Charles E. Cullen
Mostly a local Virginia cult entertainment phenomenon, but is usually known elsewhere for his movie Super Badass. Cullen is an ex-chicken farmer that makes trashy, campy, country movies for drug-addicts and bums, kinda like a slow, hillbilly, less offensive version of John Waters. Also uses puppets as characters in his movies, some animation and occasional smatterings of gore, although even that was replaced with lame CGI gore in later movies. In short, think of really stoned, slow-moving camp, inoffensive gore and trash with terrible acting and ubiquitous drugs and alcohol. Later movies feature the most extremely cheap monster and ray-gun computer effects, cheesy skeletons and blood, and stoned movie-making you're ever likely to see. Ed Wood has nothing on this guy. (Homepage/Catalog)
This is possibly some kind of masterpiece of spaced-out, really bad, zombie b-movie. A minister raises the dead with some really bad Spanish 'incantations' that get broadcasted over the radio, bringing the dead back to life. The dead include Roy Stone, a lovelorn country singer on a mission to get whiskey. The government and some scientists try to fight the dead with traps from a zombie-trap book and a ray gun, while Cullen wanders around eating random people, singing and asking for whiskey. There are a couple of random splatter scenes, puppets, comic book scenes, spaced out camera-work, and the cheapest ray gun effects you'll ever see. Country-zombie badness with the immortal dialogue: "You're going to eat me aren't you?", "I live on brains, Frank. You ain't got any."
Now this is the kind of material almost worthy of cult status. Cullen transcends his usual limp, terrible and slow-moving camp to almost meditative, terrible slow-moving camp. A crotchety old man comes to town to entertain and scare the children, leaving behind a killer puppet called Mr. Stitches. Stitches likes to insult or traumatize youngsters and children before he gorily kills them, and the local brain-dead law enforcers have to recruit a strange girl to help them fight the puppet in a Western-style showdown. Features terrible acting, CGI effects that look like they came off a nintendo game, and an ultimately bizarre scene where a kid fights off CGI vampire bats with kung-fu brought on by a didactic, evil puppet.
Cullen makes a splatter movie about witches that concoct a brew to turn the bums into zombies. Most of the movie consists of vignettes as the bums drink and defecate, turn into zombies and gorily tear apart tree-hugging girls, the local law enforcement folk, a mother and her baby, etc. while the mayor tries to avoid his cross-dressing wife and clean up the town, the local puppet proposes a venom-cure and the narrator gets high. So lame and campy that it's kinda funny, with a centerpiece involving a bat attacking a baby before bum-zombies tear the baby apart. For gorehounds.
One of Cullen's early efforts is a simple affair featuring a man in a mask running around killing everyone in sight in gory ways while the local law recruits several people to hunt him down. The film is in gritty black & white and includes a mystical witch-doctor, and a bounty hunter as poser tough-guy hunters. Otherwise, this is just an endless sequence of limp dialogue and killings with extremely cheap effects, featuring Cullen's favorites of chainsaw killings, exploding heads, messy hit-and-runs, and hammering a baby. The sequel is even more limp, featuring endlessly long scenes of 'Vietnam buddies' getting loaded and reminiscing of their Vietnam days when they used to get loaded, while the Boogieman rises from the dead and runs around disemboweling people and babies.
Another Cullen backyard, spaced-out, pocket-change, 'special effects' extravaganza. Unlike the just plain silly monster-movie Ray the Rooster though, this one goes for spaced-out weirdness and camp comedy. There's flying decapitated heads vomiting goo all over children turning them into live skeletons, flying fish creatures and skeletons, a government official barking orders into a microphone from somebody's basement, a conspiracy freak in his own TV show showing pictures of UFOs providing such silly speeches that he can't stop laughing, and then there's Cullen as an insanely jealous redneck boyfriend of a girl with hairy legs who is inspired to tap dance, and rob a government kid from his ray gun by strapping a bomb to his head. It's too spaced out to come together into some kind of plot or cult movie though, and you'll be not too happy to know that there's a sex scene.
Cullen's take on the afterlife is a tedious, tedious drugged-out outing where Cullen probably took some drugs and just slapped together an hour's worth of home-made computer effects with 20-year old software. After a very spaced-out diner scene, a hot-rod racer is hounded by the evil sheriff into an accident, and he finds himself in the Judgment House, a place between heaven and hell ruled over by Cullen himself who sends the superimposed 'running' man into 'rooms' with themes of 'cigarettes', 'marijuana', 'rock-n-roll' and 'physical pleasures'. Cullen throws together strange (think chicken-farmer-strange, not Lynch-strange) superimpositions and effects, including flying Python-esque decapitated heads, animated cardboard vampires, a stop-motion scene of a man and his animated pliers, flying crashing cars driven by chickens, kids climbing cliffs or dancing, people being tortured in hell, endlessly droning preaching by an old man (heaven?) in some stock footage, and other oddities. It's as painful as it sounds.
Despite the name, this doesn't have much to do with the kult movie about vicious alien klowns. Instead, this is another typical brainless Kullen outing about drug-addict rodeo klowns and a big chicken that get some krack from some puppets and go on a killing spree. They murder a little girl, chop up some boy's father, and take a bite out of a hamster, while being chased by a sheriff (Kullen) and getting entangled with a local kult. A slight touch of lame gore, the violent bits often shown as trippy animations, lots of puppets, and overall, very slow moving.
Sanchez is a 19th century outlaw about to be hanged, who travels through time to the modern world after eating a tequila worm. He and his gang form a band, attempt to make it big in Nashville with their music, leaving behind a wake of dead bodies on their road trip while law-enforcers from both time periods pursue. A very slow-moving and limp movie that makes no sense, lacking even campy laughs (unless you count the rocket launcher made out of a water pipe), with not even a minimal attempt to portray or explore a man from the past. The focus is on random violence, a killing spree, and weak but ample gore, with very cheap exploding heads, chainsaw splatter, and geysers of blood, and the occasional annoying country music.
A cartoonish trashy movie about an ex-farmer who moves to the city to take home-made heavy drugs and become a superhero, violently killing all criminals in the city for the mayor. When he comes up against Light-Bulb, Bucko the Clown (who kills scores of children at a birthday party), and the Boogieman (who emerges from closets and slices up little kids), things get out of hand. Although it features chainsaws and lots of head explosions this is more of a dumb comedy than a campy gory movie, with the hero having conversations with puppets, practicing lame kung-fu, participating in courtroom antics and saving ladies from muggers then stealing their money from them.