Drainiac
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What lurks in the drains of a shitty house? Well, if it’s a haunted house then it might just be a water spirit that shoots out tentacles from the drain and pulls you in. That’s the low-down for Brett Piper’s Drainiac. Now, the movie came out some time ago in 2000, but this is a newly remastered release. An ultimate edition, if you will. I have to admit that I never saw the un-remastered one, but the added special effects aren’t anything special exactly. Maybe nothing special is the wrong wording to use, but I’ll get to that later. First, the lowdown.

Julie is a typical teen. Well, a teen who has a drunk prick as a father and a mother that went “crazy” and killed herself. She keeps having crazy dreams and begins to wonder if she herself is going crazy. Her dad flips houses for a living, so one day she’s sent to begin work on a dump of a house while her father goes to the bar to bitch about her. That sounds like a pretty shitty weekend, but lucky for her, her friends decide to give her a hand and help out. What they find quickly enough though is there are some crazy things going on at this house, and after their car is sucked into the ground (which strangely didn’t seem to register as odd to them) they have no where to go. Enter a mysterious stranger who happens to exercise ghosts and we have a final supernatural confrontation on our hands. Not too shabby if you ask me.

I liked this movie. It was fun. Now, remember I mentioned earlier that there wasn’t anything “special” about the special effects? Well, let me rephrase that. I enjoyed the special effects immensely (sans an intrusive filter used towards the final supernatural showdown that blocked a death) but these are not high end 10,000 BC effects. These are good old fashioned low budget practical effects that have an imaginative feel. Some effects bordered on corny, but that only added to the throwback fun that I had with this movie. Hell, some effects I thought were down right impressive in their camera-trickery way. This movie wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was fun, imaginative and brought me a good low-budget time.

While I was not a fan of Piper’s Bacterium (Scraps oddly was) I loved his Shock-O-Rama. This makes 2 wins out of 3 in my eyes for ole’ Piper. Piper’s movies have imagination and fun effects in a world of current derivative, cliché torture garbage. Not all of his are winners in my eyes, but this one worked for me. I’d say give it a shot for some old fashioned 80s fun. Bad acting, cheesy effects and a tongue in cheek flare. Sure I could have used some more deaths and nudity, but at the end of the day what else do you want on a Saturday night of beers and friends than a prick’s prick getting torn off by a water spirit while urinating?

Added:  Tuesday, July 29, 2008
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