90s horror – Four from between 90 and 99

Near death experiences, voodoo dolls, sperm donors, and aliens in these four from the end of last millennium. It’s 90s horror time!

FLATLINERS (1990)

Sort-of-supernatural suspense flick Flatliners still holds up pretty well. It’s incredibly creepy and features a still totally relevant cast, including Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, and Julia Roberts. Oh…and William Baldwin is in it too.

A group of med students fascinated with the afterlife figures out a way to die for a short time and then come back. As they take turns doing it—and then doing it again to try to stay dead longer—they each begin having frightening dreams and hallucinations of the bad things they did to others in their past. Eventually, the ghosts of their pasts begin coming to terrorize them in the physical world.

Flatliners plays out like four different Twilight Zone episodes, with Kiefer Sutherland’s tale being the most frightening by far.

VOODOO (1995)

Voodoo feels like a male version of The Craft watered down into a silly made-for-TV occult film from the 1970s. It stars Corey Feldman (acting his most normal and likeable) as a college student who joins a fraternity that happens to be into Voodoo dolls.

A weird old man keeps popping up, trying to warn Corey to stay away from them. The old dude virtually molests Corey at one point, tearing open his shirt in public looking for “the mark.” The frat boys also use a Ken doll as a voodoo doll to get a kid to shoot up a bunch of people with a shotgun. And they perform a ritual to give Corey a tattoo (the mark the old man was looking for earlier).

It’s a pretty unimaginative film that offers no scares, blood, or nudity, and barely any suspense, but it’s entertaining if you think of it as a long episode of a cheesy CW supernatural show.

MISBEGOTTEN (1998)

In the tradition of 90s thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The Crush, here we have Kevin Dillon painting by numbers (and jerking off in a cup) to destroy an infertile couple.

The unlucky recipients are Nick Mancuso (the phone voice in the original Black Christmas) and Lysette Anthony (who stepped into Karen Black’s shoes for Trilogy of Terror 2). Once Lysette is pregnant, she has a couple of encounters with a very nice man…who happens to be psycho sperm shooter Kevin Dillon! And he wants his baby, dammit!

So what does this thriller have that dozens of other carbon copy films of the era don’t? Kevin Dillon having pointless flashbacks of being ass-raped. A human head delivered to a baby shower. A distraught mom grabbing a coat hanger to give herself an abortion. And Kevin Dillon getting shot in the dick. Jeez. He sure does get it in both ends in Misbegotten.

ALIEN BLOOD (1999)

I just…I can’t…what? Alien Blood is pure experimental art house stuff, I guess. For starters, there’s no dialogue for the first twenty minutes, so only reading the movie description beforehand gave me any idea of what was going on. And a majority of the film is comprised of pointless “footage.” I don’t know what else to call it. Landscapes, people just staring off into space, people doing Tai Chi. WTF?

A chick looking exactly like Michael Caine as the trans killer in Dressed to Kill— complete with blonde hair, black trench coat, and sunglasses—is an alien (we see her alien form once later in the movie). She’s on the run, fighting off agents who are trying to kill she and her child.

There’s also a house full of vampires. I’m not sure if they are real vampires or just playing vamp because the man of the house, who calls himself Dracula, is shot dead with a gun when the woman alien breaks into the house to hide from the agents. Not to mention, the vamps have the house all decorated for Christmas, complete with a tree.

Eventually there’s a standoff, a shootout, and a big spaceship that fires deadly lasers. The movie is just too out there to even draw you in.