It’s back to the late 80s and early 90s for the latest trio of films I bought on Blu-ray.
DEADLY LOVE (1987)
The director of Moonstalker manages to make that film seem like a better movie considering it’s a follow-up to this weak flick.
Deadly Love opens with a biker and his chick planning to run away from their dead-end town to elope. Before they can, the local rednecks kill and bury him.
Years later, she’s looking like trailer trash…living in a house. She also bares a resemblance to Britney Spears in her darkest days.
I don’t know why it took her decades, but she finally uses black magic to resurrect her lover. Awesome. A zombie biker slasher movie? If only.
The soap opera continues. She’s harassed by local teens, she commits suicide, her niece comes to live in her house, finds her diary, and reads it, bombarding us with cheesy flashbacks to her love story with the biker.
The teenage thugs return to harass the niece and in the last 23 minutes are offed by the biker (fully helmeted with a face shield) in bland ways with no blood. At least there’s beefcake.
The final moments of this movie are the only sign of horror and actual “back from the dead” vibes with some blood.
I can’t imagine why the filmmaker decided to save this kind of cheesy fun until the final frame.
WITCH STORY (1989)
So excited to score yet another 80s horror flick I’d never seen back in my video store clerk days. I noticed some reviews on IMDb saying how bad this movie is and how basic the plot is: witch executed in the past, kids in the present go to an old house, kids get killed off one by one. Um…I take it these reviewers didn’t grow up in the 80s? Because that’s all we needed back then, and horror ruled.
I’d say this is basically the Night of the Demons formula with witch possession instead of demons. The witch is burned in the past, and in the present two siblings inherit a house…her house. Uh-oh.
They come with their friends to check out and stay at the place. There’s great 80s pop music that sounds more 1985 than 1989, classic 80s musical cues during horror scenes, and the kids partying while eating KFC. One dude even has a Heart concert shirt on. Awesome.
There are a few dream and illusion scenes that deliver some blood, a ghost girl in white makes appearances, the group uses tarot cards, one girl has psychic visions, and then, for no explicable reason other than us having to assume the witch is possessing them, two girls in the group start growling and killing off their friends. It would have been nice if there was some ghoulish makeup thrown into the mix, which is where this one falls short, but at least the death scenes are violent and bloody.
There are definitely some odd moments, like one of the evil girls somehow rising out of a pool with a chainsaw (huh?), and the disjointed moving of the action from the house to an abandoned building for the final act, but familiar tropes of this type of film abound, like all the dead friends sort of coming back to deliver a bit more horror.
The fight with the possessed girls is satisfying, but the final battle is between a priest and the witch from the past, and it’s both bland and irritating, with the little ghost girl shrieking while the priest and witch hurl prayers and incantations at each other, respectively. There’s even a cheesy final frame scene.
Overall, this is entertaining enough with a good dose of 80s horror nostalgia, but it doesn’t live up to the fun of similar movies like Night of the Demons and Dead Dudes in the House.
DREAM STALKER (1991)
This shot-on-video flick from 1991 literally starts with motorcycle race footage that looks like genuine home video. The footage is so raw you can’t even hear the dialogue between characters over the wind and roar of the bikes.
Unfortunately, the sound doesn’t get much better after that. The audio is terrible, and the video is just as bad—there’s not much that a jump to Blu could do for this.
Indicative of the early 90s, the fashions look like the late 80s. A bike rider with a mullet is madly in love with his girl. He gives her a creepy music box and insists she promise that they’ll be together forever. And then…he dies.
She starts having nightmares over the next few years. She fiddles with the nightmarish music box, which shoots out same cheesy electrical special effects, and then the boyfriend is back, all rotten-faced. He kind of reminds me of the heavy metal killer from the 1986 flick Trick or Treat. His makeup and a spooky melody that plays incessantly as the film’s score are the highlights of the whole movie.
Well, not exactly true. The laughable aspects of the film are also the highlight. The boyfriend ghoul visits her in bed and slips on a condom for sex…but it breaks.
She has numerous nightmares. She goes to stay at a cabin in the woods and gets into a fight with a group of mostly white girls dancing to hip hop that sounds like it’s from 1981, not 1991.
The boyfriend starts killing people in the main girl’s life, as well as people who wrong her—like two guys that plan to rape her in the woods. Yeah, this movie is all over the place, and often in nightmare sequences.
Not to mention, the low budget but entertaining kills don’t start until twenty minutes before the movie ends. I’m not thrilled that I blind bought this on Blu-ray, but if I had originally seen it in the 90s when it hit VHS, I probably would have bought it for nostalgic reasons anyway.
