This trio of flicks I added to my collection comes from 1969, 1976, and 1977, and includes a psycho killer, Bigfoot, and a melting man!
HORROR HOUSE (aka: The Haunted House of Horror) (1969)
I had to pick this one up because people online say it’s an early slasher, and, more importantly, it now ensures I have every horror movie in which Frankie Avalon stars (that would be this one and Blood Song).
The late sixties party vibe is groovy, and a bunch of kids take off to check out an old spooky house William Castle would envy, but I was a little disappointed in the lack of a body count.
These kids go on this excursion. Awesome. A creepy old dude is basically stalking one girl and follows her there. Cool. The kids split up using candles for light to explore the place. Yay. They decide to have a séance. Excellent.
Then, one guy gets slashed in a seriously stylized kill scene vibrant with bright red blood. Nice.
When the friends decide to get rid of the body for fear they’ll be accused of the murder and it will ruin their lives, I was so thinking I Know What You Did Last Summer.
But then they go on with their life and no one comes to kill them. WTF? One person gets murdered because they go back to the house, but everyone else is just paranoid since detectives start asking questions about their missing friend.
Eventually the final act saves the film. Three of the kids decide to return to the house to try to figure out who the killer is, the killer is revealed, the killer’s motivation is explained, and someone gets stabbed in the crotch!
But a crotch kill isn’t enough. I still wish there had been more bodies.
CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE (1976)
While all the other Bigfoot movies were taking themselves so seriously during the Sasquatch panic of the 1970s, Creature from Black Lake captured the same backwoods atmosphere while having fun with the concept instead.
It wouldn’t be a Bigfoot movie if it didn’t begin with a professor giving a lecture on the creature. After class, two college students decide to head off into the woods to research the creature.
There’s subtle humor along the way as they go on their adventure, which makes them all the more likable.
They spend much of the film meeting up with various rednecks, who give them eyewitness accounts of Bigfoot, which we see in flashbacks.
The cool thing about this movie is that there are plenty of teasing shots of Bigfoot, and most of them are during the day. However, there is never really any full Monty facial shot, so I did the best I could to grab a still from a fleeting moment…
The climactic hunt and battle with Bigfoot takes place in the final chapter, and that’s at night. It’s also a pretty exciting sequence for a low budget indie.
THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN (1977)
I’ve never seen a man melt so fast. Seriously, The Incredible Melting Man wastes little time in pushing its creep to skeletal levels of goo.
An astronaut returns from a space trip gone wrong, ends up in a hospital, wakes up, and then flips out and tears off all his bandages to reveal his melting condition.
This leads to a totally trippy, so 1970s horror scene of a nurse running and screaming in slow motion down a hall that looks like…a kennel?
Anyway, a scientist is assigned to find the missing melting man, who leaves a trail of drippings and dead bodies as he continues to ooze and kill random people until finally staking out the scientist’s house.
This is just icky, eerie fun as our melting man gets grosser and grosser while on the run. There’s simply not much more to this movie. It’s basically just a slasher with killer POV, stalking, gore, home invasions, and a melting killer. I couldn’t ask for more.
