Alien nuns, a revenge demon, and a devil dog from the 1970s

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Daniel

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.

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HULU HORRORS: a nun, video nasties, an attic creature, and witchcraft in a bathroom

Posted on March 29, 2022 by Daniel

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.

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Digging into my Stephen King movie collection part 2

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Daniel

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.

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SHUDDER AND SHRIEK: a devil child, a witch, and kidnapped kids

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Daniel

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.

 

 

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Digging into my Stephen King movie collection part 1

Posted on March 23, 2022 by Daniel

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.

 

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PRIME TIME: a whole lot of slashing fun…and a good dose of gay fun

Posted on March 19, 2022 by Daniel

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.

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An Easter weekend double feature

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Daniel

It’s a little something different to add to the list of Easter movies on the holiday horror page, and they come from fifty years apart.

NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972)

If you’re itching for another killer rabbit movie to pack your Easter weekend marathon, this one is loaded with giant killer rabbits and it stars Janet Leigh!

A total product of its time, this is the kind of ecologically aware film you would see on nature strikes back week on the 4:30 movie back in the 1970s. Sort of like Food of the Gods. Actually, a lot like Food of the Goods in its presentation of the giant animals— filmed close-up and running through little models to make them look extra big.

A scientist is asked to do something to curb a population explosion of rabbits. What does he do? Shoots them up with hormones that are supposed to disrupt their breeding cycle.

Instead, it turns into bunnies on steroids! They grow huge and begin seriously tearing people apart. This is surprisingly bloody.

As in all these giant animal movies, they make a creepy noise and they’re often filmed in slow motion to create an ominous effect. The cheesy giant rabbit effects aside, there are a few really good attack scenes, and it’s surreal watching Janet Leigh fend off a horde of giant bunnies as the authorities set up a giant booby trap. Hey. It was the 1970s and before The Exorcist. Cut it some slack.

DEATH TO METAL (2021)

Taking place officially on Easter weekend, this heavy metal slasher comedy is only 76 minutes long, and it’s one of those rare cases when I would have been happy to get another 15 minutes. The reason being that the film doesn’t hit its stride until about halfway through, and then it gets to be such a blast that you want more—and you want to spend more time with the characters you feel you didn’t get to know enough earlier on.

The opener is in black and white and shows big metal head bullies picking on a little kid…and even pissing on him with a graphic shot of the stream flowing from penis and balls.

Next, we meet our main guy, who is having a bad day. He’s dumped by his band and his girlfriend on the weekend of the Holy Saturday Metal Massacre concert event.

Meanwhile, there’s an out of control priest that preaches against rock bands and every other awesome thing in life, like internet porn and gay weddings. He’s so extreme he gets booted from the church…and then becomes deformed by a toxic waste spillage.

He is transformed into a murderous priest creature that uses a big crucifix as a weapon. Awesome. Inexplicable, but awesome.  Even the characters eventually poke fun at his questionable mutation.

The pace is a bit slow at first, but there’s a backstory told with cool animation, some early kills, a guy with a cool devil horns belt buckle, and a sex scene that blesses us with the guy’s naked booty and cute furry chest.

It’s when the priest arrives at the show that the film finds its vibe, and it’s great. The cast of main characters is lovable, the gore is done with practical effects, there are clever setup shots, and the humor is quite good.

There is a bit of shaky cam footage of bands playing that might turn some viewers off, but it’s not like we have to watch full concert performances to pad the time (as we do in some indies).

I just felt all the best stuff was rushed. There’s not enough unfolding of murderous events—it mostly happens in one quick massacre. However, I do know that I’ll keep director Tim Connery on my radar to see if he does more horror, because I’ll so be there for it.

 

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Gender-bending, Bette Davis, and redneck witchcraft in the 1970s

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Daniel

It’s back to the early 1970s, when I was just a wee child, for a threesome of films featuring female horror veterans.

DR. JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE (1971)

You’d never expect Hammer Films to challenge the norm in one of its classic horror adaptations. But Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde could be covered in a queer film studies class for being way ahead of its time. I was only two when it was released, but I imagine it must have been much more shocking to audiences than the likes of the 1995 comedy Dr. Jekyll & Ms. Hyde.

The film could be interpreted as being about a man coming to terms with his latent homosexuality (it probably was back then), but this is much more aligned with the idea that Jekyll is coming to terms with the fact that he’s actually a heterosexual woman. I saw it as a film about a man finally embracing his transgender identity.

Jekyll is so wrapped up in his research that he has no interest in dating women, even though the young woman living in his building keeps throwing herself at him. In trying to find the elixir of life, Jekyll begins extracting female hormones from women he kills—prostitutes, because it’s quite common for Hyde to be interwoven with the real-life Jack the Ripper in horror films.

Jekyll soon determines that his potion turns males into females….so he drinks it. He likes what he sees. He likes the feel of his boobs. He can’t resist taking the drink more often. He gets Sister Hyde to do his dirty work She becomes the killer of women, almost as if Jekyll is taking out his jealousy against women who were born women.

In a queer moment, a man who is attracted to Sister Hyde runs into Jekyll on the street and asks him about his sister. Jekyll almost can’t fight the urge to identify himself as her and even sensually caresses the man’s face.

In a stunning scene, Sister Hyde seduces Jekyll’s male friend then brutally stabs him, but as she does, the friend begins seeing Jekyll instead of her. And when Jekyll comes to, he looks in the mirror and says “I must be rid of you” to his own reflection, not that of Sister Hyde. Sister Hyde is taking over the body and Jekyll can barely suppress her and her natural longings. She openly says that she is the stronger of the two and Jekyll is weak, and then realizes she must stop any love interest from enticing Jekyll to remain in control…

There’s a great stained glass window transformation scene, and not surprisingly, the film ends with a message of the woman being the weaker sex. Hey, it was still pretty groundbreaking despite that final offense, and horror and monster movie veteran Martine Beswick is awesome as Sister Hyde.

HEX (aka: Charms) (1973)

How does a western witch movie turn out to be such a psychedelic drug trip? Is every character in the movie cursed, or are they just tripping on some bad weed? I’ll never know.

Taking place in the early 1900s, this film is loaded with anachronisms, making it hard to tell what time period it actually is while adding to the feeling of being totally loopy.

A biker gang drives into a town, gets into trouble with the locals, and hides out on the farm of two sisters.

They have a lot of fun and get high, but then one dude tries to rape one of the sisters.

The other sister, played by Cristina Raines of The Sentinel and Nightmares, lets them stay, but hexes them.

Soon everyone is tripping out, being seduced, seeing things (mostly natures creatures), and dying.

Don’t take that as a positive, because there is little in the way of nudity, gore, or violence. This movie is all talk.

The cast includes Keith Carradine, Gary Busey, Dan Haggerty.

There’s also a car that I was convinced was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and was going to take flight at any minute.

SCREAM, PRETTY PEGGY (1973)

 

This little horror thriller is pretty predictable these days, but it’s surprising that it goes where it does in the end considering the time at which it was made. I won’t give it away, but it is definitely a made-for-TV answer to a couple of shockers from the sixties, including a major hit from a famous director.

Peggy desperately needs a job, so she applies at the home of a man (Marlo Thomas’s boyfriend Donald from That Girl) and his mother, played by Bette Davis.

Bette makes it clear she doesn’t want Peggy there, while the son begins to cozy up to her due to their shared interest in creating sculptures. In fact, he has a whole studio where he makes these freakishly cool statues in blood red.

Meanwhile, Peggy becomes too involved in the family’s secret, including why Bette’s daughter left home. She also simply has to know why she has been warned to never go in the room above their garage. Uh-oh.

The film is very minor on murder (but there is murder), and there’s a ghostly female apparition roaming around the grounds to add to the eerie atmosphere, but I’m pretty sure any horror veteran will figure out where this is headed before it gets there.

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HULU HORRORS: cannibals, swimming ghosts, and a slasher

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Daniel

I haven’t tapped into the Hulu horror selection in a while, so it’s time to check out a few of their newer offerings.

FRESH (2022)

Fresh is Boxing Helena meets Hannibal—with a very Gen X soundtrack thrown in for good measure.

The plot is simple. A girl starts dating a guy. They hit it off great. They go on a vacation together, and she soon finds herself chained up to become product in his business of selling “meat” to cannibals.

She can hear other women imprisoned in his secret home, so she begins to hatch a plan to escape.

And that’s when he does something to hobble her. Having had no idea what the film was about before starting the film, at this point I had to temporarily turn it off because I was watching it with my squeamish hubby. So I picked it up again later when he went to bed and found that the film becomes a fairly tame suspense thriller that is low on the torture porn or blood and guts.

Fresh is fun, has some dark humor, and features montages set to songs like “Obsession” by Animotion, “Restless Heart” by Peter Cetera, and “Endless Summer Nights” by Richard Marx.

THE DEEP HOUSE (2021)

I’m not going to lie—this film has a cool concept that’s equally dumb at the same time, yet I was highly entertained.

A young straight couple has a YouTube channel on which they post videos of them exploring abandoned buildings—and him always being an asshole and scaring her. They decide to do something different—explore the bottom of a lake that was created by a flood.

Down in the depths they find a sealed up house completely intact. My absolute terror of being underwater came through, because the cheapest scare ever made my stomach sink.

Anyway, they get in the house, and this basically becomes a haunted house found footage film. Like I said, it’s a silly yet oddly interesting concept.

It’s also especially effective if you’re underwater phobic like me. Things like dolls, clowns, and dead bodies submerged in murky water are twice as creepy as they are on land.

And the freaky factor only escalates when those dead bodies eventually turn into what are basically underwater zombies. Eek!

LANTERN’S LANE (2021)

If you just need a moment of not being elevated by your horror, you should check out this simple, satisfying slasher with the most primitive and delectable setup: kids stuck in a house in the woods being stalked by crazed killer wearing a sack for a mask.

A girl returns home from college and reconnecting with her friends, who she basically cut off communications with while she was gone. They decide to head to Lantern’s Lane, a spot in the woods ripe with urban legends, including sightings of a female ghost carrying a lantern and a house in which a killer did kids wrong in the past.

This being a horror movie, their car breaks down right in front of the house. So they go inside for shelter overnight.

Then comes the killer. What more can I say? There’s stabbing, screaming, running, and cat and mouse games, and plenty of aspects of this film make it pretty obvious the creators grew up watching Scream movies. A lot. Definitely worth a watch for slasher fans.

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NETFLIX AND CHILLS: Asian vs. American vs. German horror

Posted on March 14, 2022 by Daniel

It’s a trio of horror flicks from my watchlist, two that have been there for a while because I often find Netflix’s “higher end” selection of horror movies to be a huge disappointment—like two of the three movies I watched for this post…

THE 8th NIGHT (2021)

This Asian film is ridiculously long considering the story it’s telling. It easily could have been shaved by 25 minutes to improve the pacing. Even then, it’s not exactly the most compelling demon-fighting flick out there.

Opening narration and graphics tell us the backstory of a Buddha who slayed a demon and locked its red and black eyes away separately, warning that they should never meet again.

Wouldn’t you know that in the modern day, some jerk reunites the eyes.

A monk and his cute young assistant spend the rest of the movie trying to hunt down those who have been possessed by the eyes in order to stop the demon from taking over the world.

The two standout possessed victim are a young guy with a half zombie face and a school girl, because in Asian horror you simply have to have a scary school girl. Half zombie face ends up being the final boss, but the school girl is definitely the best part of the movie. She does that creaky tick thing with her joints, she smiles eerily, and she goes around sniffing the air.

Important to note is that the monk and his assistant don’t take on these demons until over an hour into the movie. Ugh. The school girl’s battle scene is way better than the final fight with half zombie face.

AFTERMATH (2021)

I will always watch horror flicks starring one of the Ashmore twins, but I was concerned about the near 2-hour running time of Aftermath. Now that I’ve seen it, I can safely say it could have been trimmed by 25 minutes to bring the horror closer together. As it stands, it’s like watching a drama about a couple constantly fighting in their struggle to keep a toxic relationship together while noticing occasional signs of a presence in their new house.

They buy the house knowing there was just a murder/suicide in it, and in between their fighting, cliché as hell occurrences begin spooking her. Their dog barks at shadows. A tennis ball magically moves from under the bed to on it. Faucets turn on by themselves. I had to keep reminding myself there are ten-year olds who’ve never seen anything like this before…

That’s not to say there aren’t a couple of effective scenes, the most notable being when a sibling comes to the house while they’re not home. However, that leads to one of many plot holes in the film. Let’s just say the sibling disappears, and yet no one ever questions what became of her…specifically her own sister!

The story starts to spiral beyond the fear that there’s something in the house. There is poisoning, a car set on fire, sexual assault…and when the couple is suddenly being accused of white supremacy, all bets were off for how the film was going to hold up.

And when the wife, who has been wanting out of the house because she’s so terrified, decides to stay in the home alone without her husband, I gave up. Also, I totally sensed what the “twist” to this “haunted house” movie was going to be early on, yet it was still rather absurd when it was revealed—and done much better in other films.

THE PRIVILEGE (2022)

The Boys from Brazil meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Disturbing Behavior in this German horror flick. The hubby and I were drawn in right from the start, and the movie kept us watching.

As a kid, a young man watched his older sister losing her mind, convinced they were being pursued by some sinister force. She tried to get him to do the unthinkable, and as a result…he did something else unthinkable instead.

In the present day, he is still suffering trauma from the incident. He sees a therapist, and she has him take a drug to help with his mental struggles.

But he begins to see freaky visions he thinks are real and becomes convinced there’s something coming for his twin sister.

With the help of his lesbian friend and an expert on funguses and possession, he starts to delve into the possible supernatural occurrences that are making everyone think he is going mad…and possibly affecting the children of privileged families.

It’s an intriguing mixture of classic horror plots we’ve seen before, and although it has some questionable moments and clarification issues, it’s still highly entertaining.

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