Time to cover six horror flicks I’ve added to my collection over the last few months, and they span decades. Let’s get into them.
THE MOLE PEOPLE (1956)
I love me some black and white sci-fi horror, but despite having freaky monsters, this one takes a turn I didn’t expect, becoming notably heavy on social commentary for its time.
After being caught in an avalanche, archaeologists in the snowy mountains drop down into a hole to rescue one of their team members. The use of a flashlight beam to create visual suspense is great and foreshadows so much horror that was yet to come. We even get an eerie, early glimpse at one of the monsters.
Things get even more terrifying when the men have sacks thrown over their heads by monster hands and get dragged into the ground. Eek!
They wake up in a sort of forgotten city. Here’s where things go awry. There are albino humans living there, and they are heavily into believing in religion and gods in the sky, which they use as an excuse to enslave and torture the mole people. They also consider one ‘normal shade of white’ woman in their society as a sort of monster and refer to her as a “dark” one. Holy crap.
To escape the city, the archaeologists end up teaming up with the mole people. Bummer. It’s one of those “humans are the real evil monsters” movies…especially the extra white people. There’s even a less than happy ending, which is another surprise.
The mole people and the idea of them dragging victims into the ground is so freaky that it’s sort of disappointing that this isn’t the whole plot of the movie, and we are instead made to feel empathy for them. This movie was woke decades before woke was even a slur.
TORSO (1973)
I finally picked this one up due to it being considered both a giallo and a precursor to the slasher genre. It definitely delivers on both counts, but just make sure to watch the 94-minute cut and not the 90-minute U.S. edit, for without the grisly gore moments, it would definitely be a little flat, despite being loaded with sexual situations. Yay!
Appropriately, it begins with a torso and tits at an orgy with a creepy doll laying around. This is really a film about men leering at women, which the camera also makes sure to do as well.
The settings is a college, where someone starts killing off pretty people with a black and red scarf. The first kill is classic slasher, with killer POV as a couple has sex in a car. The killer even wears a ski mask.
The kills have the usual odd and engrossing giallo style setups—like a girl walking through misty, dark woods and falling and then rolling around in mud with her tits hanging out when the killer comes for her. In each death scene, the killer scarfs the person to death then does some dissecting and mutilating with a knife while flashes of that creepy doll pop up on screen. Based on the title, I really thought this was going to be a situation in which the killer is gathering body parts to make a stitched together masterpiece.
There are plenty of shots of lecherous male gazes around campus. Each main girl has man trouble…obsessive, stalking behavior to confuse us with red herring.
Eventually the girls make a getaway to a country villa to escape the madness, but the killer follows them. The final act is somewhat disappointing, because it’s a perfect setup for the girls to get picked off one by one, but instead the final girl wakes up to find all the girls dead in one big body reveal moment. After that, she spends the remainder of the movie trying to get out of the house while the killer is inside with her. It should be super suspenseful, but I wasn’t totally feeling the tension. And the final frame features a couple walking off into the night to the sounds of sappy 70s soundtrack music. Ugh. Way to kill the vibe.
THE FREAKMAKER (1974)
I think this is the last movie I needed to complete my collection of every horror movie Donald Pleasence starred in. While there are some eerie aspects to the film, Pleasence is incredibly drab, forgetful, and completely overshadowed by his plant-human hybrid creations and the real deformed people hired for roles as sideshow freaks.
Pleasence is a scientist working at a college. He’s also up to some sick experiments. No surprise there. Haunting, natural images of plants in time lapse as they mutate sets a tone, along with Pleasence’s monotone musings on science that serve as narration.
There aren’t many strong characters, so there’s not much to cling to that can carry you through the movie. Pleasence is using the freaks as assistants to abduct college students for his experiments, and in exchange he promises them he will be able to fix them.
His main mutant sidekick begins to realize Pleasence won’t be keeping his promise, so he tries to convince the other freaks to revolt. This is the most compelling part of the plot.
Meanwhile, college students are chased and killed in some atmospheric scenes set to unnerving music. However, there are no standout characters among the group of students.
The climax is pretty good, with one of Pleasence’s man plants finally walking around terrorizing people. I really appreciated the look and feel of the film, but in general it’s low energy and doesn’t quite live up to its premise.
UNTIL DEATH (1989)
This Lamberto Bava flick features a plot that has been done to death, especially in short tales in anthologies. This particular take on it is drawn out and has very little in the way of satisfying horror elements.
A woman and her lover kill and bury her husband then start life together, but you immediately wonder why the woman would kill her husband for this dude. He is extremely abusive and hates her young son.
A drifter shows up looking for a room, so the woman lets him stay. The boyfriend becomes jealous. He also becomes convinced the handsome drifter (who looks like Jensen Ackles) has something up his sleeve.
As the couple gets into more and more fights, with the boyfriend repeatedly coming close to raping the woman, her son is having nightmares of the husband coming back from the dead.
I was curious as to how the hot drifter was going to play into all this but was left not quite understanding it at all. It almost seems like he was the dead husband in hot man form, making this some sort of unexplained supernatural situation, but all the dead husband sightings both the woman and the boyfriend begin having seem to be delusions. I really didn’t get it. However, whether real or not, the final melding of hubby and hottie is freaky good.
MOM (1990)
This one is loaded with a late 80s horror sleaze vibe, and despite working at a video store back then that had mostly every horror movie that got released on VHS, I’d never seen it. It was a blind buy, and I have no regrets, because it gave me all the nostalgia feels. It totally delivers on the weird horror style of that era.
In the opening scene, a woman is attacked by horror king Brion James, who transforms into some sort of monster, presumably a werewolf. Awesome.
The newscaster on television reporting on recent animal attacks on pregnant women comes home with his girlfriend to see his mom. They inform her that they are having a baby. Uh-oh.
Soon after, Brion shows up at Mom’s house to rent a room, becomes aroused by some meat she’s serving for dinner, bites her, and turns her into a monster, too.
Then the son discovers that they are out on the dark city streets at night together luring in homeless people to eat.
Faced with the dilemma of what his mother has become, the son tries to keep her from killing anyone else while throwing police off the scent.
Mom has some fun monstrous moments when she attacks people, but she never really turns fully into a monster, which is somewhat of a letdown. The body count is also disappointingly low, even when Mom enlists her son to bring her more victims. And the plot point about pregnant women being targets all falls apart.
The late 80s horror charm is there, but I definitely feel the film could have pushed the envelope a little more—more monster action, more kills, more blood.
DEATH MASK (1998)
The director of Jack-O, which also starred Linnea Quigley, decides the way to hook low budget horror fans into his movie is to begin it with her in a shower scene…that doesn’t actually fall chronologically into the events of the plot until ten minutes before the end. So we get to see it twice.
This is a simply, cozy plot. Linnea is a stripper at a carnival. Wilbur, one of the “freaks” in the carnival, is played by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazzard. Wilbur has a fairly basic scar on his face that he simply cakes with makeup so it doesn’t look as noticeable. Really not that impressive of a physical deformity considering that he’s supposed to be hideous.
Wilbur has the hots for Linnea and tries to woo her away from her sleazy boyfriend, the guy who runs the carnival. Wilbur wants more out of life, so he visits a swamp witch and makes a deal with her. She gives him a magical piece of wood, which he uses to carve a mask.
He soon learns that he can get revenge on those who wrong him by putting on the mask. His victims see it turn demonic and then suffer some sort of violent accident.
It’s silly and basic, but it has that early direct-to-DVD charm, two familiar faces, sex, and a mask that comes alive. You get what you pay for, which probably would have been a 7.99 price tag at Best Buy back in the day.
