It’s a non-canon Friday the 13th double feature

Posted on May 4, 2022 by Daniel

Jason fans rejoice. A lot of what you’ve been waiting for becomes a reality in these two films about the iconic horror franchise.

13 FANBOY (2021)

This film has such a fantastic meta premise, brings together loads of horror veterans of the Friday the 13th movies playing themselves, indulges in its own fanboy premise, and is directed by Deborah Voorhees, one of the actresses from Friday the 13: A New Beginning.

The opening kill scene sets a classic 80s slasher tone with a killer, a barn, the woods, a chase, and killer POV.

As a bonus, I created a little ScareBearDan POV…

The film then focuses several years later on the (fictional) daughter of actress/director Deborah Voorhees, now an adult and starring in horror films herself. She’s also very tight with Dee Wallace, who seems oddly out of place in a sea full of lesser-known Friday the 13th cast members.

However, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that this film is a nod to and acknowledgment of Dee’s elevated status as a horror icon, so how could she possibly say no to taking the lead role as herself?

Dee and the main girl are most specifically being stalked by a psycho fan while they’re doing the Monsterpalooza horror con, but the body count comes in as the masked killer starts brutally offing Friday the 13th actors one by one. Unfortunately, the kills don’t happen at the con, so the film tends to lose focus and feels like it’s throwing in random characters left and right.

Most surprising is that Lar Park Lincoln, the queen of Friday the 13th Part 7, is disappointingly underutilized, and spends most of what little time she gets onscreen stuck in the killer’s lair. Perhaps she didn’t want to have a major role in the film? I don’t know, but Friday fandom alone dictates that she should have been one of the leads in the film.

Also odd is that Corey Feldman has a role…but not as himself! WTF? Such a recognizable face of the horror genre and the Friday the 13th franchise should not have been cast in a role as anyone other than himself.

He is relegated to being tossed into the mix briefly as a red herring. He’s just one of several background characters presented as weird and possible killers…then vanishing from the film almost as quickly as they appear, rendering their inclusion pointless.

Giving a fun meta twist to the situation, appearing as himself is filmmaker Vincent DiSanti, known for the highly regarded Friday the 13th fanboy film Never Hike Alone. Because no matter how you slice it, this is a fan film about talent involved with the Friday the 13th films facing off against a masked killer for real. And that includes two of the actors who actually played Jason through the decades. Yahoo!

The novelty of that premise is also what ironically makes the whole film feel disjointed and padded to about 20 minutes too long. With the main girl and Dee Wallace being the main targets, all the excessive kill cameos fail to glue the plot together, as would, say a group of counselors working together to open a camp in a Friday the 13th movie.

It’s the final act that saves the day, with the reveal of  the killer’s true motive. And for Dee Wallace fans, it’s extra special. Even so, the last few minutes of the film are just awkward and the conclusion feels incomplete.

ROSE BLOOD: A FRIDAY THE 13th FAN FILM (2021)

While 13 Fanboy is a meta film about Friday the 13th, Rose Blood is a true fanboy film that is a direct sequel to Friday the 13th Part 7. Just ignore the cheesy narrator at the beginning—very out of tone for a Jason flick—and sit back for the fun first scene.

It goes right for the fanboy points in the modern day with none other than Lar Park Lincoln reprising her role as Tina. She is now in a mental institution and she hears voices…and sees them, in the form of Terry Kiser, her doctor from the original film. Major kudos to both actors for feeding the hunger of fans and making appearances in this project.

However, Lar once again isn’t the star, for this film takes us to 1989, about a year after the events of Part 7. Hardcore fans are really going to have to suspend disbelief, because the role of Tina has been recast by a young woman who looks nothing like Lar.

Slasher fans are also going to have to be very patient about getting to the “guts” of the film. Approximately the first hour focuses on young Tina being held captive in a facility, where the intent of the military and scientists is to use her powers to conquer Jason.

There is a lot of talk. I mean a lot. There are a few too many authority figures and experts in their fields that weigh the film down with their perspectives on the situation while bringing no thrills or excitement. There’s also a young girl with powers of her own brought in to help with the proposed takedown of Jason, but she’s considered dangerous and is strapped up like Hannibal Lecter.

With all the talk, there are some very forced efforts to go for the nostalgia, as characters have conversations about video games, video game systems, and graphics of the time. On the bright side, there’s plenty of hunky man meat to appreciate on the military team. They really help dress up the bland, generic scenery.

Finally, there’s a semi-exciting scene involving the new girl with powers (that happens off screen), and I began to fear this whole film was going nowhere.

And then…it happens. Over an hour into the movie, Jason is released from the lake once again, infiltrates the facility, and wreaks fricking havoc.

The massacre is a bloody blast, and the low budget amateur feel of all the dialogue-driven scenes is exchanged for what feels like a genuine Jason slaughter fest.

And this shit is violent and gory!

I loved it and could see this film being added as an extra to a future Friday the 13th physical release if it doesn’t get its own release.

While the story isn’t mind-blowing, Jason delivers what we’re really here for, plus we jump forward in time to Lar at the end so she can take Jason on once again with a little help from the always sexy Kevin Spirtas, her boyfriend from the original movie!

Finally, there’s a major spoiler in the final still shot below, so don’t scroll down if you don’t want the final act ruined for you…

HOLY CRAP!

Seriously, super spoiler photo below…

It’s another dream come true for fans of some of the biggest slasher franchises of all time. Question is, will there be a full-length “vs.” movie spawned from this brief scene?

Brace yourself…

We do get a “to be continued” tag scene after the credits, so stick around for it. Time will tell if this will be continued.

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A horror anthology triple feature

Posted on May 3, 2022 by Daniel

I marathoned two low budget indies and the latest installment of a well-known found footage franchise, so let’s get right to this trio.

OCTAGON (2021)

This is an anthology in which all the stories are essentially tied together by what might be the birth of a devil baby. I say “might” because there’s a lot going on here as the wraparound interweaves itself into the stories and the stories interweave into each other, leading to nothing ever being totally quite clear.

The wraparound has a guy in the woods telling his girlfriend he has the same dream every night of strangers crying, pleading, and running in circles.

1st story – a young pregnant woman gets a frightening visit in her bedroom at night that lays the groundwork for the stories to come, explaining to her why she can’t abort her baby. I was quickly turned off by the subject matter challenging a woman’s right to choose, and it’s worse after what transpired just as I’m working on this post.

2nd story – another tale about a woman wishing to kill her child in the womb, approached from a totally different angle. This movie is starting to feel like religious horror to me.

3rd story – I’m really not feeling these “scary” stories. This is a tale about a sleazy father sexually abusing his son using a monkey mask and a razor, and the son’s plot for revenge when he becomes an adult.

4th story – a mid-movie tie-together of the first three tales, this one has a woman holding a boy captive in her hunt for something evil that comes disguised as a boy.

5th story – a magician uses a deformed man monster as part of his act.

6th story – a female jogger is terrorized by an eye plucking psycho in the park.

7th story – a couple’s game involving campfire tales gets dark fast.

8th story – like the fourth story, this one begins to sum up all the stories, seems to bleed into the wraparound, returns to the story, then back to the wraparound…yeah. I really didn’t understand the overall point of the tie-in. Even so, a few of the stories were kind of creepy on their own.

THE BLACK BOOK (2021)

Ari Lehman, the original young drowning Jason in Friday the 13th, is the clerk at a bookstore in the wraparound. A man comes in and buys a particular book, but Ari warns him never to open it or read it. Lucky for us, the dude goes home and delves right in.

1st story – I felt like I was watching the opening scene of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. This short tale is in black and white and takes place in the 1950s. A couple is parked in their car in the woods and things get very hairy.

2nd story – this short is filled with excess just to get to its point. Three young girls sneak into an abandoned warehouse and witness a bunch of men torturing another man while demanding to know more about “the sorcerer”. It’s mostly torture, minimal plot.

3rd story – this is how not to do a backwoods horror story. A mother and her daughter move into a house, we get some uninspired atmosphere, and then the mother sees the daughter disappear into the woods. I rolled my eyes when the mom ran outside and encountered a “scary” redneck.

4th story – this tale has been done before. A dude gets dangerously drawn into a snuff website.

5th story – this is a short alien/zombie hybrid tale that doesn’t cover any new ground.

The wraparound conclusion story is kind of dumbfounding. Basically it’s the Candyman/Bloody Mary concept, but a) you have to say a sentence so long that it needs to be written on the mirror for anyone to get it right, and b) when you say the sentence into the mirror, you conjure a college professor.

No, I’m not kidding. I guess that could be terrifying if you’re afraid he’s going to teach your kid CRT or say gay, but to the rest of us, it’s as dull as sitting through a classroom lecture.

V/H/S 94 (2021)

The popular found footage anthology franchise is back. This time a SWAT team infiltrates a warehouse and finds dead cult members…and videos, of course. Roll the tape.

1st story – this is perhaps my favorite story in the bunch in terms of establishing atmosphere and delivering a few jump scares from hell. A reporter and her cameraman enter an underground tunnel in search of the local legend known as the rat man. EEK!

2nd story – more great atmosphere is established in this tale of a young woman hosting a wake all on her own at a funeral home at night during a thunderstorm. No one shows, the closed casket starts banging, the lights go out, and the truth of what happened to the body inside comes out. DOUBLE EEK!

3rd story – this feels like the longest story in the bunch. It also looks like a super gory first person shooter video game. Busting into a lab where a crazy scientist is fusing humans and machines, a military team quickly realizes one has gotten away.

4th story – an extremist “take back America” militia group plans to blow up a government building…using explosive vampire blood. But the vampire they have imprisoned gets loose in their compound and things gets nice and gory.

The wraparound conclusion about the fate of the SWAT team is the weakest part of the entire movie, especially compared to some of the wraparounds in previous installments.

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Digging into my Stephen King movie collection part 6

Posted on May 2, 2022 by Daniel

Sometimes I come back to bring my series of Stephen King posts to a close, and this is one of those sometimes, so let’s get right into three from the 2000s.

HEARTS IN ATLANTIS (2001)

Hearts in Atlantis combines King’s nostalgia narrative style with his penchant for characters with psychic powers, and in its film form it is a relatively mellow experience.

A widowed woman rents a room to an older man, played by Anthony Hopkins. Soon her young son builds a strong bond with Hopkins. They spend a lot of time together, and Hopkins admits to the boy that men in dark clothes and hats are hunting for him.

Meanwhile, the mother is constantly suspicious that Hopkins might be looking to go pedo on her son. Not the case. The boy is actually falling for his little female friend and Hopkins is nurturing that relationship.

Amazing how straight tweens always fall madly in love in Stephen King novels, yet you don’t see crazy conservatives banning this type of grooming material from libraries…

The film is fairly disappointing. The men coming for Hopkins barely pose any threat or add any suspense to the story. Hopkins rarely uses his mind-reading powers. And when he does, it’s to shame the main kid’s bully, who regularly hurls gay slurs at the kid.

Hopkins calls him out on it because he can see that the bully likes to go home and dress in his mother’s clothes. This weird sort of defense against a homophobic riddled attack by use of another anti-gay attack is basically revisited later when the main kid gets his revenge on the bully, who we now know is queer, by beating him with a baseball bat. WTF?

Anyway, the film tries to go into heartstring pulling territory, with Hopkins unjustly being ripped from the boy’s life, but I wasn’t filled with emotion when all was said and done. I just think these kinds of films worked best in the 1980s…when Spielberg made them…and John Williams orchestrated…

FIRESTARTER 2: REKINDLED (2002)

This made-for-TV sequel that King had nothing to do with was a miniseries, so it suffers from the usual problem…too drawn out into 3 hours when 2 hours would have been fine.

The first half of the film is heavily filled with flashbacks retelling and often rewriting the events of the first movie with different actors. These are presented mostly as dreams that haunt Charlie (no longer played by Drew Barrymore).

Cutie Danny Nucci plays a worker at a research firm who is unknowingly hunting down Charlie for the character Rainbird, originally played by George C. Scott, but now portrayed by Malcom McDowell.

Unknowingly, while doing his job and getting closer to Charlie (so close that we get to see him shirtless and get a glimpse of his upper butt), Nucci is actually leading Rainbird right to her.

Meanwhile, Rainbird is gathering together a bunch of little boys who also have a variety of unique powers.

Seriously, the fun doesn’t begin until halfway into the film when Charlie has her first battle of the psychic powers with these boys.

After that, Dennis Hopper also joins the cast as someone from her dad’s past—a pretty unnecessary inclusion that is also one of the alterations in the plot from the first movie. There are plenty of chase scenes and also plenty of chat scenes (yawn), but the final battle, when both the boys and Charlie pretty much wipe out an entire town, is good cheap sequel fun.

DOLAN’S CADILLAC (2009)

This movie is based on a story from the King collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and it’s quite clear this should have been a short film in an anthology and not a movie. It was agonizing to sit through.

Wes Bentley is a teacher married to horror veteran Emmanuelle Vaugier. While out horseback riding, she witnesses sleazoid Christian Slater kill drivers of a truck transporting immigrant refugee women.

While those women are sold into sex trafficking by Slater, he also has Vaugier hunted down, despite she and Wes being put into witness protection. The only horror moment comes when they find a corpse in their house.

Vaugier is killed and then Wes decides he must get revenge. This is where it’s all downhill. First of all, I have no idea how he figures out Slater’s identity or how to track him, but he begins following him. He gets a gun. He becomes a construction worker. And it’s all part of his plan of vengeance.

Nothing happens beyond one encounter between Slater and Wes in a public restroom, which makes it confusing that they suddenly seem like lifelong enemies in the final act. At this point Wes creates a huge booby trap in a desert road. Once Slater and his car are both in it, they spend a chunk of time in a verbal battle that makes you question why they were ever considered A-list actors. The performances are eye-rolling, and there’s no good reason for Wes to keep Slater alive for so long when the ultimate torture (and the plan) is to just bury him alive…. An awful execution of a typical revenge flick plot.

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Gay horror: a psychosexual short and a religious extremist slasher

Posted on April 29, 2022 by Daniel

Yay! It’s a gay horror double feature from two directors I cover as quickly as they release new material, and two more to add to the homo horror movies page. So let’s get right into them.

BLEEP: A SERIAL KILLER’S DOG

Pete Jacelone is known for making morbid homoerotic horror flicks, and this short film sticks to the trend somewhat. However, it also explores a familiar horror theme through a queer lens: loneliness.

Our narrating killer reveals the details of just one of the many murders he’s committed.

What unravels is an often uncomfortable and icky presentation of his deep love affair with a slowly rotting corpse. It’s also tragically sad if you can look past the more perverse details.

The dog angle, which is ultimately the most unique aspect of the story, is perhaps relegated to the background too much considering it gives the film its name and adds an incredibly complex layer to the plot.

The killer has a beloved dog to keep him company (as lonely people often do). Bleep is there every step of the way. Bleep gets a hint of attention from the young man the killer brings home. Bleep barks with anxiety when the killer commits his crime. And Bleep snuggles in bed right alongside the killer and the corpse.

And eventually, for a fleeting instant, we see how Bleep’s interest in the corpse is in danger of changing dramatically. Jacelone, who is not one to pull any punches, totally does here. I was rather surprised Bleep’s hunger for the corpse wasn’t used as the reason the killer has to keep killing—imagine if just when he’s beginning to nest with his corpse boyfriend, it starts turning into a tasty treat for Bleep, so the killer is forced to dispose of the body and start the process all over, hence becoming a serial killer so his dog doesn’t become a mannibal (you know…a man eating dog). Now that’s a plot that could have been extended into a full-length film, and perhaps Pete Jacelone will expand on this one later on down the line.

To learn more about Bleep: A Serial Killer’s Dog and Pete Jacelone’s other movies, take a look at his site.

CHILDREN OF SIN (2022)

This one comes from Chris Moore, a prolific indie director and one of my social media horror buddies. You could consider it a slasher, but it’s important to note that it’s a good while before we get to the bulk of the slashing. The beginning and end feel like two different movies.

For starters, it’s a heavy-handed film about how religious extremist parents can negatively affect their children. A mother of two teens has entered a relationship ship with a God-loving nut…just the kind of man you don’t want co-parenting a sexually active daughter and a gay son.

To make them pay for their sins, he has the siblings sent to a religious retreat where the woman calling the shots is a total psycho!

I’ll say right up front that Chris doesn’t go for a campy or exploitative approach to the subject matter this time around, and for me personally, this kind of material is not my thing. It’s important to recognize that awful things go on at these religious camps, but I’m not compelled to wallow in the misery of their existence when I’m indulging in horror. In particular, as much as I always appreciate gay themes in horror, I am not particularly drawn to plots with gays being victimized by religious nuts. I prefer positive gay horror…the very reason the horny, happy gay guys in my Comfort Cove fiction series fight ghosts, demons, and monsters in between all their orgies and gang bangs.

Naturally, the darker subject matter presented here may appeal to some gay fans, but it could also be traumatizing for those who are sensitive to such material. However, here is where the big surprise comes in.

In the last 20 minutes, Children of Sin morphs into a fast-paced slasher, and it’s a fricking blast, with the loony lady brutally unleashing her insanity on all the kids she’s trying to “help”.

I personally ate up the final act because the film puts a pause on the gloom and doom reality of religious camps. It’s more in keeping with Chris Moore’s slasher Triggered, which still carries some social significance but is more gay positive and fun.

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PRIME TIME: it’s slasher time again!

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Daniel

I’m never one to turn down the promise of some slashing fun, so I checked out a trio that spans the past decade on my Prime watchlist. Was there fun to be had? Let’s find out.

MUNGER ROAD (2011)

Thanks to IMDb, I went into this one aware that it had a “to be continued” ending and the sequel was never made, so I was prepared for loose ends. Unfortunately, everything about this movie is loose…beginning, middle, and end.

The numerous reviews on IMDb claiming it’s a great slasher filled with jump scares that is just missing a tidy ending are all clearly bogus. There wasn’t a single jump scare, and there weren’t any kills—a few may have been implied in the last fifteen minutes, but we are not sure if those people actually died because they screamed off-screen.

It’s also hugely disappointing that the premise has a small town supposedly preparing for a fall festival when an imprisoned lunatic escapes…yet we never even get to the day of the festival. WTF?

Somehow Bruce Davison ended up in the film as the sheriff. As always, the mayor doesn’t want to stop the money-making event because of the possible threat. So Bruce and his deputy spend the night patrolling the town. Every scene is too dark, I never had any idea where they were in the town or what really led them there, and they do nothing but talk out loud to each other about the nonexistent mystery they’re trying to solve.

Meanwhile, two straight couples head to Munger Road to see if there’s any truth to a legend that says if you park on the train tracks, the ghosts of kids who died in a bus accident will push your car off the tracks. The film fails to make even that interesting or suspenseful…and also keeps it all too dark for us to see anything.

Then the kids head home, their car breaks down, and they slowly split up and disappear. Finally, Bruce and his deputy find one of the kids in a house, turn on a video camera the kids had with them, and we get the dreaded “to be continued” that never happened. As disappointing as this film is, it’s made even worse by the fact that there was no sequel to at least tie any of the plot points together. And considering mostly nothing happens, I can’t fathom why the filmmaker didn’t just edit the script for this film and the sequel into one faster-paced, more interesting movie with an actual ending.

SHHHH (2014)

This slasher gives off a very indie vibe, and even taps into that low budget 80s slasher feel a bit, which was the aspect I enjoyed the most. I was expecting it to be more of a horror comedy based on the artwork, the plot description, and the title. Instead, it seems to take itself kind of seriously. Either that or the tone is just not quite hitting the mark.

The basic premise is that this wannabe filmmaker nerd can’t stand all the different types of people that make distracting noises at movie theaters. It seems those deplorables are the ones that start getting killed off, but the death scenes don’t take place inside the theater, which kind of makes the whole point of the plot fall apart.

So there are kills, the main guy starts dating a pretty girl who is also an aspiring filmmaker, and he tries to juggle dating her and nurturing his relationship with his loving mother.

Meanwhile, there are two cops trying to solve the case of the mounting body count. Their scenes really kill the pacing and add nothing to the movie. I wasn’t exactly drawn in by any sort of whodunit angle—it was more like a “who are all these random people they’re talking to and why are they dressed like frat boys?” angle.

The indie feel comes in the way of various exploitative moments, like a pregnant woman being gutted and strangled with her baby’s umbilical cord, a long and loud blow job scene, and a scene of a guy on the crapper with plenty of explosive poop noises, of course. I’ll never comprehend how filmmakers become convinced their movie can only get better if they add a shit scene, as if that’s where all the movie magic is.

On top of that, we get flashbacks of the main guy’s troubled childhood, which is intended to make us believe this momma’s boy is the killer, but it’s not very convincing.

The bizarre series of events at the end aren’t all that bizarre if you grew up on tons of 80s slashers and Euro horror, but they definitely feel disjointed from what comes before them. I think Shhhh loses its way simply because it doesn’t remain within the confines of the theater.

VENOM COAST (2021)

What we have here is basically Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and other similar backwoods family movies) on a boat. It’s all been done before (although not on a boat), however one thing that stands out is that this family isn’t comprised of your usual religious extremist hillbilly nuts. They’re more like left wing hillbilly nuts that want to take down the 1%. Awesome.

A group of pretty young white people (I guess that automatically makes them the 1%) is invited to come party on some clean-cut dude’s boat. Little do they know he’s a psycho killer.

Once on board, they are soon falling victim to the crazy family, which includes the matriarch, a hippy looking grandpa, a burnout dude, and a big Leatherface clone in a dress they keep chained up way too long, because he would have rocked as the main killer. Instead, he’s introduced nearly an hour in.

The film had potential to be suspenseful, scary, and gory, and does include some pretty whacky scenes, with our baddies presenting themselves in a variety of bizarre costumes.

Unfortunately, in order to up the body count, the coast guard boards the ship and is basically like a fully-armed military. It just really spoils any sense of urgency.

There’s also a totally odd epilogue that feels too detached from the thick of the movie’s story arc.

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Some late 80s additions to my Blu-ray collection

Posted on April 19, 2022 by Daniel

The 80s really is the decade that just keeps giving and giving, so I was psyched to add three more titles to my always growing library. This trio takes us from 1985 to 1990.

HARD ROCK ZOMBIES (1985)

This crazy little film doesn’t even wait to go off the rails. It’s as messy as 80s horror gets.

It starts with a young woman luring a young man into some skinny-dipping while a short dude, a wolf man, and a tall man with a camera spectate.

Then we meet a “hard rock band”…that plays some of the best power pop new wave that should have been hits in the 80s. Only once at the end of the film is there a montage with a song that actually resembles hard rock. Hell, in one of the many montages in this film, these guys with long hair even dance. That was a total taboo for hard rock guys with long hair back in the 80s.

Anyway, this weird film has the faux hard rock guys come to a bizarre town. One guy falls for the skinny-dipping girl, there are werewolf people, there’s Hitler and Nazis, and 45 minutes into the movie it gets to the point—the townsfolk kill the band members and then resurrect them as zombies.

The zombies then go on a rampage turning the Nazis into zombies.

I don’t know what the hell I was watching, but the movie rocked (or new waved) in a totally retro 80s way.

The musical highlight is a montage featuring a power ballad with a girl’s name as the title. Ah, the 80s. Rosanna, Carrie, Gloria, Sherrie, Veronica, Jenny Jenny, Amanda, Eileen, Billie Jean, Elvira, Baby Jane, Nikki, Joanna, and thanks to this movie…Cassie…

THE AMERICAN SCREAM (1988)

80s horror doesn’t get any more WTF? than this. It feels like no one involved in The American Scream had a plan going into it. I guess the best way to describe it is as Children of the Corn with the protagonists and antagonists flipped…and a bunch of nonsense tossed in to fill the time due to a non-existent script(?).

A family wins a trip to a resort. It might be Christmas because there are hints of the season once they get to the resort, but nothing substantial.

The gang consists of a mother and father (the mother played by Oscar Goldman’s secretary Peggy from The Bionic Woman), a totally 80s cute son and his buddy, and a daughter and her friend. The mother and father seem like they’re not normal, almost as if they’re living in another world. The son’s buddy seems like he’s psychotic right from the start. This all just complicates matters when the resort town is inhabited by adults only and they all act openly crazy.

Even worse, no one in the family seems to think they need to get the fuck out. This dilemma starts during the ride there, when all four kids are in the back of a station wagon, see a couple in the car behind them beat a baby to a bloody pulp on the dashboard…and then just go on about their business of going to the resort.

It’s that bad. Even worse, there are barely any kills, and when there are, the film is edited in such a way that you have no idea what is going on.

There’s a lot of time spent at a polka dance party, then late in the game some mysterious dude all in black comes across as the leader of the crazy adults. At that point, the kids decide the only way to survive is to dress up as adults. Huh? Instead of looking like adults, they look like kids playing adults in really bad costumes in a high school play.

There’s a message here about adults being afraid of youth bringing change to society, but it’s buried in a mess of a movie.

NIGHT ANGEL (1990)

The director of Halloween 5 and Omen IV proves that sometimes you’re much better off making your own movie than hopping on a cash cow to make a name for yourself. Night Angel rocks!

A she demon crawls up from the ground and transforms into a sexual seductress. She gets work at a fashion magazine run by Karen Black and begins banging her way through the men there, often killing them, while making Karen her demon bitch.

The main guy is dating Karen’s sister and gets sucked into the demon’s web.

He has some wild nightmares and visits a hellish sex club of the deformed, tortured, and mutilated.

It felt like something out of a Clive Barker movie adaptation, and it freaking rocks the horrific imagery.

We even have a young Doug Jones, who went on to become a horror icon, as one of the demon’s bitches. He even does a funky dance with her early on.

Finally, the main guy and his girlfriend take on the demon with the help of the typical wise old mystic lady.

When we get to see the demon in her real form, she is horror perfection.

Night Angel is a feast for the eyes for lovers of practical effects.

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Digging into my Stephen King movie collection part 5

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Daniel

Actually, I’m digging into Stephen King adaptations for television this time around, including two miniseries and a short-lived anthology series.

ROSE RED (2002)

Legend has it that Stephen King wanted to team up with Steven Spielberg to create the most terrifying haunted house movie ever, but they just couldn’t agree on the direction it should take, so they went their separate ways and King came up with this.

He should have stuck with Spielberg.

The miniseries takes the Shirley Jackson classic The Haunting of Hill House and manages to make it even duller and more convoluted. That’s right, I said it. Her novel, the movie adaptations, the Netflix series, the rip-off movie The Legend of Hell House—they’re all one more agonizingly boring than the other. But Red Rose takes the cake.

Probably the biggest problem is that King wrote a screenplay like he was writing a novel. There’s so much bland exposition that goes on and on and does nothing to develop the scares or the characters in film format. All it succeeded in doing was dragging this shit out for three nights.

A teacher gathers together a bunch of psychics to go to an abandoned mansion ripe with a tragic history of murder and mayhem. Her young lover is about to inherit the place, so he comes along.

Aside from loads of standing around and talking for the hours and hours this movie runs, there are some cheesy effects, people running and screaming at the sight of things we never see, and everyone tossing their psychic powers around to confuse the haunting aspects even more. Oh…and the house keeps changing its architecture as in the 13 Ghosts remake. And just to be clear on the effort put into ramping up the fear factor…there’s a cheap rat scare in the final act.

Do yourself a favor if you want chills, thrills, and popcorn movie fun—skip anything based on The Haunting of Hill House and go straight to Vincent Price in The House on Haunted Hill.

NIGHTMARES & DREAMSCAPES (2006)

This one-season series featured one-hour episodes based on tales from King’s short story collections. Here’s what you get, and unless otherwise noted, the stories come from the fiction collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes:

1st episode – In a tale from Night Shift that plays out entirely with no dialogue, William Hurt is an assassin who kills a toymaker and is then terrorized by toy army soldiers in his apartment. This one is a nonstop action thrill ride.

2nd episode – This is a tale of a husband and wife that get sucked into a monstrous dimension while on their way to a prospective employer’s home for dinner—even after a cab driver warns them not to go there (at which point the husband’s racism shows). I was reminded of a Twilight Zone episode in which a couple spends the episode running around a deserted town, only this one features much more chaos and very 2006 CGI monsters.

3rd episode – This one has a campy 1930s charm, as a private detective discovers he is merely the womanizing fictional character of a successful author that wants to swap places with him (William H. Macy in a dual role). It feels like an episode of Spielberg’s 1980s show Amazing Stories, with a cutesy retro tone that wears thin fast.

4th episode – a documentary filmmaker trying to cope with the horrors of the world looks back at how his brother discovered a town that was totally crime-free then attempted to replicate that magic worldwide. Boring episode, but it was fun to hear Texas name-dropped as the state with the most violent crimes.

5th episode – in this tale from the collection Everything’s Eventual, Tom Berenger plays a famous author who gets bad news during a colonoscopy. He buys a painting at an estate sale of an evil man in a car, and then finds himself being stalked. The painting is hella creepy and so is the driver.

6th episode – Jeremy Sisto is released from prison on probation and swears he’s going to clean up his act. But then he learns his ex-prison mate has spread pieces of a map out to various guys Sisto has to hunt down to score a treasure.

7th episode – this is another story from Everything’s Eventual. Richard Thomas finds himself in a body bag in a morgue after a golf game and totally experiencing everything that’s happening to his body (including an anal probe). He starts to piece together in his mind what actually happened to him…by gasping his thoughts out loud in a stream of conscience narrative for an hour.

8th episode – another story that feels right out of Amazing Stories, this one stars Steven Weber. While he and his wife are on a road trip, they stop in a small town that seems to be rock and roll heaven, for all the most famous deceased rock stars live there.

BAG OF BONES (2011)

Now this is how you do a Stephen King miniseries. It also helps that it was only two parts when aired, so without commercials it clocks in at under three hours, making it more concise than that Red Rose mess.

It also has that classic King narrative style, bringing to mind plot techniques of many of his best storytelling from his earlier period of writing, including everything from The Shining to Pet Sematary.

Pierce Brosnan is excellent as an author who loses his wife in a tragic accident then escapes to their summer house by a lake to try to grieve.

He immediately begins receiving signs that his wife is attempting to communicate with him. He’s also victimized by some very unhappy ghostly apparitions. On top of that, he’s drawn into a residual haunting by an alluring Black female singer of the past.

Meanwhile, in the real world he becomes implicated in a custody battle involving horror veteran Melissa George and her nasty old wealthy father-in-law, whose female assistant is deliciously evil.

The film moves at an excellent pace for a miniseries, with clear character development that doesn’t overdue it, as well as a slowly unfolding supernatural mystery that keeps you engrossed. And I’ll be damned if there aren’t quite a few highly effective jump scares the likes of which I haven’t experienced in a Stephen King miniseries since Salem’s Lot and It.

The denouement in the final act reveals a classic King backstory, and you should be warned there is rape and racism involved. You should also be warned that there are a few really hokey moments involving good ghosts. Let’s just say it’s the kind of stuff that works great in pulling the heartstrings in Ghost, but not in Stephen King.

 

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PRIME TIME: hungry zombies and some deep horror

Posted on April 15, 2022 by Daniel

I couldn’t find a third zombie flick to watch to make this a triple feature, so I just tossed in a random movie to cross off my way-too-long Prime list, and it sure was a different subgenre than zombie horror. Let’s get right to them.

DEADLOCKED (2020)

This is a short, low budget indie about a motley crew that gets trapped on an elevator during an unexplained zombie outbreak.

On board we have an arrogant actor, an introverted girl with asthma, a cute cop, a muscle hunk, and a smart, brave young woman. The elevator comes to a halt, and over time they slowly figure out the predicament they’re in.

The film really doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere for quite a while, and when they finally open the doors a crack between floors, we’re subjected to several predictable and repetitive jump scares of zombie faces poking in.

It’s when the brave young woman decides to climb out and get back to her apartment that things finally pick up. She has a camera attached to her so those in the elevator can view her progress, and the POV and action temporarily give off a Quarantine feel. Definitely the highlight of the film.

Eventually the whole group escapes and has to contend with a small onslaught of zombies, and it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Also, there’s not much in the way of zombie makeup, but their movement and some of the setup shots are quite effective.

THE CURSE OF HOBBES HOUSE (2020)

This is a fresh approach to the zombie genre that leads right to the classic zombie dilemma—how to escape a house that has been surrounded.

A young woman comes to the mansion of her deceased aunt for the reading of the will. Also present is her half-sister and the half-sister’s boyfriend, a woman overseeing the proceedings, and the aunt’s faithful servant.

It takes some time for this one to get going as the relationships are established, but when the first zombie appears, it’s a zinger that gave me a good jump scare and reminded me of a Deadite.

Also important to note is that these cool zombies are fast runners and make squealing noises, and they also have glowing eyes, which I saw people online criticize in Night of the Living Dead: Rebirth, but which I find to be pretty cool.

The action is fairly typical, but it’s the satisfying type of typical, so if you need a zombie fix, don’t hesitate to check this one out.

THE POND (2021)

The Pond is definitely not for me, but if you love elevated horror, this is probably one you shouldn’t miss. This shit goes deep. Translation: it felt like I was digging a six-foot deep grave I then couldn’t climb out of.

A super slow burn steeped in folk horror, religion, and philosophical perspectives on existence, it’s about an anthropology professor who gets canned from his job because his research seems too far-fetched.

He believes perhaps we aren’t even tapping into all the senses at our disposal and are therefore missing out on aspects of life that are there but we’re just not seeing. Meanwhile, his daughter is insisting that she literally keeps seeing a monster…yet he tells her it’s not real and just in her dreams. WTF? Hypocrite.

There are also several odd characters surrounding him in this rural area in which they’re living, and their presence adds to the mystery and confusion as to what exactly is really going on. Creepiest are a dude who seems like a lost soul with a screw loose and two young girls who subtly torment his daughter and seem like they would summon Slenderman, Candyman, and Bloody Mary at midnight on Halloween while standing on a serial killer’s grave just for the fun of it.

The film is visually arresting throughout, and there’s a spooky figure I like to call twig head.

However, this is in no way a boo! scare horror movie. A lot of patience and quite a bit of mind flexing are necessary to appreciate what this flick is going for.

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A killer octopus, a back baby, and a horror anthology

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Daniel

It’s a return to the late 1970s with this trio of flicks I just picked up on Blu-ray. I regret nothing, so let’s take a look.

TENTACLES (1977)

It’s yet another killer creature of the deep film that came out in the wake of the Jaws box office numbers. This one is an Italian film that somehow lined up the likes of Shelley Winters, Henry Fonda, Claude Akins, John Huston, and Bo Hopkins.

For starters, I’ll just say that the biggest failure of this octopus film is the horrible Euro horror music cues that, as usual, never fit the tone of what is actually happening on screen and make everything feel like a whimsical action sequence.

The only scene I remembered from this film, which I literally saw decades ago as a tween, turns out to be the opener, because it involves the murder of a baby. Yay! But seriously, it’s so ridiculous. A woman is with her baby in its stroller by a rocky edge of the shore that drops off into the water. A friend pulls up on the far side of a two lane street, so this fucking Karen leaves the baby to go say hi.

There are quickly a series of deaths to get us hooked, as well as a jump scare from hell. Then we meet all the famous people in the movie and get the basic plot–a tunnel is being built under the bay, and radio signals are causing the octopus to go nuts. Just the octopus? No other animal life at all? Weird.

There are plenty of underwater scenes, some funny octopus ink attacks, shots of the octo eye and octo legs, and even some awesome shots of the octopus sinking boats.

But in exchange there are loads of very long montages of a boating race set to that horrible Euro muzak.

And in the end, the solution to taking down the octopus is a couple of killer whales.

It cools that it’s an octopus flick instead of yet another shark film, but it’s no Jaws.

THE MANITOU (1978)

More than 40 years before Malignant, there was…The Manitou!

Not to be upstaged in the horror genre by his wife and daughter, Tony Curtis jumped into the fray a few times, including here, where he plays a psychic who finds himself drawn into a very supernatural situation.

His woman has the demonic spirit of a Native American medicine man growing out of her back in fetus form. This is precisely why abortion needs to be legal.

There are some wild scenes, including one of Curtis’s clients floating down the hall of his building, and more importantly, the little man Native American demon that eventually emerges from the woman’s back.

There’s also a lot of filler as Curtis seeks out various means of help leading up to the wild final act when the birth occurs.

And then this shit totally jumps the shark, with a portal opened into another dimension that looks like outer space, the Native American little demon man floating around, and his involuntary mother floating around in her hospital bed shooting lasers out of her fingers. Sigh.

So, yeah…Malignant did it better.

SCREAMS OF A WINTER NIGHT (1979)

Although this is an anthology film, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the wraparound inspired Raimi to make Evil Dead. It concerns a group of friends heading to a cabin in the woods. They stop at a gas station on the way and their gas is pumped by a young William Ragsdale of Fright Night fame.

When they arrive at the ramshackle cabin, one guy shows them a grave site and tells stories of a family believed to have been killed by a Native American spirit.

Finally, 25 minutes in, they gather in the cabin to tell stories. Adding to the fun, the same actors play the characters in the stories.

Adding even more to the fun, the Blu-ray includes the long version, which features a bonus tale cut from the original theatrical release. Here’s the breakdown:

1st story – this is a take on a classic urban legend we would see again in Urban Legend. A couple gets stuck on a road at night, he leaves to get gas, and something chases him in the woods. Back at the car a while later, she hears something scratching at the roof of the car….

2nd stort – guys sneak into a supposedly haunted building for a frat initiation, and when they go to investigate a noise, they split up. The short ends with a creepy and odd discovery by one of the guys. It’s the kind of final frame that would have been the stuff of nightmares when I was a kid.

3rd story – this is a tale of a witch buried outside the cemetery, and the stupid buddies who go to visit that cemetery. Eek!

4th story – this final tale shows you just what a problem horror has always had with chauvinism. A young woman goes on a date with a guy, he tries to rape her, and she kills him. So you’d think that would make her a man-hating killer, right? Nope. SPOILER: she ends up going to college, snaps, and kills her female roommate that borrowed her cardigan sweater without asking. WTF?

The wraparound delivers on the Evil Dead vibes right up to the conclusion, when the gang is finally targeted by the mysterious force believed to have killed that family in the woods.

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NETFLIX AND CHILLS: escaped psychos, ghost hunters, and a rookie exorcist

Posted on April 12, 2022 by Daniel

Once again I’m kicking myself for doing a marathon of Netflix horror movies. So it’s time for you to either suffer the way I did, or perhaps find one that sounds right up your alley.

THE TRIP (2021)

I don’t know. I guess this is a home invasion/almost gay rape-revenge flick. It’s nearly two hours long and that’s just one of the reasons it’s so not my thing.

A straight couple heads to a house in the woods, neither partner realizing the other partner has sinister plans for them.

While they’re both in the middle of solving their relationship problems in all the wrong ways, they get another unexpected surprise—three escaped psychos are hiding out in the house.

After a long scene of the male partner under the threat of being raped by one of the psychos, who’s gay (landing this on the does the gay guy die? page), the captured couple starts to fight back.

There’s loads of over-the-top violence, shit humor, the gay guy plucking a bullet out of another psycho’s ass, the type of out of sequence narration made famous by Taranatino films, and…well, that’s about it.

If you’re into all that, you should have a blast with this one. A bit of a slow start, but after about 25 minutes it’s a wild ride.

MALEVOLENT (2018)

Why do I keep doing this to myself and watching these ghost hunter movies?

This isn’t a found footage movie, but that doesn’t help. It takes place in the 1980s and even has a club scene featuring the dance hit “IOU” by Freeez, but that doesn’t help. Unless you just adore ghost hunter movies, there’s so much more you could do with this 90 minutes.

A brother and sister team does scam ghost hunts. But on their latest case the sister hears voices and is afraid she’s going nuts like her deceased mom did before committing suicide.

A woman asks them to chase away screaming girl ghosts in her home.

The home where she had fifteen foster girls. The home where simple research turns up the fact that her son was believed to have killed them all after sewing their mouths shut.

The story arc is obvious, the scares are lacking (unless little girl ghosts standing in the background still scare you). This movie simply did nothing for me.

THE SEVENTH DAY (2021)

This film almost had me, and it offers a couple of promising premises, but in the end the execution is just so generic it falls quite flat.

It begins with horror veteran Keith David as a priest doing an exorcism on a little kid with a rookie priest by his side.

We then meet the rookie years later, played by Guy Pearce, and he is now an unconventional mentor to another rookie exorcist on his first day. They go to perform an exorcism on a homeless person under on overpass, and this felt like it was going to be a different kind of buddy exorcist movie.

But that possibility fades fast.

The rookie becomes the focus as he takes on a case of a young boy who axed his family to death and is believed to be possessed and in need of an exorcism. The possession and exorcism elements are sooooo run-of-the-mill here, and even though there’s a good twist as to what the real problem is, it simply doesn’t manage to pack the punch it should. There is, however, some priest on priest action…

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