The 90s: when most horror was direct-to-video

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Daniel

I once again struggled my way through a bunch of 90s crap I’d never seen, and I actually found a couple that had their charms—one of which was a total winner for me.

THE INHERITOR (1990)

There’s a good idea here, but I feel it fails to deliver on any scares at all.

It begins in colonial times, with a woman being buried alive as a witch by colonial wingnuts.

In modern day 1990, a young woman comes to a town after the death of her sister to identify the body. Grizzly Adams makes a brief appearance as the man who performed the autopsy.

The main girl then stays in her sister’s rental home, which is owned by her sister’s boyfriend. The pair spends a lot of time together as they try to determine what really happened to the sister, and in an odd moment he tells her everyone thinks he’s gay. Okay…

Little hints are dropped of something ominous. A guy who warns them someone died in the house ends up dead. The main girl thinks the house is haunted. The boyfriend tells a tale of a church burning and Indians that were accused of the deed and then massacred.

Does any of it come together? No. Is there anything scary? Not at all. They knock a hole in a wall, enter an underground cavern, find the coffin with the dead witch’s corpse in it, a hairy horned man comes and makes love to the woman…I had no idea what the hell I was watching, but at least there was a hairy horned man.

STEEL AND LACE (1991)

Ah. 1991. Still kind of giving off a late 80s vibe because the new decade hadn’t totally found its footing yet, but already veering into weird territory to satisfy horror fans while trying not to be the same as 80s horror. And so we get a movie like Steel and Lace, which is really just…a rape/revenge Robocop?

Opening with a trial that shows quick cuts of a gang of guys sexually assaulting the female lead, this film in no way exploits the rape part. The situation is all implied and very brief.

However, the guys are set free. They decide to start a business screwing over vulnerable people while the rape victim takes a dive off a building. Her devastated scientist brother, played by veteran actor Bruce Davison, bring her back to life as a cyborg that is a master of disguises!

So robochick goes around disguising herself as other hot women to seduce each guy, and then rips off the fake face and uses her powerful body parts to tear these dudes to shreds. At one point she even spooks a guy by disguising herself as a dude, making some oddly intimate suggestions and then unbuttoning her shirt. Talk about moobs.

It’s a cheesy 90s direct-to-video time killer, and we ate them up back then. It helped that they were always loaded with familiar faces of my generation. Here we get the geeky lead kid from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the hot guy who starred in the short-lived late 80s TV show Werewolf, the guy who played Ian the new waver in the last season of Fame, Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley, and always adorable David Naughton. I so want to be the bear in that bed.

NECRONOMICON: BOOK OF THE DEAD (1993)

This fun popcorn flick horror anthology makes all three stories ooey, gooey, drippy, and oozy, and the wraparound focuses on H.P. Lovecraft getting the inspiration for his stories from the Necronomicon.

Jeffrey Combs stars as the horror author, and he has been so coated in makeup in an effort to make him resemble the actual man that he ends up looking like a cross between Bruce Campbell and the evil dude from Stephen King’s Storm of the Century.

He visits a building where monks guard the infamous book so that he can page through it for ideas, which kicks off three tales that are an extravaganza of practical special effects.

1st story – a man inherits a hotel.

While he reads letters from an ancestor, we get a story of a fishy monster encounter, which carries over into the man’s story as he faces off against a fish woman and then a giant sea creature.

Guess who. Totally awesome.

2nd story – the most lackluster of the tales, this is about a young woman who rents a room in a house, has an affair with a doctor trying to defeat death, and eventually joins him in his experiments.

3rd story – this is how you end an anthology.

We’re taken on a nightmarish Lovecraftian journey as a pregnant cop considering an abortion is dragged through a hellish experience that is as perfectly horrific as the 90s gets.

Only a few cheesy bat creature computer effects taint the freaky visual pleasure this icky story delivers.

Not to be overshadowed in the horror department, Combs gets into some horrific predicaments of his own as the wraparound concludes.

This anthology passed me by back in the 90s, so I’m thrilled to have found it on Blu-ray to add to me collection.

EBOLA SYNDROME (1996)

I’ve read so much about how sleazy and depraved this Asian film is, but honestly, I’ve seen far worse in a variety of Lloyd Kaufman Troma productions.

What bothered me most about Ebola Syndrome (I’ll get to why else I didn’t like it after) is that I was totally not expecting animal mutilation—especially of the real kind. A warning to those who haven’t seen this, you will be subjected to a sudden, gruesome, way too long clip of a dude hacking the legs off live frogs in a restaurant. Later there is a scene of voodoo rituals, and after seeing the frog scene, I wouldn’t be surprised if the chickens that get their heads ripped off were really live chickens.

As if that weren’t enough for me to hate this movie, there’s everything else. It focuses on a totally worthless dude who makes a habit out of fucking his bosses’ wives and then killing both the boss and the wife. If only the guy in the pic below were him…

We follow him as he does that and then goes to Africa, where he contracts, carries, and spreads Ebola back home. See, he works at a restaurant and does nasty things like fucking and jizzing in the meat, spitting in the food, and feeding his dead bosses and their wives to patrons.

You’d think this would be some sort of zombie or infected movie, but nope. The disease doesn’t really start to spread until the final third of the film.

At that point the focus turns to guys in hazmat suits pursuing the main guy, who gets even worse when he’s feeling trapped.

There is really nothing worth seeing here if you ask me.

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Halloween and Christmas horror round-up…in February

Posted on February 11, 2022 by Daniel

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, but somehow a bunch of October and December horror flicks gravitated my way—finally, months after I needed them to. Therefore, it’s time for a belated seasonal celebration of flicks to add to the full holiday horror list, both the Halloween page and the Christmas page.

FOR THE SAKE OF VICIOUS (2020)

I’d suggest watching this home invasion flick for the sheer final act of insane violence, and not for any clarity of why any of it is happening.

On Halloween, a nurse comes home to find some dude has her wounded landlord tied up in her kitchen and wants her to patch up his bruises. It seems the captor believes the landlord raped his daughter.

The first half of the film involves the nurse playing mediator as the two men have a war of words and the landlord gets tortured a bit. All I could think the whole time was, Why doesn’t the main girl just contact the police in between nonchalant conversation with the man barely holding her hostage?

And then…

Dudes in masks bust in, adding a whole new level of…well…I can’t call it plot, because there’s not a lot of meat there. Just enjoy the ride as everyone hacks and slashes the fuck out of each other for about 30 minutes.

And take note of the most important message of the movie—timing is everything. There is a trick or treater before all the insanity begins, then not another single trick or treater until right after it ends…

ANOTHER EVIL NIGHT (2017)

This is a sequel to a 1992 film called Evil Night, which didn’t take place on Halloween. The original film is summarized at the beginning of this one, and I’m okay having never seen it because it looks like a camcorder home movie, and I’m so done with films like that.

Not that this is any better. Seems the only thing that has improved (slightly) in 25 years is the camera equipment.

Not even a 65-minute runtime makes this any less agonizing to sit through. What little plot there is involves a bullied dude somehow connecting with the killer and joining him for a murder spree on Halloween.

I do like that the film has a lot of Halloween atmosphere.

I guess the most important thing of note is that the killer has the inexplicable ability to move things. Wait until you see him wielding his power by waving his fingers like he’s doing jazz hands. Or maybe don’t see it, because my suggestion is to just watch Satan’s Little Helper instead. It’s Halloween horror classic with a similar plot and much better execution.

THE TRICK OR TREATERS (2016)

If it weren’t for the editing and the constant, ear-shattering noises that are trying to pass as a score, this found footage film may have had something intriguing to offer. Instead, it is just a fucking headache from start to finish.

It begins perfectly with a little tour of the autumn streets to set the tone.

Then we meet a couple that is preparing a video for a charity event while also watching horror movies at home.

I was totally feeling the main girl obsessing over where to hang one particular Halloween sign. I’ve so been there.

The couple seems to live in an apartment building….I think…which would explain the confusing places this film goes. It all starts when three masked creeps come trick or treating and shot footage of the main couple shooting footage of them when answering the door. The main guy pulls a prank on the trick or treaters and it’s all downhill from there.

The couple is abducted and abused.

The couple gets away. The couple’s friends come over and get drawn into a house of real-life horrors that I think is in the basement of their building? I really have no idea.

It’s just a barrage of some ghastly visuals hacked to pieces by terrible editing and shaky camera for a majority of the film, with very little chance for the “characters” to deliver any semblance of logical storyline through actions or dialogue. And it just gets worse as it progresses, although I was really feeling the occasional clarity that implied the killers were using Halloween candy to kill.

My suggestion? Just watch Hell House LLC instead.

HELL ON THE SHELF (2021)

If Mark Polonia had taken all the money he has put into the no budget movies he’s made over the years, perhaps he could have made just one fantastic film.

Hell On The Shelf is obviously cashing in on the Elf On The Shelf trend that scars children for life every December, but several other not so great holiday horror movies have done it better (I’d suggest the 2017 film The Elf for a more satisfying holiday horror cheap thrill).

For starters, let’s look at the holiday aspects. This is a found footage film about a haunted house that won’t sell, so a real estate agent calls in ghost experts. In one interview, we see a tiny Christmas tree up on a shelf. There’s snow on the ground. The doll that is barely the focus of the film is a Christmas elf. The ghost in the house is supposed to be that of a boy who fell down a flight of stairs while fighting over a Christmas toy with his brother.

And finally, when we first see the house, there is a wreath on the door and gifts on the steps. Seconds later, when the investigators pull up to the house, none of that is there.

Basically that symbolizes a) how sloppily Polonia films are made, and b) how non-existent the Christmas holiday is in this film.

These guys spend most of the movie annoyingly repeating the same questions over and over to the air trying to talk to the boy and getting answers from a voice they claim sounds just like a little boy—but which really sounds like an adult man.

There’s a Paranormal Activity sheet tugging trick. The little boy’s room is covered in horror movie posters, but his family wasn’t actually the last one in the house, so they’re not his. The skeptic of the three investigators always wears horror movie T-shirts. Are horror movie fans usually skeptics? Not this horror movie fan, considering my house was actually haunted when I was growing up.

There’s a legend of the doll possessing anyone who touches it. That never happens. The guys argue over the doll moving and who may have done it, and one guy makes a comment about the elf falling off the shelf. Wink wink. There’s even elf POV when they review their footage. I guess the elf films his crimes like any other stupid, modern day criminal.

All the lazy line delivery works best when the elf insists one specific guy must perish, and the bearded guy says, “I agree with him, you have to die”.

With 5 minutes left in this 75-minute movie, the doll finally attacks in a blur of static and shaky cam. In other words, we don’t see anything.

RED SNOW (2021)

This cute little vampire indie has an element of Christmas romance to it—although this isn’t exactly a Hallmark movie. If it were, I’d be okay with it preempting The Golden Girls for a whole fucking month.

A vampire romance novelist is spending the holiday by herself in a family house in the woods. She has the house all decked out for the holidays and the camera makes sure to always get some of the festivities in the shot.

The novelist takes a wounded bat in to nurse it back to health.

When she wakes up in the morning, she discovers it has transformed into a naked, sexy vampire man.

She supplies him with nourishment to regain his strength while he helps her get details right for her novels. Meanwhile, as they’re getting cozy by the tree, a vampire hunter is on the prowl, and her sexy vampire’s vamp friends are about to crash their intimate party to have a little seasonal sucking celebration. Eventually the novelist is going to have to decide if falling in love with a vampire is biting off more than she can chew.

The vamps look cool, there are a couple of nice red snow scenes for sure, the main vampire guy is a hottie, and the leading lady is cute. The only issue I have with the film is that there is too much time taken up focusing on just the two of them talking. If the vamp friends had arrived a bit earlier, there could have been a bit more horror action to keep the pace going. But the Christmas spirit rox.

SHEITAN (2006)

There is very little in the way of Christmas spirit in this demented, slow burning backwoods inbreed French flick with flecks of religious horror shining through (I think that covers it all). We see a tree get knocked over in a convenience store, and the main dinner in the middle of bum fuck is a Christmas Eve celebration, but that’s it.

However, this one totally gets under your skin like old school horror, and you just sit waiting for something absolutely awful to happen…for most of the movie. Yes, it crawls at a snail’s pace, but it is well worth the watch.

After a guy is booted from a club for being a douche, he and his friends befriend a young woman who invites them to her family home in the country for Christmas.

Once they get there, they meet a dude named Joseph, who is tending to his farm animals and also happens to have an expectant wife. Where have I heard this story before?

Joseph is freakishly friendly and takes a shine to the douche—inviting him to go skinny-dipping down at the springs. The whole group tags along, as does a gang of inbred looking motherfuckers from the area, and the douche gets into a fight with them.

There are more and more signs that things are just off at this girl’s house. There’s a room full of doll parts, and we are teased with clip of someone making a very creepy doll. Joseph has bizarre relationships with animals. And all we ever see of his pregnant wife is her belly.

Tensions rise at their holiday dinner when talk turns to religion and who does and doesn’t believe in God. This is the springboard for shit to just start going fucking insane at last—a combination of creepy, violent, and disgusting. I don’t quite know what it all means in the end, but I will say this. When it all comes down to it, Sheitan (which means Satan. Dunh dunh dunh!) seems to be about an inbred hillbilly closeted drag queen Jeepers Creepers dude with a Christmas complex.

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The horrors of Udo Kier: the formative years

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Daniel

After entering the horror genre with a witch hunt historical horror flick, Udo Kier did a trio of sleazy flicks based on classic fictional horror monsters. Yay! So let’s get into all four of them.

MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970)

This is where Udo’s horror career all started, if you consider it horror. To me, this witch-hunting period piece exploitation shit from the late 60s an early 70s is the original torture porn. Having sat through a few of these by Hammer Films and Paul Naschy, I dare say I’m burned out on them, so I’m not going to be kind.

The message is there as usual—men are monsters who simply dehumanized other human beings for power, pleasure, and personal gain. Yet we’ve learned nothing, because half the people in the U.S. would get wet at the thought of resurrecting public square torture and killing of people who aren’t just like them.

In this film, Udo Kier is the apprentice to a respected witch finder, but the more he sees him gruesomely violate people, the more he doubts his integrity.

The majority of the film sees two people being continuously tortured: a young woman they’re trying to get to confess that she fucked the devil, and a young man they want to sign over all his possessions to the church. Not surprisingly, these God-fearing freaks do a lot of butt stuff to him…

That’s about it. Eventually Kier turns against his “master”, and a woman he saved from sure death starts a rebellion against the witch finder, leading to a melodramatic, tragic love story ending.

FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN (1973)

Despite Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula having “Andy Warhol’s…” added in front of the titles when they were released, they are the creations of director Paul Morrissey. I don’t know how Andy’s name got attached to them. He doesn’t even seem to get production credits. Perhaps it was a way of saying thanks because he let Paul borrow his boy toy obsession Joey Dallesandro to star in both films?

Either way, maybe if John Waters had taken himself more seriously back in the day, he could have been the mastermind behind what feel like Hammer Films gone rogue. I haven’t seen them in decades, so it was kind of fun to revisit them, especially after having gone brain dead from watching dozens of actual Hammer versions of Frankenstein and Dracula in the past year.

Udo Kier continued to solidify his horror icon status starring in the lead role as Dr. Frankenstein. He wants to make a master race of Serbians, so he begins by crafting a woman with the help of his assistant Otto.

Sexually repressed—probably because his fricking wife is also his sister in this movie—Frank makes sweet love to his creation’s guts a few times while Otto watches, thereby earning this movie its X rating.

Meanwhile, Frank’s sister-wife has the hots for Joey Dallesandro, the farmhand stud that Frank has somehow completely overlooked in his plot to make a virile man to impregnate his new woman. Not realizing what is right under his nose (and what his sister-wife is under), he goes to the local whorehouse looking for a horny brain and mistakes Joey’s friend, who is ready to become a holy man, for a sex fiend (easy mistake to make). So Frank and Otto hack off his head and put it on their man creation.

Between segments of sleazy and bloody sex, Joey figures out what has become of his friend, and Frank figures out he figured it out. So Frank abducts Joey with plans to use his hot head instead…and so that we can gaze at Joey bound up and helpless.

As with any classic Frankenstein story, Frank’s plans all backfire and the monster goes on a killing spree, although it is the shortest segment of this re-telling of the tale.

BLOOD FOR DRACULA (1974)

It’s as if the almost incidental camp of Flesh for Frankenstein inspired Paul Morrissey to totally go for it with the follow-up, which stars Udo and Joey once again. Blood for Dracula is a midnight movie mess and I love it.

Udo mesmerizes with his eyes as Dracula, but the true stars here are Joey’s butt, Joey’s hilarious New York accent in a period piece, and Udo’s flamboyant assistant—sort of his Let the Right One In guardian—who is played by the dude who played Otto in Flesh for Frankenstein.

Dracula is sickly and in need of virgin blood, so his assistant brings him to meet a family with a gaggle of supposedly virginal daughters. Good luck with that when Joey Dallesandro is…shocker…the studly caretaker.

With his hair beautifully trimmed this time (I’m just not a fan of long hair on men), Joey is totally gorgeous in this film. He’s also a total douche bag who smacks the sisters around and calls them whores as foreplay whenever he’s about to fuck them. So sexy. But seriously, this film is misogynistic satire? Historically accurate? Exploitative? All of the above?

While Joey is punching and plugging away at the sisters, Drac is meeting them one by one, trying to trick them into admitting they are not virgins, and then giving in to his desires and sucking them for sustenance anyway. Udo is comedy gold when his face literally turns green and he begins to get violently I’ll because he drinks slut blood instead of virgin blood.

Delivering on the déjà vu, Joey once again figures out there’s a monster in their midst, but this time he goes into Buffy mode and hunts down Drac with an axe and a stake. The climax of this one rox.

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE (1981)

I wouldn’t be surprised if this take on the Robert Louis Stevenson classic weren’t the inspiration for the 1986 flick Gothic, another trippy film intertwined with a classic horror novel. It also makes Hyde as perverse and vile as he can possibly be—beginning with the pursuit and beating of a child—and parallels his grotesque and evil behavior with that of the aristocratic class.

Udo plays Jekyll. He and his fiancée are having an engagement party loaded with the upper crust of society. When a female guest is gruesomely raped and murdered, there is a surprisingly graphic inspection of her bloody vagina and then all hell breaks loose. Guests run amok in a frenzy of fear, and an old military general starts shooting willy-nilly.

This leads to the best debauchery the film has to offer. Hyde appears, ties up the old man, and makes him watch his whorish daughter bend over and offer herself to Hyde. Nothing is left to the imagination as we see Hyde’s huge, erect member several times.

Male guests barge in to chase him, and while the old military man is busy whipping his grown daughter’s bare ass, Hyde is sodomizing a dude in the attic.

It’s impossible to ignore the fact that his erect penis is now blood red. Ew.

Considering Hyde is played by a different actor, Udo doesn’t actually have substantial screen time. The film just gets more chaotic and confusing as Hyde runs around beating people, shooting them with a bow and arrow, and eventually enticing Jekyll’s fiancée to go female Hyde for a final act that feels like a bad drug trip—okay, an even worse drug trip than everything that comes before it.

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Crazy for the 80s

Posted on February 3, 2022 by Daniel

My latest selection of six flix to cover includes five I scored on Blu-ray, and a final one that could definitely use an official release on disc—and they’re all lesser-known movies you may have stumbled upon on HBO or on the video store shelves back in the 80s.

SCREAM FOR HELP (1984)

Before its recent Blu-ray release, I hadn’t seen this movie in decades—like, literally since it was on cable in the 80s. Dang, I’m old. Anyway, this is basically The Stepfather three years before that movie existed and twice as edgy. It is so damn quirky and unwilling to be typical that I kind of love it—except for the awful melodramatic score, which sounds like bad music from a Charlie’s Angels episode in the 1970s.

Our main girl is seventeen and believes her stepfather is trying to kill her mother. She watches his every move, and every time there’s an “accident” that leads to harm or death, it seems to be right after he was lurking in the area. She follows him several times and catches him banging another woman. She tells every adult she can, but no one believes her.

The best thing about this movie is that none of the characters give a fuck. The main girl boldly confronts her stepfather about everything she catches him doing. She brazenly invites her newly deceased best friend’s boyfriend in to fuck her.

She runs around with cherry blood on her hand when her stepfather catches them in the act.

The stepfather arrogantly cops to every attempt at murder, including deactivating a trap meant for his stepdaughter when she fails to trip it before he comes home. When he can no longer deny the truth to his wife, he brags about how he wanted to kill her because he couldn’t stand fucking her. And when it’s time to do something about them, he coldly and violently throws them down a set of stairs to lock them in the basement…until he needs help from the main girl, at which point he goes to ask her to do him a favor. WTF?

Highlights include a suspense sequence when the main girl sneaks into the home of the woman her stepfather is banging, a home invasion cat and mouse game during the final act, and a cheesetastic “they always come back” scene at the end.

This movie is just 80s whacked and I can’t get enough of it.

THE KINDRED (1987)

Stephen Carpenter directed three films in the 80s—The Dorm That Dripped Blood, The Power, and this one—before coming back in the 2000s for one more horror film: Soul Survivors. In my opinion, The Kindred may just be his masterpiece. It is a gory sci-fi/horror creature feature from start to finish and is as 80s as it gets.

A scientist’s mom is dying in the hospital and tells him to put an end to her experiments. She also manages to drop one more bomb before croaking—he has a brother he didn’t know about.

So he travels to the family home with some assistants, including DiMucci, who did it for our country five years before this movie in Grease 2, plus a few recognizable horror vets of the 80s.

After a not so cool scene in which tentacles come up from the floor and grab a dog, the tentacles shift focus to embedding into the skin of the scientists one by one.

With its practical effects, this movie makes a damn good argument against CGI.

It’s also a good reminder that all horror needs to stick with you is a simple plot and kick ass effects.

GRAVEROBBERS (1988)

Sort of like a cross between Dead & Buried and Phantasm, this is pure 80s direct-to-video weirdness. I’m kind of glad I missed it back then, because it gave me a chance to feel like I was immersed in the decade once again with something new. I’m actually shocked Graverobbers made it to Blu-ray before many better known films.

The generic late 80s pop sprinkled throughout that sounds like bad Miami Vice TV show music adds just enough reminder of where this movie lands on the horror timeline. So does the rest of the movie for that matter. It opens with a woman having a gory nightmare while drenched in red horror light.

She works at a diner, where she agrees right on the spot to marry a weird dude that walks in and proposes to her. Clearly there’s some sort of supernatural magic at play (which is never explained), because this dude looks like a psycho killer funeral director.

Turns out he’s a psycho killer funeral director. He takes her to his funeral home, where all the locals are waiting for the wedding to start. She’s warned never to open a specific door.

She soon discovers the whole town is nuts, and the men turn dead bodies into zombies and fuck them because there’s no way to get AIDS from them. Ah…the 80s.

I kid you not when I say approximately the last half hour is a chase scene, both on foot and on wheels, with the main girl being chased by corpses riding motorcycles. Ah…the 80s.

The worst part of the film? A fricking voiceover at the end describing what became of each character after the movie ends. I didn’t even understand what had become of them when the movie ended.

GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL (1989)

The most glaring issue with Girlfriend From Hell is that she’s a fucking bore. It’s the boyfriend who really brings the party.

A typical goofball occult comedy ripe for viewing on cable dozens of times back in the eighties, this little film has a great pop wave theme song and explodes with the best that bad eighties fashion had to offer as the decade came to a close. How I wish it never had.

 

Anyway, a shy guy and a shy girl are set up on a blind date at a birthday party their friends are throwing. But the party gets crashed by a she-devil on the run from her ex-boyfriend, a nerdy devil hunter with a ray gun. Ah…the 80s.

Just when the shy couple kisses, the she-devil enters the shy girl’s body in a streak of neon like Kira rolling by on her skates in Xanadu.

This transforms the shy girl into a rocker vixen in red leather.

If only she were as tantalizing as she looks. I don’t know. Maybe they just got the wrong actress or the wrong writers to write the character, because she is dull no matter how hard she tries to be an evil bitch. The worst she can conjure up is getting a lobster to come back to life on a dinner plate and having the shy boy beat up some bad boys in an alley.

The film only picks up when her devil hunting geek boyfriend joins up with the main girls to help bring their boyfriends back to life after the she-devil fucks them to death.

This devil-hunting dude is a hoot and he’s always horny and hitting on the girls. He has a ball at a strip club…almost more than one ball when one of the girls uses his magical tool to catapult them to a gay bar when he’s not paying attention.

It’s when he finally battles it out with the she-devil that she seems a little more lively, mostly because they got a good stunt person to get tossed all over the place in tight red leather.

CURFEW (1989)

 

This is such a low-brow home invasion flick, but the cast makes it a perfect 80s time capsule piece.

Rapist brothers bust out of jail, and one of them is the Brody brother from Jaws 3 that isn’t Dennis Quaid. They go on a killing spree, taking down those involved with putting them in prison. They’re heading for…

…the home of Kyle Richards, whose father is a district attorney. She goes out with some friends, and her date is the cute alien from V that knocked up a human.

The sleaze that impregnates Jennifer Jason Leigh in Fast Times works at a diner, and Peter Brady is the sheriff.

Kyle goes home to find the escaped convicts have busted in, and after a chase scene it’s the usual home invasion torment and torture.

Eventually her friends show up so there will be a better body count.

The only high point of this tame thriller is that Kyle is the hero, as she should be in the next Halloween film if they plan to redeem the new trilogy at all.

BIG MAN ON CAMPUS (1989)

This one slipped by me in the 80s, so I’m not sure when the name change occurred, but it was intended to be titled The Hunchback of UCLA. That would have been perfect if this spoof on the Victor Hugo classic had kept the “monster” in the shadows a little longer and perhaps been more of a sex comedy. It’s disappointingly PG, so there are no sexual hijinks—not even the hunchback peeping the girls’ locker room or beating off while spying on a pillow fight.

Instead, almost as quickly as we learn that everyone believes there’s a monster living in the clock tower on the college campus, he swoops down and saves a female student and her boyfriend when some dude starts a fight with them down below.

The hunchback is brought to trial for violent behavior, and Jessica Harper and Tom Skerritt play doctors on opposite sides of the argument as to whether he’s a man or a monster.

The hunchback ends up living in his tower with the main guy, played by none other than Corey Parker, the boyfriend from Scream for Help.

The main guy and main girl help the hunchback adjust to life in society, which should provide fodder for plenty of funny scenes, but it’s all surprisingly tame, from a basketball game to a mall trip. There’s even a blip on the radar moment when the main guy and hunchback are caught hugging by a bunch of other guys in the shower room. Rather impressive that there’s no blatant homophobia tossed in here.

The funniest part for me was when the hunchback expresses his curiosity about romance to his therapist, played by Cindy Williams. I guess it kind of makes sense that the seasoned comedic actress would pull off the comic highlight of the movie.

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Asian horror remade in the new millennium Part 3

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Daniel

I bring my series of posts about Asian horror films that were remade for the U.S. market in the 2000s to an end with a look at The Eye movies!

THE EYE (2002)

The Eye to me is like Exorcist III—one highly effective scary scene has earned it much more credit than it deserves. Yeah, I said it. The Eye is actually a rather generic film coming from the peak of the Asian horror craze.

While in the hospital for an eye transplant, a young woman makes friends with a child going through brain surgery.

After having her bandages removed, the main girl at first sees blurry images, including a creepy encounter with a mysterious female figure in the hospital hall at night. It’s an effective scene that includes a good jump scare.

She then goes to stay in an apartment building with her grandmother, where she has repeated run-ins with a little boy who always asks her if she has seen his report card.

When it comes down to it…she sees dead people. But her new sixth sense goes beyond that. For instance, I didn’t quite understand why she sees a ghost woman slowly and lustfully licking a piece of hanging meat in a restaurant. Was she starving in real life?

She has a total Ghost moment when she encounters a boy ghost right after he dies in an accident on the street. This is also when she discovers that a figure in black with a blurred face comes to take the dead spirits.

Then comes the elevator scene. Eek! It makes me think of that true story of the young woman who died in the water tower after doing weird shit on a security camera video on an elevator. In the movie, the main girl sees a man standing facing the corner…but not in the security monitor, only after she gets on the elevator! Instead of getting off the elevator sooner, she rides the damn thing fifteen stories up as he begins fucking floating towards her. As she rushes to her grandmother’s apartment, she sees the little report card kid getting ready to jump out a window, but she just keeps running.

She also happens to be a violinist, which isn’t focused on much in the original, but she does pass out at a recital, which lands her back in the hospital for a sad goodbye with the brain cancer child before the Grim Reaper appears.

Her therapist, who doesn’t quite believe she is seeing dead people, helps her find the mother of the girl she received her eyes from, and a whole new set of information is heaped on us. Bottom line is…the donor committed suicide. With the main girl pushed to the same state of despair, the mother helps her, which frees the dead girl’s soul.

On the drive home, something totally unexpected happens in this little ghost movie—a massive disaster scene! The main girl now has psychic powers (on top of seeing dead people and the Grim Reaper), so as as they are stuck in traffic, she knows there’s going to be a huge explosion. As she’s running down the road trying to warn people sitting in their cars, we are bombarded by flashbacks of the suicide girl’s past that reveal that she had psychic ability to predict tragedies, and when they came true, they would think she was evil.

THE EYE (2008)

The American remake spoon feeds us all the information that is sloppily dumped on us in huge chunks in the original, but that just manages to make this a chaotic mess of shrill shock scares that fall flat within minutes because they’re so overdone.

We are handed the suicide girl right at the beginning before we meet our main girl, played by Jessica Alba. Her career as a violinist gets more focus, including her therapist being a fellow musician.

A young Chloë Grace Moretz is the brain child in the hospital, and Parker Posey plays her sister, with the grandmother stay scrapped for this movie.

When Jessica sees the first scary lady in the hospital hall, the scene is a typical quick edit assault on the eyes and ears. Yawn.

The report card kid is around, but instead of the meat licker at the restaurant, we get some cranky white chick who even bitches to Jessica and gets all in her face. A fucking Karen ghost. Also, the dead kid in the accident on the street is swapped out for a woman.

The Grim Reaper is creepier and more ominous, and the scene saying goodbye to the brain child at the hospital is less poignant and played more for the horror and suspense of the Grim Reaper’s presence.

And of course there’s the elevator scene. It’s a bit more frenetic than the original instead of building the tension as much, but what I do like is that Jessica slams every damn button on that elevator in order to get off sooner. The creep in the corner looks a bit more gnarly gory than the creep in the original, but I wouldn’t choose to ride fifteen floors up with either of them. And once Jessica gets off the elevator, instead of ignoring the jumping report card boy, she actually runs to the window to try to stop him. Blah.

The major change throughout the film is an onslaught of nightmares Jessica has revealing the history of the previous owner of the eyes, along with a whole lot of warnings of fires and explosions. When she finally gets to the mother of her dead donor, the woman fricking has a heart attack and Jessica helps free the girl’s soul in a whole different way, which was a bit hokey to me.

And finally, the traffic jam explosion scene has minor changes but is just as massive as in the original.

THE EYE 2 (2004)

While the remake didn’t spawn any sequels, the original lived on. Moving forward, “the eye” just refers to the ability to see ghosts, with the concept of eye transplants thrown out the window.

In the sequel, a young woman is not in a good place and ends up trying to commit suicide. After overdosing on pills, she sees ghosts all around her bed before being rushed to the hospital.

Then it’s game on and ghosts galore—in a taxi, jumping in front of a subway, even in the reflection in her bathroom tiles. It’s familiar territory for anyone who’s been around Asian horror for a while.

Finally we get the twist. She’s pregnant, she doesn’t want it, and the ghosts are coming for it, which kind of makes her want it.

The most intriguing scene is when she is assaulted by a man on the street, something attacks him, she blacks out, and then the police tell her she attacked him in  self-defense.

The most derivative scene? Long black ghost girl hair attack! Yawn. This time it’s on an elevator, and to make things a little more interesting, ghost girl wants to crawl into where babies come out.

THE EYE 3 (2005)

The Eye 3 continues the trend of having every film serve as its own subgenre of horror. This installment goes for a fun and funny teen horror comedy vibe!

The opening exorcism scene is a sign of things to come. It’s seemingly creepy at first, with a possessed girl levitating and groaning demonically, but then a circle of exorcists gets slapped one by one in the face with a big tongue.

Next we meet a group of friends. They read a book covering various rituals to communicate with the dead—which also happens to reference the “cases” of hauntings from the first two movies. Sneaky.

The kids do a ritual that involves drumming on bowls with chopsticks, and ghosts appear. Also, one of their friends disappears!

They spend the rest of the film being harassed by various ghosts as they try to find their friend. One girl is chased by a basketball. A guy has a dance-off in a hallway while running from ghosts after spoofing on the original film by having an encounter in the elevator and then an encounter with a kid looking for his report card.

There’s also a silly element about seeing ghosts by bending over and looking between your legs, and when the kids finally reach a ghostly dimension where they can rescue their friend, fart humor comes into play! This one definitely gets dumber as it progresses.

THE CHILD’S EYE (2010)

The series goes out with a child’s eye…and a dog’s eye! This one has more in common with the third film, but pulls back on the humor to focus more on the horror.

When social uprisings begin while pretty young people are on vacation, they end up stuck in a seedy hotel with a ghostly past.

This installment jumps the shark by bringing in a dog that can see ghosts (can’t they all?). When the guys in the group of friends go missing, this pup helps the girls unravel a supernatural mystery involving a man believed to have killed his pregnant wife’s dog, after which the wife disappeared. Uh-oh.

This was originally a 3D film, which probably worked well with the less intense nature of this installment (it’s definitely a popcorn an cherry cola film), so there are some cheesy moments where hands, bugs, and other things sort of just float in front of the camera.

There’s some possession action, a scary ghost woman, and another dimension as in The Eye 3.

The best part for me was this freaky half-dog/half-child thing that runs around terrorizing the girls. Eek!

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Asian horror remade in the new millennium Part 2

Posted on January 28, 2022 by Daniel

I caught all four missed calls—3 Japanese installments and the American remake—but should I have missed them?

ONE MISSED CALL (2003)

It’s like they took the phone call aspect of The Ring, the techno ghost transmission aspect of Pulse, and the predictive death aspect of Final Destination and made yet another movie that eventually evolves into a tale of an angry little ghost girl.

I would have liked One Missed Call a lot better if it had gotten to the point sooner instead of running 112 minutes long. It is painfully padded before getting to the really good stuff in the final act. And as with most of these Asian ghost mysteries, there are a few too many elements tossed in along the way to complicate the plot.

A young woman receives a message on her flip phone in her own voice. Two days later she is on the phone with her friend and dies by falling in front of a train while saying exactly what she was saying on the message.

The friend is now stuck with this curse as her friends start getting similar messages and dying off. There’s a ringtone that is meant to instill fear in us and become an iconic sound of the horror genre, but it didn’t particularly do much for me.

The story about the deadly supernatural phone messages goes viral before going viral was even a thing, and one of the friends ends up on a live television exorcism show.

Meanwhile, a detective who lost his sister to the phone message helps the main girl investigate, and an Asian horror ghost girl legend is born about a girl with asthma, her abusive mother, and the reason a red jawbreaker is found in the mouth of every victim.

It all leads to a derelict hospital for the best part of the film, with a corpse terrorizing the main girl and detective, and a horrendous moment when the main girl apologizes to her abusive mother as if she was the one at fault.

ONE MISSED CALL 2 (2005)

Here is one of those sequels that rewrites horror history to create a convoluted new origin story of the curse.

The phone messages and ringtones of terror strike a new group of friends, and the case from the first movie is referenced for some sort of continuity.

Then a reporter steps in to help them out. The jawbreakers are out and the stomachs of victims are now lined with coal dust, which leads to the grandfather of asthma girl from the first movie, because he lives in a mining town.

Let’s do something totally different…
scary crawling girl with SHORT hair!

It seems the curse actually originated with a girl who lived in the town and could make awful things happen just by saying them out loud. So the locals sewed her mouth shut and buried her in the mine.

A terrible idea in any language.

The reporter and the main kids go into the mine to find the body and are terrorized by the ghost girl until the end…when the jawbreaker aspect suddenly pops up again, even though that was tied to the myth of the first movie’s asthma girl, not the second movie ghost girl. Ugh.

ONE MISSED CALL 3: FINAL (2006)

How about a heap of headache with a side order of no scares? The final film in the Japanese trilogy fully injects confusion to the max as it returns to asthma girl and her jawbreakers as the source story.

A girl bullied viciously at school falls into a coma after a failed suicide. Her friend gets revenge by sending a curse through her computer to the phones of all the bullies then checks them off in the yearbook like it’s Prom Night.

To save themselves from dying, the bullies start forwarding the message to each other because doing so is supposed to be the key to passing off the curse. What do you expect when all your friends are bullies?

This shit gets all forgive and forget as our main girl apologizes to coma girl, which supernaturally catapults them both back to school and drags them into a realm of cheap ghost scares—the best part of the movie.

They also get a live viral campaign going to help defeat asthma girl and then live happily ever after as BFFs. Yawn.

ONE MISSED CALL (2008)

This is what I’m talking about. After three bloated One Missed Call films, the U.S. remake sticks to the plot of the original and simply streamlines it to a sleek 80 minutes (minus the 6 minutes of closing credits).

Unfortunately, it also exploits the cheap “demon face” app effect everyone and their mother was playing with on the internet back then, which is why I hated this film at the time. But comparing it to the original version, I’ve gained a whole new respect for it.

Even with trimming the storytelling time by 30 minutes, the remake still manages to add some info visually that was just mentioned in dialogue in the original film. For starters, the first kill—a drowning—is only referenced in the original, but it plays out here in a silly scene involving death by fish pond. Not even the cat survives this one.

Shannyn Sossamon (Catacombs, Devour, Sinister 2) stars as the girl on the phone when her friend gets creamed by a train in a scene loaded with CGI specters and a splat. Much different than the original.

Ed Burns plays the main detective who lost his sister, and I have to say, I never realized what a gorgeous long nose he has. Yum. Margaret Cho has a very brief cameo as a fellow detective, and Ray Wise appears as the guy with the exorcism show.

Anyway, it felt very reminiscent of The Ring as victims start dropping dead after having delusions of centipedes, hideous dolls, and other creepy things. Turns out they are all objects in the house of asthma girl when the main girl and the detective get there, which is much sooner than in the original, thankfully.

Dang, this movie moves fast. Before you know it, the pair is at the abandoned hospital, and once again it ties back to objects in asthma girl’s house. The corpse attack is freakier because it takes place in a damn vent, and thankfully, there’s no bullshit apology to the abusive mother.

As for the ending, aside from the presence of the jawbreaker, the final scene is totally different—much more explosive and Hollywood, for sure.

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STREAM QUEEN: underground dwellers, a classic monster match, and a killer cult

Posted on January 26, 2022 by Daniel

My latest streaming marathon of indies was quite entertaining, so let’s get right into them.

IT CAME FROM BELOW (2021)

Just check this one out if you need a creature feature fix and are a fan of The Descent.

There’s nothing new here—a group of friends goes exploring underground tunnels, one of them is vulnerable following a personal loss, and then a creature starts tearing them apart. Yay!

It’s astounding to me that whiners on Prime say this is the worst movie ever, no one in it can act, it shouldn’t have been funded, no one should have agreed to work on it, they want their money back, blah, blah, blah. Everyone just wants to hear the sound of their own hatred for everything these days.

This movie may be a bit cliché, but there’s nothing bad about it beyond the lighting being a bit dark at times and the dialogue being too low to hear if you don’t crank up the volume. I found it to be a tight film with some good suspense and a wicked cool creature design.

Plus, there’s a little more going on here than just the creature…which, unfortunately also means we get less creature.

FRANKENSTEIN vs. THE MUMMY (2015)

I wasn’t aware that Damien Leone directed a film between All Hallows’ Eve and its spin-off Terrifier, so I was psyched to stumble upon Frankenstein vs. The Mummy. I wasn’t crazy about it being 2 hours long, and I stand by that after watching it, even though I enjoyed it.

A clever way to bring these two classic monsters together, this film has a male professor piecing together the monster with the help of a sleazy dude who brings him body parts, while a female professor, who happens to be his girlfriend, scores the university a mummy that needs human sacrifices to come back to life.

Both monsters are pretty damn freaky. Frankenstein reminds me of the vampire from Subspecies, and he even has a hot ass and, eventually, a nasty sense of humor.

Plus the kills are violent and gory.

Now here’s the problem. It’s not until after 50 minutes in that both monsters come to life, they don’t meet until 102 minutes in, and their fight is less than five minutes long!

My opinion…the movie should have been trimmed by 30 minutes, and 30 minutes of the remaining 90 minutes should have focused on Frankenstein and The Mummy beating the shit out of each other…

BAPHOMET (2021)

It’s about time someone made a movie named after the classic satanic symbol, it just doesn’t come into play in the film. Even so, this is one hell of a satanic cult film right from the opening sacrifice of a naked young woman.

Running only about 70 minutes long, it’s an odd little indie with absolutely no filler, and I give it props for that. A family is celebrating their daughter’s pregnancy when a man comes to offer them a load of money for their land.

The father refuses, and the family is immediately subjected to an onslaught of tragic events at the hands of the cult.

A pretty damn good shark attack scene is the last thing I expected in a satanic cult movie, but it’s the catalyst for the rest of the film, which involves a witch, a resurrection, a home invasion, and finally, a visit from a damn cool looking devil.

I’d say this one is worth giving a watch if you’re a fan of satanic cult movies and can appreciate indie films.

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STREAM QUEEN: a sausage fest, a killer bunny, and a Ouija sequel

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Daniel

I had a lot of fun, some fun, and no fun with this trio. Let’s find out why.

COLD FEET (2019)

What a treat to stumble upon an indie horror comedy that the hubby and I both enjoyed and that also lands on the sausage fest scares page.

Guys rent a house for a bachelor party, and as the owner gives them a brief tour, we learn that one of the dudes is gay…and is also the cutest of the bunch!

A stripper shows up to get the party started, and she has various successes and failures with each guy in the group during a montage—including a slow mo rejection from the mo…

The next morning the burnout drug dealer friend, who is also the funniest dude in the group, wakes everyone up to reveal that the stripper isn’t quite alive anymore, the house is haunted, and snipers are surrounding the place and shooting at them!

How the hell does all that come together? Quite brilliantly in this cleverly written little comedy, which also benefits from the performances of the actors.

It is most definitely a perfect, lighthearted supernatural comedy for a movie night with friends.

And hey, the gay guy doesn’t get naked, but another cutie gets shirtless, and his nipples are plump and delicious.

HAPPY LITTLE BUNNIES (2021)

This is a good one to add to the holiday horror page for a killer bunny marathon even though it doesn’t take place on Easter.

I will say right up front that the campy, gory kills and practical effects are the highlight from the very first death scene, which makes smart use of light, shadow, and an umbrella to introduce us to the bunny masked killer.

In between the kills the film focuses on a troubled dude talking to an equally troubled therapist.

Through flashbacks, they unpack how issues from their pasts and societal pressures fucked them both up, and try to come to terms with why they have urges to do awful things to people.

The dialogue definitely has its quirky, funny, and clever moments, but this film goes on for nearly 100 minutes, and conversation is the bulk of the runtime, so I personally found it burdened the pacing. I began losing focus and just started counting the minutes until the next awesome kill.

My absolute favorite death scene would have been an old standby: the glory hole. Of course that lands this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

However, that was overshadowed when the killer bunny man entered an S&M party in full swing for a campy massacre. Classic.

OUIJA: DEADLY REUNION (2021)

In European markets, several movies have been slapped with the title Ouija Experiment 3, but this is the official sequel by director Israel Luna, who made the first two films. This film is also known as Ouija Warehouse, but I prefer this title because the film reunites a couple of characters from the first movie.

That also makes this a confusing sequel. The second sequel is a meta movie in which actors from the first film appear as themselves. In this third installment a bunch of people setting up a birthday party in an old building find a Ouija board, use it, and bring back the actors from the first film…as the characters from the first film.

But that doesn’t even matter, because despite being an anal retentive, obsessive compulsive completist, I won’t be adding the final film in the trilogy to my collection (I seriously feel physically ill admitting that). This seems like a rushed, uninspired effort to release a new movie simply by clinging to past output. There’s nothing to be drawn from this movie for fans of the first two installments in terms of plot, scares, humor, or expansion of story. It’s virtually all dialogue and a handful of characters walking around a warehouse. No ghosts, no creatures, no kills. Nothing.

The highlight for me was a practice drag performance that ends with a suspenseful moment, but the queer content feels more forced than fluid as it usually does in Luna’s films.

 

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Still scraping the bottom of the 80s barrel

Posted on January 21, 2022 by Daniel

Once again I return to the 80s with five films that have landed in my personal collection in recent months. So let’s see what goodness the worst of the 80s turned up this time.

JULES VERNE’S MYSTERY ON MONSTER ISLAND (1981)

Horror kings Peter Cushing and Paul Naschy in a movie together at last? Not quite. They are each in Mystery On Monster Island for about three minutes or less, and not in the same scene, but their joint presence was reason enough for me to add it to my collection.

The movie is about a young man who wants to travel before his upcoming marriage. So his uncle sends him to explore an island he just bought at auction, with an experienced professor as his traveling partner.

Soon the ship they are on is invaded by humanoid sea creatures! They are the only two to survive, and they end up stranded on the island.

They set up camp, and it is immediately established that the professor is the comic relief. So despite the pretty intense first scare scene with the somewhat goofy sea creatures on the ship, this is based on the writing of Jules Verne and more of a “family” movie for the most part…

See, the idea of two men stranded together on an island takes on a whole blue (boy) lagoon dimension for a young gay kid. I always loved how bare asses were okay in family movies when I was a kid as long as they were hanging out of loincloths on native tribal characters. And that’s exactly what we get here. The main guy and the professor spot cannibals about to indulge in native man they have strapped up. Yummy.

In an uncomfortably dated scene (and also oddly sexual), the two leading men save the native, he bows down to kiss their feet as thanks, he insists on being the professor’s servant, and the professor agrees to be his master to appease him. You’d never see that kind of “polite” racist shit happening in a movie these days.

The native joins their little party, and in the process immediately became a distraction for me for the rest of the film with his hot, barely covered bod.

The trio encounters a dinosaur, different humanoids from the sea, a giant caterpillar…all in the first half of the film.

The second half is much less exciting, and things begin to drag as the focus shifts totally to human enemies, plus the addition of a woman to their group. Blah.

THE SECRET OF THE MUMMY (1982)

This is an unbearable Brazilian…horror comedy? Exploitation? Soft core porn? I don’t know. Maybe something was lost in translation, but I didn’t find it to be funny, and it was a mess of spliced together, amateurish scenes. But it was in a cheap boxed set with a film I needed to complete my Paul Naschy film collection.

Feeling like it’s comprised of news footage half the time (often in black and white), this is the story of a mad scientist who finds a mummy and brings it back to life.

In flashbacks we learn this mummy was a pretty—to the point of looking kind of queer—and psychotic young prince that liked orgies and liked murdering young women during sex.

40 minutes in the mummy goes on a killing spree in what feels like a bad spoof of mummy movies.

And that’s in between raunchy sex scenes, including one involving a mouse used as foreplay and another that features actual tongue slathering over bush.

BLACK CANDLES (1982)

I’m a fan of director of Jose Ramon Larraz’s movies like Vampyres, Rest in Pieces, Edge of the Axe, and Deadly Manor. Even better, most of them are from the 80s, as is Black Candles. Therefore, I purchased the Blu-ray release without a second thought.

I guess every director is entitled to a miss. This one is it for me. Sex, depravity, and a satanic cult sound like a lot of fun, right?

Unfortunately, it’s all about the sleaze without any suspense or scares. That’s mostly because rather than try to escape the horrors that await, our main girl basically just goes with it until she is seduced to the dark side.

She comes with her boyfriend to the home of her missing brother. Little does she know that her sister-in-law has evil plans for her.

This is mostly two hours of sensual soft core sex, complete with a load of lesbian sex. Amazing how the devil always seems to be into lesbians but doesn’t have any interest in having guys bang each other at his orgies.

We get lesbian hand jobs, tit licking and squeezing, a “priest” going muff diving, boring hetero sex, and then a few heinous scenes, one in which a woman gets fucked by a goat—missionary style!—then lustfully licks its face, and one in which the cult anally impales a dude with a sword.

With so much sex going on, it’s hard to believe this film is so utterly anti-climactic.

THE POWER (1984)

I’ve finally completed my collection of Steve Carpenter horror movies, which also includes The Dorm That Dripped Blood, The Kindred, and Soul Survivors (his one dip into the new millennium), and I have to say—I do wish he had made more than three horror flicks in the 80s.

The Power is a total direct-to-video horror flick that delivers much of what I want from 80s horror, even if there is a drop in action in the center of the film and it tends to go off on tangents.

The opener rocks. A professor teaching students about an Aztec figurine is actually possessed by the figurine, leading to a wild levitation and impalement scene filled with fog machine atmosphere.

The figurine lands in the hands of students after they sneak into some building and play with a Ouija board, and then each of them begins to experience paranormal attacks in their rooms.

They also drag a female reporter into it and she begins having nightmares. But it’s her reporter boyfriend who becomes obsessed with and eventually possessed by the figurine.

The final act gets into good old skool 80s horror territory, with the kids again in some building (I had no idea what was going on at times), and the possessed reporter stalking them.

The money shot is a practical effects body mutation scene. There’s also a cheesy fun final frame ending.

THE SEVEN VAMPIRES (1986)

What a difference four years makes for the director of The Secret of the Mummy. This oddity delivers the direct-to-video nonsense we expected in the 80s, including musical performances, nudity, and even a variety of horror subgenres crammed into one plot.

It all begins with a botanist acquiring a man-eating plant from Africa.

When it does what it does best to him, his special lady becomes reclusive, gets bit by the plant, and then decides to produce a show at a club called The Dance of the Seven Vampires. Uh-oh.

As we begin to suspect the plant that we never see again has turned people into vampires, one of the detectives on a case concerning a rash of murders around town also believes vampires are on the loose.

So, if you stick with the vampire concept for a while, that eventually leads to a killer in a robe and mask!

WTF? This film ends up at a theater and suddenly feels like a slasher with a hint of The Phantom of the Opera thrown in just for the hell of it.

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Asian horror remade in the new millennium Part 1

Posted on January 20, 2022 by Daniel

As we move towards the 20th anniversary of the trend of Hollywood remaking popular Asian horror films—most notably The Ring and The Grudge—I decided to do some comparing and contrasting of a few of the lower profile adaptations. So let’s get started with Shutter. You should be familiar with at least one of the films before reading this post.

SHUTTER (2004)

I find the original Thai film to be creepier than the remake (no surprise there), but as always, I did find some changes in the U.S. version that either made sense or were more effective.

The original begins with our main male/female couple on their way home from a party at night. She’s distracted while driving and hits a young woman in the middle of the road. He convinces her to drive off.

He’s a professional photographer, and during a photo shoot at a graduation soon after, he sees a corpse of a woman standing among the students. In fact, all his photos get developed with weird streaks in them. He also begins to experience pain in his neck and shoulders that he assumes is from the accident.

Meanwhile, the girlfriend has a super creepy nightmare in a scene that so takes a page from Ringu. It involves a ghost girl climbing out of a water basin in her boyfriend’s dark room—black hair first, naturally.

And so the couple begins investigating the phenomenon of ghosts showing up in photos.

After another photo shoot at a studio, the guy experiences a visit from the ghost girl in a flashing camera light scene. Super scary and suspenseful but totally routine. He also has a nightmare in which he sees her with her eyes and mouth bleeding, but again it’s cliché.

The couple eventually learns several of his male friends have committed suicide, and he even witnesses one of them jump out a window.

Meanwhile, his girlfriend turns up a name of a young woman, and he is forced to come clean with her—he dated the girl while in school. She was weird, so he kept their relationship a secret, but eventually broke it off with her with the help of his friends.

The couple decides to go visit her to see how she’s doing, and during the ride he encounters a ghost girl again…clinging to the side of the moving car (thanks for the ride, lady!).

He also has a false alarm encounter at a rest stop in the men’s room stall with what I’m assuming is supposed to be a drag queen.

This is the really weird part of the Thai film. When they get to the girl’s house, they discover she has died and her mother has been keeping her corpse stashed away Norman Bates style. What the hell? They figure giving the dead girl a proper burial will rid them of her ghost so they throw her a funeral.

Fail! She ends up climbing into bed with them in a move right out of The Grudge, but the chase definitely did some damage to my mind.

First the bitch walks upside down on the ceiling, and then she scoffs at that pussy Sadako for using the stairs and instead takes a fire escape ladder down. Eek!

Meanwhile, the main girl gets more photos developed that reveal the ghost girl climbing up a bookcase in the living room, so she searches it and finds more photos to develop that reveal the awful truth, which the main guy then cops to when he comes home. His friends raped the girl he wanted to dump, and when he walked in on them they made him take pictures to use as blackmail if she didn’t leave him alone. So the girl eventually couldn’t live with that and committed suicide. There was no car accident ghost girl looking for revenge. Suicide ghost girl apparently just figured out how to be a road crossing ghost girl who gets hit by a car just for attention.

The big payoff is the main guy’s battle with her when he uses his camera around his apartment to try to see her. The big zinger photo reveals that she has been sitting on his shoulders the whole time. Struggling to get her off, he falls out the window.

He ends up in a mental hospital, his girlfriend comes to visit him, and we see in a reflection that the ghost is still with him.

SHUTTER (2008)

Naturally the U.S. remake casts two pretty people as the main couple—Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor. However, this film begins with them getting married and then flying off to Tokyo, where he lands a photography job—and so that a creepy Asian ghost girl can remain intact.

This is where I feel the U.S. remake totally fixed a whole lot just by altering one scene. Rachael is driving and hits the girl crossing the road at night. However, this time they get out and even call the cops, but there’s no body. This not only removes the stigma on both characters for driving away from the scene of a crime as established in the original, allowing us to empathize with them longer, but it also clears up that the girl crossing the road is already supernatural. In the original film, I seriously thought the girl they hit in the road was meant as a red herring to make us think that she dies and became the ghost haunting them, and the scene of her clinging on to the side of their car later on confused matters for me even more. That scene does not occur in the U.S. version, even though it is a goodie. Instead, we get a lame nightmare sequence of Rachael dreaming about the girl climbing on the front of her car, which also replaces the cool dark room nightmare scene from the original.

This film quickly Americanizes the plot, with Rachael being the one to suspect a ghost, Josh acting like she’s crazy even though he’s experiencing shit himself, and Rachael noticing some oddly suspect behaviors between Josh and his friends that clue her in to the possibility that he isn’t exactly who she thought he was.

The investigating about ghosts in photos is mostly the same, but Josh’s flashbulb ghost attack scene at the studio is a typical frenetic American take on the sequence that has about half the impact of the slow burn pace of the original scene.

When he reveals his past relationship with the dead girl, her story has changed somewhat. She isn’t painted as a pathetic girl he felt bad for. Instead, her father didn’t approve of their relationship, but then he died and she changed and became clingy. I actually like this tweak to the story, because in the original it seemed exceptionally cruel that the guy just secretly dated her out of pity and would even ignore her and mock her with his friends in public.

To up the “body count” for U.S. audiences, we see the main guy’s friends die. The first is subjected to an exploding camera attack.

The second does the window jump, happens to be Pam’s first man Roy from The Office, and takes the dive shirtless. Yay!

Next comes another major change that I much prefer. When they go visit the girl, she lives alone and they find her dead body. No mother storyline at all, a plot point I found to be just plain weird in the original. The decision to remove it here was clearly made later in the game by the filmmakers, because it is included in the deleted scenes on the Blu-ray.

The climb into bed with the couple is briefer, but it’s also less of a rip-off of The Grudge and tosses in some icky sexual elements just for the fun of it. However, the awesome hall ceiling chase and ladder scene are gone. Bummer.

Another minor change I like is that the developed photos of the ghost girl don’t simply lead to a bookshelf in the main room of the apartment; Rachael has to think a bit on it and determines that the ghost girl is leading her through a wall into the dark room. To give her a break after all that thinking, she doesn’t have to develop any film, because the photos of what happened to the girl are on an SD card in a camera.

Here the main guy is painted as much more of a vial human. He was actually in on the plans to take damning photos of the girlfriend, and the flashbacks of her being victimized are much more gut-wrenching than in the original.

The finale ramps up the battle with the ghost girl, and it is ridiculously over-the-top, with him frying himself with camera equipment in his effort to get her off his back.

And finally, the scene at the mental hospital is much more satisfying because Rachael is not there to visit his miserable ass. In a deleted scene she is present…but only to dump their wedding rings on his dinner tray before the nurse brings it in to him, which is just as satisfying.

I wish I could have covered Shutter One, the Thai sequel to the original that was released a year after the U.S. remake, but I was unable to locate it in any way shape or form to watch. Which means…my fricking collection of Shutter movies is incomplete on my shelves. Grr…argh.

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