of kids head out for a weekend getaway to help a friend recover from the tragic death of his girlfriend. Along the way the gang stops at a small town that harbors a terrible and vicious secret. Bloodthirsty monsters attack and quickly whittle away at the groups numbers. As the body count rises the victims discover that the only way to defeat the demons is to become one themselves.

I don’t know how standard this is, but I enjoyed it regardless. The monsters are really cool looking. Kind of a mutant bear/rabbit thing. There was lots of splatter and some funny dialog. I got a kick out of a motivational speech delivered towards the end of the film that mentions gasoline running through your veins and being a one man walking holocaust. Tongues were firmly in cheek for this one. There’s also a twist ending so unbelievable it would make M. Night Shyamalan squirt cum out of his asshole. COLD BLOODED is now available on dvd from MichiganStreet DVD and can even be found on Amazon.

Horror fans looking for creative independent efforts should definitely support Sonny Fernandez Films. You can check out his myspace page here:

http://www.myspace.com/sonnyfernandezfilms