My latest triple feature was a buffet of subgenres, and while there was nothing outstanding here, there was some fun to be had with each one.
LAST NIGHT AT TERRACE LANES (2024)
Running only 75 minutes long, this quirky film is a mix between a slasher and a home invasion flick…in a bowling alley.
The basic premise is that four friends—two guys and two girls—go to a bowling alley the night before it is due to close for good and are soon trapped in the alley with other patrons as masked cultists bust in to slaughter everyone.
While there’s lots of mayhem, good kills, and some funny moments, this definitely isn’t humorous enough to reach the level of cult classic material.
The really odd thing about the film is that it virtually sets things up so that one guy friend is gay for the other guy friend (he literally licks him behind the ear at one point) and that the main girl is into the other girl (the ear licker even tells his friend that she is), but these queer plants are never fully explored. WTF? What was the purpose of even including them?
Another glaring issue is that there weren’t many extras hired to fill the alley. There being barely any patrons would make sense for a place that’s going out of business, however the moment the masked killers show up, there are suddenly a bunch of people running around being killed off.
For me, the cast of characters was a letdown because of the refusal to delve into the queer stuff, but the cult members had some notable moments, like when they first enter the bowling alley…through the bowling pin racks. Awesome.
FOR SALE (2024)
This film falls short in that the attempts at comedy only end up being a little quirky. It falls long in that it’s an hour and fifty-five fricking minutes. This is inexcusable, and I don’t understand how anyone and everyone involved in the film didn’t tell the filmmaker that the movie should have been trimmed down to about 90 minutes long. All the good stuff is spread too far apart, and every segment of the story goes on too long, making what could have been a fun viewing a tedious experience at times.
A dude gets a job as a real estate agent assigned to sell a particular house. He immediately experiences a few odd things, plus some truly creepy elements including a freaky apparition. In fact, the ghosts in this film are spooky enough for this to have been a scary movie instead of a horror “comedy” if the more whimsical moments had been dropped completely.
Anyway, the real estate agent runs into one set of ghosts after another throughout the course of the movie, tries to do some ghost busting, and eventually has to face off against the ghosts and come to terms with his own shortcomings.
If you want to see a real estate horror comedy done right, watch The Selling of Scarry Manor.
SENTINEL (2024)
This combination of infected people, alien, and time travel subgenres would have been pure SyFy network original perfection back in the day. It even features b-movie king Michael Pare as the President of the United States…which is actually just a moon base now.
See, it’s the future, and the earth was ravaged by an alien invasion. So this team of three people from the moon base decides to head to earth…with a time travel machine! Yep. They’re going to save survivors from the past. Huh? Yet each member of the trio ends up in a different time period! Double huh?
It doesn’t even matter, because they encounter infected, zombie-esque humans (eek!), as well as the big sentinel monster that is controlling the infected. Awesome. This is old school costume monster, not CGI.
There are also some suspenseful scenes and some exciting action sequences, making this a perfect piece of mindless, cheesy, rainy Sunday sci-fi/horror.
