This was a triple feature of blind buys for me, so let’s find out if I should have opened my eyes before handing over my money.
THE MURDER SECRET (1988)
This Italian horror flick is a hybrid of supernatural horror, mystery, and slasher, and it reminded me of Lamberto Bava’s Macabre, just that the twisted part is withheld until the end. It is also filled with that awful, cheesy type of music that plagued Euro horror in the 80s and totally clashed with the horror vibe.
A man brings his wife and kids to visit his aunt, but when they arrive at her house, she’s not there. The caretaker says she’ll be arriving soon. So, the family settles in, and we sit around waiting for something to happen beyond some mysterious phone calls and the teen daughter hearing voices.
42 minutes in, someone is finally murdered.
We get some flashbacks to the father’s past when he was a child, including his mother’s tragic death, but the mystery here is just not very compelling.
56 minutes in we finally get some major slashing, beginning with a Psycho-esque shower scene. Soon after, heads start flying as people are decapitated. The deaths come one after another with no suspense or atmosphere. However, they deliver on the blood.
Finally, the truth of what’s going on comes out. It involves a rotting corpse, a fist fight that goes on forever, and a sudden twist that feels really out of place but would become a horror trope a few decades later.
BLOODY PSYCHO (1989)
This Italian supernatural slasher is about a corpse ghost in a wheelchair killing a bunch of sexually charged weirdos in a castle. So European.
Do the details even matter? Is it worth trying to decipher the bizarre plot twists? Of course not. It’s 80s Euro horror. You just go with it for the gore and sleazy sex.
A hands-on healer dude who also has psychic powers comes to a castle to help a woman in a wheelchair. This bitch treats her maid like a slave…who also happens to be her lover.
The woman also has a journalist friend who helps the healer investigate the castle’s haunted past, which he knows about thanks mostly to his psychic visions. He sees some pretty crazy shit, including a walking doll and a corpse in a wheelchair.
He begins poking into the past of the family that lived in the castle. He talks to a priest, a lawyer, a drunk…fun times. Especially when everyone who spills family secrets begins getting killed by the wheelchair corpse.
Macabre scenes, creepy castle atmosphere, and grisly gore aside, this is the usual hokey Euro horror trash, with a bad, jazzy 80s score, bizarre filler, like making us sit through watching a woman ride horseback before agreeing to meet with the healer, and silly edits, like the same moment of the wheelchair corpse crashing through a window presented three times in a row at different angles. In my opinion, it’s a perfect edition to my extensive collection of 80s horror.
LEVITICUS (2026)
The title tells you what you’re in for with this one that lands on the homo horror movies page—a gay horror flick based on religious abuse. In this case, despite it being gay trauma porn to some extent, I really liked the general premise. However, since the main character is experiencing a serious sense of isolation in a small town he’s just moved to, he’s pretty much the only target of the very It Follows entity that has possessed his love interest.
So, this town is very religious, to the level of cultish. The main kid becomes intimately entangled with another boy (no sex scenes though) and then witnesses that boy being exorcised of his lustful demons in church. It’s a total metaphor for conversion therapy obviously, but what’s clever is that only after the love interest is cleansed of his homosexual tendencies does he seem possessed.
Actually, it’s like a doppelgänger of the kid, and it begins to terrorize the main boy. He never really knows when it’s the real boy or the demon chasing him.
There are some creepy and suspenseful scenes of the main guy encountering the demon, but since it’s just him against the world, he has no one to drag into his problems. The movie really feels underdeveloped in that sense, or perhaps just too long due to the limitations of the story it is telling.
The finale definitely intensifies, and surprisingly, there’s a nice, neat, anticlimactic conclusion. Gays usually don’t get those types of endings, so that’s refreshing.
