Sometimes I ask myself why I keep coming back for more Stephen King movies not from the 1980s. I’m just a sucker for Stephen, and there’s at least little enjoyment to be had with these three, so let’s find out where that horror happiness stems from.
DESPERATION (2006)
When we think of fantastic performances in Stephen King adaptations, we think Kathy Bates in Misery, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Dee Wallace in Cujo—but we should also take note of Ron Perlman in Desperation.
The tragedy is that he disappears midway through the movie due to the plot, at which point the entire film loses steam. If you ask me, King should have revised his story for the screenplay in order to keep Perlman as the antagonist.
Driving along a desert road, numerous people are stopped and arrested by a freaky sheriff, played by Perlman.
He tosses them all in prison cells in a ghost town to do what with them we don’t know.
Working as his minions are loads of nature’s creatures, including spiders, buzzards, snakes, a mountain lion, and wolves.
At some point, Perlman takes a woman from the prison to pass on to her a demon that has been possessing him, and then he’s gone. After that, this becomes a generic, totally forgettable, good vs. evil, made-for-TV movie with way too much talk about and metaphorical shit concerning God and Jesus. Cool cast though—Steven Weber, Tom Skerritt, Charles Durning, Henry Thomas…
And as a subliminal PSA, Skerritt wears protection when he comes upon a dangerous looking hole…
BIG DRIVER (2014)
This flick is based on a novella from the collection Full Dark, No Stars, and it just feels like King is at a loss for new ideas and resorting to giving basic old premises a King touch.
This is a rape/revenge story. How it differs from other similar stories is that the victim here is an author, and to get revenge, she relies on an “imaginary friend” in the form of a character from her novel…played by Olympia Dukakis. Weird.
This was originally a Lifetime Channel movie, yet the rape scene manages to be very disturbing.
The main character gets a flat on a deserted road, a huge guy in a pickup truck stops to help her, and he then assaults her.
Rather than reporting the incident, she starts an investigation to track him down. That’s about it until the big final battle.
The most interesting thing to come out of this is Joan Jett in a small role, but the final act is satisfying enough for a fairly generic rape/revenge flick.
1922 (2017)
At some point it has to be all right for someone to admit not everything King writes is great, and the stuff that isn’t good shouldn’t be made into bad movies.
Adapted from a novella in the book Full Dark, No Stars, this is basically Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, with the beating heart replaced by rats and mooing cows. I can’t. I just can’t.
And therefore, I barely will. Thomas Jane’s wife wants to sell their farm and move. He convinces his son to help him kill her. They dump her down a well. Rats start eating her.
They dump one of their cows in on top of her—alive (the theme of animal cruelty I’ve been noticing in this series of Stephen King posts persists). They fill the hole with dirt.
Thomas Jane is terrorized by rats and mooing for the rest of the movie.
Even though Scooby and the gang almost always yank off the mask at the end to reveal a boring old human behind the monster, no doubt the Scooby-Doo cartoons were a gateway for many a horror fan. Due to their weekly ghoulish encounters, the characters made for perfect Halloween costumes as well. In fact, they even dressed up like each other a few times over the decades during their own Halloween celebrations through numerous versions of the show. However, not every Scooby-Doo Halloween lives up to the holiday for me. So let’s get to breaking them down.
THE SCOOBY-DOO SHOW:
THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN OF HALLOWEEN (1976)
I was just a kiddie when this one first aired on a Saturday morning, and I have to say, it’s classic 1970s Scooby-Doo with comedic mayhem and a laugh track, but it’s a huge Halloween disappointment.
It starts off perfect. The gang—including sometimes cousin/sometimes brother Scooby-Dum—is at a Halloween party in Sleepy Hollow at the home of descendants of Ichabod Crane.
When apple bobbing goes wrong, they encounter the Headless Horseman. Eek!
But the Halloween spirit is out the window fast when the specter crashes the party.
All the guests leave, the Headless Horseman exchanges his jack-o’ lantern for a human head, and then it’s just like any ordinary Scooby-Doo episode.
THE SCOOBY-DOO SHOW:
TO SWITCH A WITCH (1978)
It begins with an old man digging a grave at night and a witch burned at the stake rising from her burial ground. Now that’s some serious Scooby-Doo Halloween setup.
The gang is visiting a friend in Salem who happens to be a descendant of that witch, so the town suddenly turns into a lynch mob that wants to burn her for being a witch!
While the gang is determined to investigate, Scooby and Shaggy still want to trick or treat, and Scooby happens to dress as a witch that looks just like the resurrected witch. You can imagine the shenanigans that ensue as a result. The mystery romp takes us through a pumpkin patch, to a witch museum, and back to the graveyard for the finale.
Plenty of witchy stuff for sure, but there isn’t exactly any major holiday celebration going on in this episode—a little disappointing considering it’s Halloween in Salem.
THE NEW SCOOBY AND SCRAPPY-DOO SHOW: A HALLOWEEN HASSLE AT DRACULA’S CASTLE (1984)
This is the only Halloween episode to feature Scrappy. People fricking hate Scrappy, but I love me some puppies, so back in the early 80s when I was a tween, I was a fan.
We jump right into the Halloween spirit, with autumn leaves falling as the gang visits a costume store.
Little do they realize that the owner is Dracula when he invites them to a big Halloween party.
In fact, all the guests are actual classic monsters.
They sure do add to the Halloween vibe, but it’s kind of surprising to find Dracula’s castle doesn’t go all out with Halloween decorations. What a letdown.
What isn’t a letdown is the twist. It’s up to the gang to save the monsters from the ghost of Van Helsing on Halloween!
Too cool. There’s even a Ghostbusters reference in an episode that originally aired the very year the film came out. Trippy.
A PUP NAMED SCOOBY-DOO: GHOST WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1988)
This is from a series that featured the gang as kids.
They go trick or treating and learn the couple at one particular house is ready to sell because it’s being haunted by a pirate ghost. And this episode has not one, but two classic chase scene montages.
A couple of interesting things to note. First, the gang gets help solving the mystery from an actual little ghost named Mr. Boo.
Second, although nothing got accused of being “woke” back in the eighties when they dealt with societal truths (because there was no internet to amplify anger and hatred), this episode has a premise that would go over the heads of kids but is blatantly clear to an adult.
It’s an older Black couple that is being pushed out of their home so fat, wealthy white people can bulldoze their house to put up money-making restaurants. That shit isn’t fiction—it’s based totally on reality. And now the play on the title “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” all makes sense.
WHAT’S NEW, SCOOBY-DOO?
A SCOOBY-DOO HALLOWEEN (2003)
This is the gang’s first of two Halloween encounters with the band KISS. They travel to the home of Velma’s aunt and uncle, where KISS is headlining a festival for the holiday.
They soon learn of a local legend about a spirit that is going to return for revenge.
Sure there turns out to be a ghost, but better than the lame ghost are the evil scarecrows with sharp weapons. Awesome.
Not only do Scoob and Shag dress as each other for Halloween, but there’s also a fun in-joke for us genXers; a dude dressed as Hong Kong Phooey gets annoyed when a teenager doesn’t know who he’s supposed to be.
SCOOBY-DOO AND THE GOBLIN KING (2008)
The first major Halloween movie for the gang, this one really blows it except for one great scene that makes up for an earlier Halloween disaster.
It begins at a Halloween carnival, but the gang quickly gets kicked out after exposing a magician as a fraud.
From that point on, this Scooby-Doo movie goes on an acid trip.
The magician draws the magic from a fairy that looks like Tinker Bell dressed as Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi in order to steal powers from the goblin king of the underworld.
Scoob and Shag are sent by what is essentially the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland to cut him off at the pass.
In the underworld they encounter plenty of classic monsters, which leads to the highlight of the film—a kick-ass chase with the Headless Horseman, complete with the covered bridge. This totally makes up for that first ever Scooby Halloween disappointment.
Other notable aspects include Lauren Bacall voicing a witch and Tim Curry voicing the goblin king.
Unfortunately, this is so out of the realm of the silly reality in which regular Scooby-Doo mysteries are usually based that it doesn’t even feel like Scooby-Doo. However, we do get to see Scooby and Shaggy in Daphne and Velma drag.
SCOOBY-DOO! AND KISS:
ROCK AND ROLL MYSTERY (2015)
The Scooby gang once again meets KISS in a full-length feature that’s sort of like a sequel to the movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. And while it’s supposedly Halloween themed, there’s barely even any mention of the holiday, and not a decoration or pumpkin in sight. The whole point of the plot is to get rid of the baddie before a KISS Halloween concert even happens.
However, viewed as a “KISS meets the Scooby gang” movie, it totally rocks. The animated KISS action rules, especially Gene Simmons and his tongue.
The band has special powers, and they team up with the Scooby gang when a witch begins to terrorize their KISS amusement park.
Unfortunately, the witch kind of sucks. Rather than a traditional witch, she’s a futuristic sci-fi witch. I really wasn’t feeling the baddie at all.
Highlights include Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith doing the voices of two roller coaster workers at the beginning (not as Jay and Silent Bob), and music montages featuring KISS tracks like “Rock n Roll All Nite”, “Shout It Out Loud”, and “I Was Made for Lovin’ You”.
BE COOL, SCOOBY-DOO!
HALLOWEEN (2017)
This basic 20-minute episode is full of Halloween fun and a classic witch enemy.
Hell, she even looks like she lives in the Evil Dead cabin.
In this tale, Velma is a stick in the mud who feels like Halloween is a mockery, Daphne, Scoob, and Shag are totally ready to party, and Fred is afraid to celebrate because things always go bad at Halloween.
Highlights include a montage of Fred remembering Halloweens past, and Shag and Scoob doing their classic shtick of throwing the baddie off her game with their crazy antics.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN, SCOOBY-DOO! (2020)
This is the ultimate Scooby-Doo Halloween. It all starts with a Halloween theme song as Elvira hosts a parade and an evil scarecrow busts in to bring real terror to the haunted happenings.
Luckily the Scooby gang is well-equipped for such Halloween emergencies at this point (they’ve been doing this for 5 decades, after all).
I’m not a comic book guy, but apparently this scarecrow dude is a crossover from the Batman universe. However, he’s not the real threat.
In a total horror movie moment, Scoob and Shag go trick or treating and witness toxic waste leaking into a pumpkin patch, leading to the growth of a giant walking pumpkin and little pumpkin minions.
A good chunk of the film becomes a car chase scene, with Elvira in her hearse and the gang in a technologically advanced Mystery Machine with a Bill Nye hologram as their guide.
The Halloween spirit couldn’t be any better, and we even get to see Fred with his shirt off and dancing with a guy dressed in a Fred Flintstone costume at the end.
TRICK OR TREAT, SCOOBY-DOO! (2022)
I’m loving how they keep pumping out Halloween installments, and this one will go down as infamous due to its blatant revelation about Velma’s sexual orientation.
For a Halloween movie, it was sort of annoying that Trick or Treat, Scooby-Doo! begins on a snowy mountain. The segment is short-lived though as the kids solve a case and then—this is brilliant—discover that many of the unmasked baddies in the cases they solve have been getting their costumes from the same company!
This movie does a great job of poking fun at the tropes of the Scooby gang through the years, so it’s easy for those who grew up on the show to appreciate the in-jokes.
Velma immediately falls head over heels for the babe who owns the costume company, whose gothic, ghoulish costume maker apprentice also reads as queer if you ask me.
Meanwhile, all Shaggy and Scooby want to do is trick or treat, but first the gang sets up a booth at a Halloween festival to draw business for Mystery, Inc. It works, because it’s not long before they are being terrorized by a family of ghosts.
There’s a classic chase montage in a creepy library (set to the Sweet classic “Ballroom Blitz”), and a montage of the gang fixing up the Mystery Machine to an awesome now wave song by Joseph Holiday called “Change”, which I believe was created just for this movie!
Considering the film is afforded a song with such an alternative vibe, I was bummed that the original theme song is reimagined in a sort of slower, folk rendition. Blech.
If there’s one major disappointment here, it’s that Scooby-Doo is not all that much of the focus. In fact, late in the game he has to remind everyone that the whole franchise is named after him, so I’m glad I’m not the only one that noticed he deserved more recognition. He and Shaggy just don’t get up to enough shenanigans together this time around. However, in the end, they do get to trick or treat.
I’ve seen it all before, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like seeing it again. A look at three familiar plots from a weekend marathon on Netflix.
NO ESCAPE ROOM (2018)
Yep, it’s another escape room movie. If you don’t like this trendy subgenre, then don’t even bother. If you do like it, you get more of what you expect, plus something a little different—that defies logic in the end.
An angsty teen daughter is stuck with her dad on a road trip. The car breaks down in the middle of bumfuck and they have to kill time while it’s being repaired. She smartly points out that the escape room attraction her father comes upon is probably not safe in hillbilly land. But…they go anyway.
Along with a handful of other people (including a hunk), they have to find their way out of an entire house, room by room, after being told a story of tragedy that occurred at the house and locked five people within its walls.
Hey, it has some cheap thrills and some okay suspense moments, and I didn’t in any way find it a waste of time.
But it definitely feels like it was left requiring a sequel for any of it to make sense, and an entire second movie just for that would be a waste of my time.
NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE (2021)
This fairly entertaining film is so filled with typical, repetitive scares that they just negate the quick pace. I’ve really had my fill of glimpses of ghostly apparitions in the background in horror movies. You get them ad nauseam here to the point that the main character runs through a room and they just keep popping up left and right. Sigh.
Anyway, this is the story of an undocumented immigrant who works a lousy job and takes a room in a cheap boarding house run by a man who only rents to women.
She immediately starts hearing odd noises and soon begins seeing those apparitions.
In the meantime, she struggles with some issues concerning her immigration status, but this isn’t a movie that is going to get the anti-woke crowd worked up—actually it will just because the word immigrant is used. However, her status really plays little part in the arc of the story other than the fact that she is perhaps considered an easier target for an evil plot that requires people to go missing and never be seen again.
It all comes down to there being something going on in the basement of the building. There’s definitely an awesome creature. Unfortunately, this movie absolutely fails to explain the rules of just how this legend works—it is based on a book, so perhaps it was made clearer in the novel.
For viewers it feels like a “chapter” is left out of the film. The main character finds herself chained up in a seemingly impossible to escape situation, and then suddenly…she’s just…free. Just like that. I did one of those “ending explained” searches on the internet and still wasn’t buying it. It’s infuriating, and it makes any thrills delivered in the denouement void of any impact whatsoever. And by the way, if you make a movie and then discover there are loads of “ending explained” posts about it on the internet…you fucked up.
DON’T KILL ME (2021)
When a movie starts with a guy speeding down a winding mountain road with his girl in the passenger seat guiding him to stay on the road as “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd plays, I’m definitely immediately immersed in the action.
After that, Don’t Kill Me becomes another fairly typical vampire/zombie hybrid horror romance.
The couple swears they will spend eternity together, they die together…and she inexplicably comes back from the dead and crawls out of her crypt at the mausoleum.
She soon discovers she’s rotting, that she needs to feed on people to feel better, and that vampire hunters are on her tail.
All the while, the plot is interspersed with flashback scenes revealing how the relationship between she and her boyfriend started and grew.
It’s entertaining enough for what it is, but there is really not a thing here you haven’t seen before in other movies.
Sometimes I come back for post-80s Stephen King movies again. Let’s get right into another three.
MERCY (2014)
Not that M. Night’s The Visit or this film were the first horror flicks about scary grandmothers, but it’s kind of surprising that this one was released a year before The Visit and not a cheap cash-in to piggyback on that bigger Hollywood release, which is what it feels like.
Based on the short story “Gramma” from the fiction collection Skeleton Crew, this King story had already been adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone back in the 80s. Maybe the limited original source material would explain why even the full-length film is only 78 minutes long.
It starts off strong with a guy axing himself in the head. Then Carl from The Walking Dead comes with his mother and brother to live in a rural home with their bedridden grandmother, who needs constant care.
Carl used to be close to his rather spiritually mystical grandma, but now she is quite creepy, and the reason why is revealed as the story unfolds.
It’s not all that frightening, but the final battle with what irks grandma is quite satisfying as far as scary granny movies go. Unfortunately, everything is filmed soooo dark you don’t really see any of the action (unless you lighten the screen grabs with Photoshop…).
Dylan McDermott appears in a role that is virtually pointless, as does the creepy dude from Creep—losing their inclusion could have shaved another twenty minutes or so off the running time. In other words, this probably just works better as an episode of The Twilight Zone…
DOLORES CLAIBORNE (1995)
It would be so easy for King fans to criticize this film because it breaks somewhat from the original novel, but that change somehow enhances the story even more. Plus, it’s an incredibly compelling tale and loaded with fantastic performances.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the grown daughter to Kathy Bates’ version of Dolores, whereas the novel character didn’t have a relationship building plotline with her estranged, adult daughter. JJL comes to the small island on which she grew up when Dolores is accused of murdering the rich elderly woman she worked with for decades.
The detective on the case, played by Christopher Plummer, believed Dolores killed her abusive husband years before during an eclipse.
And so do many of the locals, who harass Dolores relentlessly, which just stirs up memories for JJL of when she lost her father.
The clash between mother and adult daughter sparks numerous flashbacks to what transpired both with the father and with Dolores’s employer as this engrossing and dark movie explores repressed memories, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse.
GERALD’S GAME (2017)
Directed by Mike Flanagan of Absentia fame (also, Oculus and Doctor Sleep), this is a faithful adaptation of another Stephen King novel burdened by sexual abuse of a daughter by her father. And that abuse takes place on the same shores of the same body of water during the same eclipse as Dolores Claiborne!
Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game were companion novels, and although this movie that comes almost twenty years later isn’t specifically a companion movie, it easily could be considered one, because it clearly references the linking occurrence in Dolores Claiborne without ever speaking her name. Cool.
The focus is on a troubled couple trying to save their marriage. They come to their summer home, the husband handcuffs the wife to get kinky then keels over dead, and she spends the rest of the film trying to figure out how to escape her restraints.
To infuse his horror reputation into the story, King includes a hungry stray dog (ew), and a freaky looking man who creeps into the room in the shadows at night looking for jewelry. But this is actually a tale of a woman coming to terms with how her entire sex life and concept of love have been warped and made her a prisoner of her own past due to what her father did to her when she was a child. The flashback of the father (Henry Thomas) doing his thing with her is even more disturbing than a similar scene in Dolores Claiborne, including the way in which he manipulates her into keeping it secret.
It’s hard to get through, and in film form the side story of the metaphorical yet real monster man that comes into her room at night feels really out of left field. In my opinion it kind of takes away from the main plot as it jarringly becomes the focus at the very end of the film.
It’s a trio of new Blu-ray additions to my collection, so let’s see if they were worth subtraction from my wallet.
END OF THE WORLD (1977)
Not gonna lie. This isn’t a good movie, but the filmmaker definitely makes the scenes with Christopher Lee feel like classic horror moments with Christopher Lee. Or…maybe it’s just Christopher Lee doing that.
The focus is on some scientist guy getting signals from outer space while a series of natural catastrophes are striking earth. So he and his woman start an investigation into what could be the cause. That’s the boring bulk of the film.
Meanwhile, Christopher Lee is a priest cloned at a convent along with a bunch of nuns by some sort of aliens.
Eventually, the investigation leads the man and woman to the convent.
Other than seeing some alien hands on the nuns, all we get is talk, with Lee explaining the dastardly plan of the aliens…which requires the man either steal a crystal from a government plant for them or they’ll kill his woman. The fact that this mission lasts like five minutes and makes absolutely no attempt at suspense pretty much sums up the whole movie. We are, however, finally thrown a bone and get a glimpse of alien head.
MEATCLEAVER MASSACRE (1977)
Not having a single meat cleaver present in this film makes as much sense as having Christopher Lee provide an unrelated intro and outro (due to his narration apparently being filmed for a different movie then sold without his consent to this movie).
The good news is, Lee brings his devil dick along.
Meatcleaver Massacre is about a teacher who pisses off a burnout student that doesn’t believe in his tales of ancient magic.
As revenge, the student gathers together some friends, goes to the teacher’s house, and kills the whole family, including the dog. But the teacher survives, is in a coma, and somehow conjures a revenge demon.
In between a detective investigating the initial home invasion, there are a handful of odd supernatural murders of the killers.
First a guy has a sepia toned nightmare that feels like something out of Carnival of Souls, and then dies by what appears to be a cactus attack in the desert.
Another guy is almost compelled to slit his wrists but instead goes to his job at an auto shop and gets crushed in a car hood. A third guy feels up some tits during a sex scene then gets fried by a projector at the movie theater where he works. I think this movie is trying to warn us that work kills.
The money shot comes when the original burnout student goes back to the teacher’s house and looks for a counter spell to stop the demon. Fast, choppy editing delivers a pretty effective, totally 70s freaky attack by the demon in the basement. Best part of an otherwise dull movie, but I discovered if you grab a screenshot of the demon for a blog post, he looks like a poor man’s Swamp Thing…
DEVIL DOG: THE HOUND OF HELL (1978)
I can’t believe it’s been over forty years since I originally saw this one on television as a kid. It’s a little different than I remember, because all the times I’ve referenced Devil Dog, the Hound from Hell in my life (more times than I can count), I just recall it being about an evil dog. In actuality, the devil dog kind of possesses almost the entire family that adopts him.
The opening scene has a satanic cult led by Martine Beswick of Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde conjuring the son of the devil to go into a German Shepherd.
One of its puppies ends up in the hands of Richard Crenna and his family, which includes young Kim Richards as the daughter.
It’s kind of funny to realize that this movie is essentially The Omen with a dog. Every time someone wrongs the family, that someone gets killed. The mother, son, and daughter become its minions, making sure it is protected from any threats against its existence. And the father is the one who has to go out of his way to figure out how to do away with the devil that has entered the family’s life.
The climax feature a silly looking transformation of the dog into what looks like it should be a contestant on Dragula.
It’s a smorgasbord of different horror flicks on Hulu. Did they show me a good time? Let’s find out.
SAINT MAUD (2019)
Considering I despise religious horror, maybe I should have just skipped a movie called Saint Maud with a woman in a white robe wearing a crucifix in the poster art. But my feelings on the film would have been a little more forgiving if there had been some horror…
This is actually a story of a young woman who finds God after she has a life-changing experience as a nurse. She becomes a nun, goes to care for a lesbian dancer dying of cancer, and decides she can save her.
Thankfully, even though this dancer is dying, she’s not going to take any brow-beating from a religious nut.
Feeling like a failure once again, Maud quickly loses faith. But then she finds it again. She’s really a tragic and lonely figure, so I’m going to use a dirty term here to describe this film—elevated horror. Yes, just as I love to use the term torture porn because so many people hate it, I’m using elevated horror because it has suddenly become the new torture porn.
In the end, we don’t even know what the hell was real or what wasn’t as Maud has some “supernatural” experiences before she finally thinks she found salvation.
SPOILER: depending who watches this film, the takeaway can either be a) kill a lesbian, earn your wings and ascend to Heaven, or, more clearly b) kill anyone while playing God and go to hell.
THE EVIL NEXT DOOR (2020)
This Swedish film is riddled with familiar situations for anyone that has seen any horror movies in the past 20 years or more. A straight couple moves into a new house with the male partner’s son, who strikes up a friendship with what at first glance might be an imaginary friend.
But pretty soon the female partner is experiencing the usual—bumps in the night, voices, fleeting movement in the shadows, and a young boy who starts acting out against her.
It’s all very cliché, right down to the jump scares, the man in the relationship thinking the woman is the problem, and the woman seeking out the former owner of the house for answers. But hey, the cheap scares are effective and there are some creepy scenes involving the mysterious presence living in the house.
But what stands out most is that this is a sad look at the challenges of being a stepparent of a child you want to love that doesn’t want to love you back.
WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING (2021)
This is one bizarre film, and as it neared the end I turned to the hubby and said, “You know none of this is going to make any sense when it’s over, right?” Seconds later, the film ended abruptly with no clarification of any of the events that took place. And yet I found the film to be fast-paced and oddly compelling.
A family holes up in their bathroom when a storm is about to hit, becomes trapped there, and must then face off against a series of mysterious threats…and each other.
The mother is played by Allison from Hocus Pocus, and the father is played by horror veteran Pat Healy, who is ridiculously entertaining in his over-the-top performance here.
But the flashback story is that the teen daughter had a girlfriend, and they were practicing witchcraft together. Now the daughter thinks all the crazy things happening to them in the bathroom are result of her casting spells. Are they? We’ll never know.
Even so, the horror aspects are pretty thrilling and fun, there are several references to Ozzy Osborne, who also makes a voice-over cameo as a demonic voice, and Taco’s 1983 hit “Puttin’ On The Ritz” is featured prominently in the film as a ringtone and during the closing credits.
CENSOR (2021)
While Censor is rather slow paced, it is a treat for anyone who grew up in the 1980s and is aware of the wave of censorship that swept over the U.K. concerning a list of banned horror movies that became known as the “video nasties”.
The premise is quite cool. A young woman in the 80s has a chip on her shoulder about being a censor responsible for saving the world from the video nasties.
But her life turns upside down when a) a serial killer blames his work on a movie she cleared, and b) she becomes convinced her sister, who went missing years before, is one of the actresses in a film she is reviewing.
Her goal becomes to hunt down the director of the film, making much of this a slow-moving “private investigation” horror flick. However, the final act makes up for it as the censor queen starts to lose her shit from watching the movies she thinks no one else should be allowed to watch. Believe me, I won’t be watching a movie with that thing below in it. Oh shit. I just did.
Sometimes I come back for another installment of post-80s Stephen King movie adaptations. And this trio has some high profile male actors.
SECRET WINDOW (2004)
Secret Window is based on a novella from Four Past Midnight and almost feels like King is mimicking his previous writings. It’s actually a welcome throwback compared to much of his more recent work.
As King has done often, he delves into the mind of a writer and how the man’s writing comes back to bite him in the ass. What makes this little suspense/stalker flick fun is Johnny Depp’s quirky performance as the author, which offers some humor.
While in the midst of a divorce, stays in his cabin by the lake. A man claiming Depp stole his story comes knocking and soon makes his life hell, terrorizing Depp while giving him a time limit to prove he wrote the story first. As always, King never fails to remind us that he has no problem killing beloved animals in his stories.
It’s a basic plot progression and pretty predictable when the twist finally comes, especially if you read a lot of King. It’s also not very scary or anxiety inducing. However, adding to the lite fun is what’s clearly gimmick casting—Timothy Hutton, who played a writer with an evil alter ego twin in King’s The Dark Half, plays the ex-wife’s new man in this film.
1408 (2007)
If ever there were an example of why short stories would be better adapted into short films for an anthology instead of stretched into a full-length film, 1408 is it. Even worse, it’s a 104-minute movie in its theatrical form, 112 in its director’s cut.
John Cusack is an author who debunks haunting cases. He comes to a hotel where Samuel Jackson is the manager and urgently tries to convince him not to stay in room 1408. It’s a battle he loses.
We then spend the whole movie watching John Cusack talk into his tape recorder, see scary things that aren’t really there, try to figure out how to escape the room, video chat with his wife while being haunted by his past, and eventually go pretty much insane.
Only two parts of the film were creepy to me: a) Cusack going out on the building’s ledge, and that’s only because heights freak me out, and b) Cusack trying to escape through a damn vent, where he’s chased by a crawling corpse. Eek!
It kind of sucks that they spit all over “We’ve Only Just Begun” by The Carpenters, using it as an annoyance that keeps playing on the radio.
And finally, there have been major complaints that the home release of the film doesn’t use the theatrical cut ending. However, I watched all three ending options in the bonus features, and none of them makes this a better movie.
CELL (2016)
It’s almost as if Cusack and Jackson decided to try to make amends for starring in a crappy Stephen King movie the first time. Unfortunately, they just dug themselves a deeper grave.
Seemingly running out of ideas, King decided to jump into the zombie craze, using pulses through cellphones as the cause of the crazies in order to seem like he wasn’t just writing a zombie story.
This is a zombie story.
Cusack is in an airport when those on their phones suddenly go spastic and then start viciously attacking everyone else. It’s fast-running zombie insanity, and even Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman makes a cameo (thankfully non-speaking). And because this is Stephen King, someone devours a dog yelping in agony. Sigh.
Cusack escapes and teams up with Jackson and little Esther from Orphan. So begins a typical zombie movie/The Walking Dead journey as the trio tries to a) get to Cusack’s house so he can check on his wife and son, and b) get to a place where there is no cellphone tower.
Along the way they run into Stacy Keach and some other survivors, dance to Anita Ward’s disco classic “Ring My Bell”, and dream of a man in red, whose inclusion is so typical Stephen King yet just confuses matters.
And if you want to argue that this is somehow different than other zombie movies, note that it has the same fatalistic ending as hordes of other zombie movies since the beginning of zombie time.
There’s a whole lot of trouble for young boys in this trio I checked out on Shudder. Let’s see what you can expect from each one.
SON (2021)
This polished “son of Satan” flick from the director of The Canal stars Laurie Strode’s granddaughter Allyson as a single mom who enters her young son’s room one night to discover a horrific sight; a cult she fell victim to as a child is back again and after her boy.
Disrupting the abduction, she soon finds her son having bad attacks—puking blood, rashes, and convulsions.
As doctors struggle to figure out what’s wrong with him, she finds figures it out the gory way…he’s hungry.
This turns into The Omen meets Let The Right One In as she takes her ravenous son on the run to keep him alive while trying to delve into what exactly happened to her as a child and how history might be repeating itself.
Thing is, her traumatic past might be all in her head, and the audience begins to question everything she sees that scares her or keeps her on the run.
It takes some time to get to the final act when she finally confronts her demons, and the film does become a bit repetitive and drags for a while, but there’s definitely a satisfying payoff at the end.
SLAPFACE (2021)
The odd title of this film is so apropos, because by the time it ends it feels like a slap in the face.
I really loved the classic tone as seen through the eyes of a young kid. It’s very 1980s, and stories about young, vulnerable kids facing horrors on their own always seem to be the most terrifying (as Stephen King has shown us time after time).
The story is about a young boy and his older brother, who live alone after the death of their parents. They regularly play a game in which they just keep slapping each other in the face.
But the younger brother is lonely, especially because the older brother is pulling away from him to spend more time with a girlfriend. So the young brother becomes a doormat for three girls that bully him relentlessly just so that he can be their friend.
This leads to an initiation in which he is forced to go into an abandoned building. Inside he is attacked by a frightening witch. This is how you do a witch right.
However, the tide turns and the boy sort of befriends the witch. Understand that this is not a speaking witch. It’s just a form cloaked in black rags and dark, shadowy silhouettes. EEK!
This is where things get sad. On the one hand, you could see this as a tale of two outsiders finding each other. But this witch is never presented as likable. In fact, she’s terrifying, touches the boy in a way that seems quite inappropriate at one point, and does awful things to anyone she thinks is harming him. Unfortunately, in doing so she is literally removing the only people he has in his life, so she’s not actually doing him any favors. It’s not exactly My Bodyguard…
A PSA about bullying at the end of the film just pours salt in the wound considering the entire trajectory of this movie is a total downer.
THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR (2020)
This is a very simple plot that pits two boys against a kidnapper in a game of cat and mouse.
The boys are tossing a baseball back and forth when it rolls off into the woods. They go to fetch it and are abducted.
Lonnie Chavis, who plays Young Randall on This Is Us, is excellent in his role as the boy who gets away and has to figure out how to rescue his locked up buddy.
However, this is a cliché scenario as he lurks around the house trying to stay out of the kidnapper’s sights, and it just didn’t push me to the edge of my seat. Maybe if the purpose of the kidnapping had been revealed earlier it would have amplified the urgency.
That also might explain why the feeling of the film intensifies in the second half. Pam from True Blood arrives midway through the film with an axe and gets drawn into a battle of wits with the boys. It is quite satisfying as the boys fight back big time.
Although post-80s Stephen King novels and movie adaptations failed to mesmerize me like the material being released when he was at the top of his game, I’ve decided to go back and check out a bunch of the adaptations in my collection from the 90s going forward, starting with these three.
NEEDFUL THINGS (1993)
Needful Things is based on a Stephen King novel from the dwindling days of his great period (1991) and is a nice reminder that he used to write engrossing stories about small towns turned upside down by a supernatural invader. That feel is perfectly captured here, and it’s very reminiscent of Salem’s Lot (helps that Bonnie Bedelia is back in a starring role again).
However, I feel that this is just one of those stories that doesn’t quite translate from fiction to film. It comes across as intentionally campy very often.
Max Von Sydow—somehow looking like he’s 80 twenty years after he looked like he was 80 in The Exorcist—is a highlight as an owner of a new shop in town who grants people their greatest wishes with a catch. In exchange for getting what you want, you don’t have to pay money. Instead, you have to do something awful to someone else. However, each “customer” doesn’t realize they are stirring up clashes between other people by doing so.
For instance, a young boy who wants a particular baseball card must throw apples at some woman’s house. This woman happens to be feuding with another woman, so she immediately assumes her enemy did it and seeks revenge. You can imagine how quickly a domino effect starts, causing absolute chaos in town, that escalates to violence and murder before you know it.
With the movie running 2 hours long, it becomes repetitive, and quite honestly, the only fun conflict that was energetic and fun was an over-the-top knife/cleaver fight between the two feuding women. By the end of the film, when there’s looting and destruction running rampant on the streets of the town and Ed Harris, playing the sheriff, tries to calm everyone down, the hubby and I were chuckling.
APT PUPIL (1998)
Apt Pupil is from Different Seasons, King’s collection of four novellas, which was one of the first of his books I read back in the summer of 83 when I was just 14. It deeply disturbed me and had me mesmerized all at once. The teen boy in the story was about my age and going through a lot of the same changes I was…and yet he was the complete opposite of me in his cold, calculating, manipulating, vile ways of getting his sick desires satisfied (I’m upfront about it).
While the film adaptation doesn’t quite delve into the psyche of the boy the way the novel did, nor into the mind of the old man he discovers was once a Nazi and blackmails into telling him of all the atrocities he committed, I feel it definitely captures the overall tone of the traumatic tale. It also sticks close to the major details of the book until the quite different ending.
However, while watching the film, I was getting the same kind of icky vibes I got the first time I watched Clownhouse…the feeling that young boys were being presented on screen in almost sexual ways. And dammit, just as that film turned out to be directed by the pedophile who also directed Jeepers Creepers, this one is directed by Bryan Singer, who has also been accused of molesting underage boys, including some from the locker room shower scene of this movie. Blech.
With that knowledge, this film reads just like Jeepers Creepers…almost as if the director’s “villain” is echoing his improper attraction to young men. The teen boy in this story begins spending all his time at the home of the lonely old man (played by Ian McKellen). They form a bizarre bond. The boy brings out dormant desires in the old man (killing people) and the old man in turn awakens the same desires in the boy. It’s just all so…blech. And yet that disgust perfectly encapsulates the entire point of the story, which makes it work so well even though the characters’ mental states aren’t dissected as much as they are in the book.
And just like the Creeper only focused on young men as victims, highlighting a male/male preying situation, this film taps into the same issue. Not only is there the main boy and old man bonding, but the old man brings home a bum who offers to give him sex for food and drink and maybe some money, the young man can’t perform when he is about to get a blowjob from a girl, and in the end he blackmails his counselor, played by David Schwimmer, using a pedophilia accusation as leverage.
The story behind the scenes definitely makes this even more icky than the already heinous concept of a young man wanting to hear all the fucked up details about how Nazis treated their victims.
DREAMCATCHER (2003)
Dreamcatcher is such a messy novel (in more ways than one), and the movie seems to try to clean it up a bit, but it turns out to be a mess of its own. However, it’s an all-male cast, including the likes of Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, and Timothy Olyphant, so it earns a spot on the sausage fest scares page.
This is the story infamous for featuring “shit weasels”, at least in the book. The movie doesn’t refer to them that way and drastically limits the amount of time they are the focus . In fact, there is only one major shit weasel scene, and it gets the horror ball rolling in a different direction.
The focus is on a group of guy friends that go to a cabin in the woods. They propose a toast to a mentally challenged friend they’ve known for years, which leads to several very Stephen King flashbacks about how they saved him from bullies and scored psychic powers in return.
Pretty soon, one of the guys comes upon a very sick man in the snow and brings him back to the cabin. Out plops the shit weasel. Cool, icky weasel, that’s for sure.
So little time is spent on the guys in the cabin before the military is introduced. Blah. Ruined. Morgan Freeman is a crazy military leader that wants to contain what he knows is an alien invasion.
In the meantime, the men fight more weasels, a big alien is unleashed that possesses one of the guys (presented in a very confusing fashion), and eventually there’s a mission to stop the alien from dumping a dog hosting a weasel into a water reserve to ruin life as we know it, which leads to a cool final boss battle. It’s also a reminder that Stephen King’s work has never shied away from doing awful things to animals—including dogs and a cat in these three films.
Now this is how to do a weekend marathon of simple slashers. There was plenty to like about this trio, so let’s take a look.
SLASHORETTE PARTY (2020)
I went into Slashorette Party hoping for some halfway decent kills and some funny lines here and there, and that’s what I got. Plus, this indie is a concise, 75 minutes long, so it moves at a quick pace.
It has a very 80s dream sequence intro, including the music, lighting, and mist machine. The nightmare wedding scenario introduces us to the bride-to-be when she awakes.
She’s anxious about her coming wedding so her friends take her to a cabin in the woods for a party…along with her fiancé and all his friends.
Her fiancé is a total prick and everyone at the party knows it. After the couple fights and she runs into the woods, the killing begins.
It’s made obvious from the start who is doing the killing, but along with some practical kill effects, we get a slow motion party scene—with female strippers instead of male! WTF?
That’s when the killing kicks in big time, and it’s a lot of fun. As a bonus, a male stripper shows up too for a quick bump ‘n’ grind.
So does the bachelorette’s doctor, played by legendary adult star Ginger Lynn, and she proves to be quite funny by the final act.
Meanwhile, the killer motivation is a (hopefully) satirical jab at the idea that men who are not responsible for how horrible they are…women make them that way.
HOLLOW SCREAM (2018)
This short indie opens strong, with a girl in the woods being chased by a killer, running through Argento lighting, and…well, you can imagine how things end up.
What you won’t expect is that it’s simply a virtual reality demonstration for a handsome guy considering investing in the project.
This handsome guy is also deliciously shirtless in the next scene. This is where things get kind of confusing. He has this super smart brother who he feels is wasting his time teaching kindergarten, and wants to get him in on this opportunity. So they head back to the company together to immerse themselves in the game.
The truth? Everything that happens involving them outside the game is confusing.
Luckily, most of the movie is spent in the game, which is a fun slasher featuring pretty young people in the woods having sex and getting killed off by a lurking, hunky killer.
Catch is, the illusion in this game is that the person playing only thinks it’s virtual reality. It’s actually real!
That cool concept is definitely muddled by the exposition the film attempts to present about the brothers between scenes of the slasher, so if you’re going to check this one out, just do it for the virtual virtual reality, which makes it actually reality. I’m getting a headache.
EXPLOITED (2022)
Reminding me of a cross between Scream and Smiley, this erotic gay horror flick is basically a slasher in which no one is slashed for a majority of the running time.
The super hot opener has a nude dude in the middle of some sex cam action when he is attacked.
Next, a gay dude comes to a new college, meets his hot wrestler roommate, and then finds a load of explicit videos on a USB drive…of the guy we saw attacked in the first scene in a whole range of fetishistic situations with different people.
Thing is, someone wants that drive back. So the gay guy and his new college friends begin getting stalked by someone in a gimp mask.
The film is fast-paced, intriguing, super sexual, suspenseful, and has likable characters. Plus, it’s just plain fun and has a very retro, late 90s slasher vibe, even if there isn’t much in the way of a body count.
I’ve already bought the Blu-ray for my collection and added the film to the homo horror movies page.
