STREAM QUEEN: will you Await the Dawn in the Funhouse with The Mad Hatter?

Posted on October 28, 2021 by Daniel

After a marathon of 26 Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee films, it was time for me to jump back into the 21st century with some streaming of modern horror flicks. Here’s how things turned out with the first 3 films I watched.

FUNHOUSE (2019)

The director of The Evil In Us makes a statement on the instant fame of reality by applying a Saw style touch.

Another Skarsgard kid is one of the leads as 8 wannabe celebrities are brought together for a Big Brother style reality show streaming live to the internet.

As soon as the first competition hits—human piñata!—the cast realizes this is no ordinary game.

In between violent and gory competition kills and tensions between the cast members, clips are interspersed including viewer reactions, video reviewer reactions, and news reports about the missing celebrities.

The host of the show is a computer generated, talking Panda, and the threatening assistants wear creepy panda masks.

There are boobs, a sex scene, a hottie with a Mohawk taking on a bunch of big beefy guys, and an ending that avoids the most obvious route.

THE MAD HATTER (2021)

The Mad Hatter trailer reminded me of supernatural killer of the early 2000s PG-13 movies, so I thought I’d check it out. The film’s creators had a different plan though.

A college professor who is so clearly weird from the start invites some students to stay in a mansion rumored to be haunted. He also plans to hypnotize them to further enhance their supernatural experiences. This just leads to some of them tapping into deeper distractions trapped inside their minds—most specifically one kid who seems to have guilt over a drowning.

As for the other kids, they experience a variety of different yet predictable supernatural occurrences. And yet each of them basically pretends their encounters didn’t happen and just go on without telling anyone.

For instance, a guy with a sexy body has a sexual encounter with a girl…who briefly turns into a man during foreplay. Hot. However, the guy says nothing when he later encounters the girl.

And when the whole group of kids is playing dress-up with some old clothes they find, a creepy, menacing man suddenly appears and doesn’t move or say anything to them. Soooo…they just leave the room and never speak of it again or wonder where the hell the man came from, who he is, or where he went.

Sort of like Euro horror of the 80s, this film just throws one horror after another at the audience (rarely is that horror actually the Mad Hatter). But unlike 80s Euro horror, which hit us with a series of nonsensical horrors that were also freakish or terrifying enough for us to not care that we couldn’t understand what the hell was going on, The Mad Hatter tries to make all those random horrors somehow have meaning and connection…yet it’s still nonsensical horror. Unfortunately, it also isn’t freakish or terrifying.

But my biggest issue? Every time someone just “disappears”, the increasingly creepy teacher simply says, “oh, they went home” and no one bats an eye!

AWAIT THE DAWN (2020)

A movie with Dee Wallace and her daughter Gabrielle? I was so here for it. I was also pleasantly surprised that this was a lighter, less polished indie with a campy vibe, plenty of practical gore effects, and eventually a “pass on the possession” plot—one my favorite kinds.

The opening scene and music totally gave me that Creepshow comic book movie feel—I’m talking the 1982 movie, not the current series. There’s definitely a campy tone that carries threw the film. However, despite the actors handling their business fine, a nagging melodramatic chord progression serves as the score and plays continuously regardless of the tone of the scene, which waters down any sense of nuance or range of emotion and often makes the performances seem awkward or misguided.

The story focuses on a family in an RV driving their addict daughter to get help. Dee Wallace is the mom, Courtney Gains of Children of the Corn is the daughter’s doctor. When the family is distracted, a (hot) guy sneaks on board and then holds them at gunpoint.

He also tries to warn them to just drive away as fast as they can when they come upon a little girl lying on a desolate road at night.

So they stop…

This girl is an evil little bitch, and the young actress cast in the role is clearly having a ball playing it to the max. As she terrorizes the family, she gets help from those she eventually makes into demonic minions.

I say eventually because unfortunately a good chunk of the film drags before the horror action truly kicks in. Serving as character development, the guy with the gun has conversations with each family member to get to know them better, and when he at last reveals what he’s all about and what he knows about the little girl, it gets a little technical.

Considering this is basically Evil Dead in an RV, we don’t need complicated exposition. Just bring on the demon people, the screaming, and the gore. Thankfully, Await the Dawn does so starting at about the 51-minute mark, at which point it becomes a lot of fun.

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13 horrors of Christopher Lee

Posted on October 25, 2021 by Daniel

Naturally I had to follow my Peter Cushing blog with a companion blog covering Christopher Lee films. And just like the Cushing blog, these are the last 13 films in my collection starring Lee that I hadn’t yet covered on my site, and only a few of his horror films are left to cover simply because they aren’t available on disc yet.

THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1960)

There’s only so many times you can see yet another adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic without feeling like you’ve seen enough. At least The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll brings some new elements to it—starting with a title change and the presence of Christopher Lee, of course.

Lee’s inclusion is a main reason for a major change in the plot. He plays the lover of Dr. Jekyll’s wife, who is bored because her man is so busy in his lab all the time.

The other change? The doctor is the “ugly one”. See, when he takes the drug he creates, his dark side comes out in the form of a sexy, smooth-faced playboy.

Indeed, Jekyll is a bland, bearded, older dude (insulting) and Hyde is like his beautiful portrait of Dorian Gray come to life.

So don’t expect to see a traditional monster here. Despite being sleazy and sexual, this adaptation has Hyde mind-fucking his wife and her lover until he eventually enacts his revenge on them. It’s utterly boring, and the most exciting moment is when his wife falls off a balcony onto a crowded dance floor.

SCREAM OF FEAR (1961)

We have a winner! At least I have a winner in the realm of the dozens of Hammer films I’ve subjected myself to since inheriting my brother’s collection.

Scream Of Fear has what is by now a seemingly cliché plot, but it is such a tightly presented horror flick with so many delicious little twists at the end that it stands out from the pack of its time.

After the loss of a friend by suicide, a young woman in a wheelchair returns home to her estranged father’s estate. And they remain estranged because he’s not even home! She’s greeted by her stepmother and doesn’t quite trust her.

This is one of those “are they trying to drive her crazy?” films. The young woman begins seeing signs that her father is “around”…including a sighting of his corpse (eek!), but everyone in the home thinks she imagined it. Even the doctor, played by Christopher Lee, makes her feel like she’s going nuts.

The only person she can turn to for help is a new love interest…who we get to see in a bikini swimwear!

There are some truly eerie and increasingly gruesome moments as the film progresses, with great use made of tight camera work and shadowy lighting, plus a series of unexpected events in the final act. This is one Hammer film I am thrilled to have in my collection.

CHALLENGE THE DEVIL (1963)

This is an Italian language film, so Christopher Lee fans need to know that his voice has been dubbed by another actor. So not only are you sort of getting Lee, he is also in the film for just a very brief time.

The first twenty minutes or so are wasted with setup—basically a monk gets mixed up in an attempted murder, reconnects with his ex-girlfriend, and then tells her a story of what led him to the life he’s living now. But before that, we are bombarded by a couple of song and dance numbers at a club.

As for the rest of the story, it’s about the monk and his delinquent friends committing some violence and then busting into a castle and doing some psychedelic dance partying before Christopher Lee suddenly appears in a white wig and stares into a fireplace for a while. He also tells them he’s possessed by the devil.

After that, the group mostly sticks together (shocking) as they try to find their way out of the house.

Lee is never seen again, and this plays out like a haunted house attraction movie, with winding stairs, a maze of mirrors, a ghostly apparition, a spider sighting, and not much else. Plus, the final takeaway is pretty much a religious message. Yawn.

THE VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG (aka: Horror Castle) (1963)

Now this is classic horror. It all starts with thunder, lightning, a woman walking around a castle with a candle, torture devices, and gore.

Horrible sixties jazz music kills that mood fast. Why the fuck did they do that shit in sixties horror?

Anyway, that’s about all we hear of that nonsense music, so the atmosphere is perfect for the rest of the film.

Our main woman has moved into a creepy castle/museum with her husband and must contend with a weird maid, an unnerving, scarred custodian played by Christopher Lee, and worst of all, what is apparently the resurrected resident torturer known as “the punisher”.

It’s all very House on Haunted Hill as our poor leading lady is terrorized. Best of all, the film becomes more horrific as it reaches the final act, with a nasty rat torture scene and the great reveal of the punisher’s face. Eek!

There’s even a gruesome Nazi tie-in backstory.

CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD (1964)

Even though this is a period piece, there’s nothing more modern than a couple making out on the side of the road and getting killed by an unseen threat.

The film focuses on a group of traveling entertainers with an escape artist gimmick.

They are invited to stay at the castle of Count Drago (uh-oh), but before they can get there a witchy woman on the road warns them to stay away.

Naturally, when they get to the castle, the count is Christopher Lee, who looks more perfectly undead than in any of his other movies and says that he’s been down in his “Luh-bore-a-tory”. Pronunciation is everything.

He has a room full of stuffed birds, so you can just imagine what Count Taxidermist has in store for them. And a young Donald Sutherland shows up as law enforcement to complicate matters.

But this film takes an odd turn…the real danger is this laughing Lurch looking goon that was traveling with the group. This dude is a psycho killer! He even tosses a little man off the castle roof! Luckily we have a woman traveling in the group to serve as the main girl.

CRYPT OF THE VAMPIRE (1964)

Now this is my kind of old black and white horror movie, and it sure makes me wish Christopher Lee had escaped the clutches of redundant, bland Hammer Films productions more often.

Crypt of the Vampire has a lot going on, and despite having “vampire” in the title, this is far from a hardcore vampire film.

Filled with classic black and white horror atmosphere, the film is about Lee’s grown daughter, who is experiencing nightmares and paranoia. Lee believes her issue is related to a family curse, so he hires a man to research the witch that cast it.

Meanwhile, the housekeeper believes the daughter is possessed, so she calls on fricking Satan to help her. Also, a young woman comes to stay in the house after an accident and befriends the daughter.

A very haunting series of scenes of vampires terrorizing the daughter reminded of the nightmarish scene from the original Salem’s Lot (you know the one).

Another highlight is when the two girls make a gruesome discovery in a large bell.

As the girls are off on their excursion in ghostly white nightgowns, Lee and his expert are busy trying to prove the witch is influencing all the supernatural shit going on, and vampiric themes finally emerge.

THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (1967)

Somehow, this movie with “torture porn” basically built right into the title won’t commit to its promise after a pretty gnarly opening.

It starts back in time with Christopher Lee, a count (why was everyone a count back then?), being punished for his crimes of torturing other human beings. How is he punished? Torture, of course! He gets a spike laced mask smashed onto his face and then has all his limbs ripped off by four horses. Ah, the classics.

In the present day (still the past since this is a period piece), a baroness and her lawyer are summoned to Blood Castle so she can collect an inheritance. The journey in a stagecoach goes on and on and on…until a foggy night when they travel a road lined with dead bodies hanging from trees. Best scene in the movie.

Circumstances lead them right to the castle, they meet a ghoulish servant of the count, and we learn that the plan is to resurrect the count and keep him alive with sacrifices.

And then…brace yourself…it turns out this is an adaptation of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”! The lawyer comes face to blade with the pendulum, the baroness is pitted against a pit of snakes, and I literally guffawed at how the lawyer escapes the pit…and it’s not with the help of rats. But will the baroness and lawyer get away, and will there be a happy ending? The absolutely awful music that destroys any horror atmosphere at the end of the movie can answer that question.

THEATRE OF DEATH (1967)

This is a fun little film in which Christopher Lee runs a theater of the macabre, crafting performance pieces that end with someone’s gruesome murder. He is mesmerizing audiences…and hypnotizing his performers to get them to do his bidding in his shows.

A detective starts to fall for one of Lee’s leading actresses, who Lee seems to be mentally tormenting, making her feel inferior and replaceable when a new girl joins the theater group.

Meanwhile, women have been murdered around town, and the detective doesn’t trust Lee. There are plenty of odd plot points that don’t add up here. For instance, the detectives specifically discuss only women being victims, yet the next thing you know, we’re witnessing a man being murdered in a tunnel (it’s implied). Also, it’s pointed out that the main detective has hand damage so he can’t use it, which makes it seem like that factoid will play a crucial part in the plot later, but it doesn’t. Even the possibility of vampirism is discussed by the detectives, who think the killer desires blood, but that doesn’t pan out either.

The biggest surprise of all is that Christopher Lee vanishes from the film halfway through, never to be seen again. It’s kind of cool to pull such a stunt, but he does add an element of intrigue to the plot earlier on and is missed once he’s gone. However, the cast manages to carry on, and by the time the main girl confronts the killer, you should have guessed who it is.

It’s also kind of weird when the main detective refers to a Black victim as a “colored woman”. Totally brought me back to the days of my single-digit years when all the really old people in my life used to refer to Black people that way.

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968)

I’m rather surprised this mess of a cult movie was written by horror master Richard Matheson. It’s 95 minutes of characters running around from one house to another being abducted and escaping a cult over and over.

While investigating the occult leanings of a friend’s son, Christopher Lee accidentally summons a demon…that looks exactly like your ordinary everyday Black man. What the hell?

Lee and friend escape the demon by running to another friend’s house, and in doing so, drag that whole family into the occult madness, for an entire cult is on their tail.

After much running around in circles for most of the movie and being subjected to having their bodies temporarily possessed by a demon every once in a while, the main characters step into a pentagram for protection and watch as a giant spider and a skeleton knight on horseback come to taunt them just outside the circle. I did not find this horror movie chilling at all.

THE CRIMSON CULT (1968)

What I like about this film is that it knows it has Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff waiting in the wings, so it totally sets the tone in a creepy house with thunder, lightning, secret passages, a cemetery, a weird butler lurking in the shadows, and a celebration of witches and witchcraft.

A man comes to the house—basically a bed and breakfast owned by Christopher Lee—in search of his missing brother.

Lee’s niece takes a shine to the guest and tries to help him with his investigation. And Boris Karloff is an occult fanatic being rolled around in a wheelchair to oversee a joyous party marking witch history.

The main man starts having ominous nightmares about an evil witch queen that adored torturing people, and her entourage includes a whip-wielding mistress in pasties and a hunky slave boy in a black Speedo. Awesome.

It’s perhaps a little lowbrow compared to Hammer Films productions of the era…which would explain why I like it better than most of them. It’s just pure, silly, classic horror fun.

THE BLOODY JUDGE (1970)

Christopher Lee wasn’t above taking on “horror” that was simply misogynistic exploitation of the witch trials, which is all this plotless movie is.

Lee is a judge who finds beautiful women guilty of witchcraft left and right.

They are then taken to a dungeon barely dressed and subjected to various forms of physical abuse, most of which won’t exactly impress torture porn fans in this day and age.

The thin plot involves one young woman desperate to clear her accused sister’s name…but not desperate enough to sleep with Lee in exchange. Soooo…she’s tortured a lot.

Meanwhile, Lee is desperate to preserve his political ambitions by taking down any challengers to his authority.

There are various war battles, but you really just watch this one if you want to see writhing women in pain at the hands of a dude who looks like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.

Also watch if you want to witness the voluptuous leading lady give a bloody female victim a sensual tongue bath.

THE WICKER MAN (1973)

Permanently scarred from watching the remake with Nicholas Cage, I never felt the need to watch the original…until discovering I’m obligated due to the rules set in my own mind not only to watch it but to own it because Christopher Lee is in it.

On the bright side, Nicholas Cage is not in it. On the down side, I see why Midsommar gets compared to this film. It is boooooooring.

The plot is intriguing, it really is. A Christian detective gets an anonymous note about a missing girl on an island. He flies to the island and quickly realizes everyone on it is entrenched in Pagan rituals…and acting as if the missing girl doesn’t exist, including her mother!

Christopher Lee is the leader of the island, and the detective is at odds with him for rejecting God.

We are subjected to horrible singing and dancing around a maypole, a frog being used in the mouth of a child to cure a sore throat, a scary clown doll, people in creepy masks, and most terrifying of all, a naked woman singing a folk song. Nightmare material.

And then there’s the final sacrificial pagan ritual in a big wicker man contraption that would be so damn easy to get out of once it started burning, which makes the shocking finale of this movie a huge disappointment.

THE KEEPER (1976)

This is an odd little film that comes across as silly and campy at times—I think on purpose.

Christopher Lee runs an insane asylum for rich people, where he makes everyone call him “The Keeper”. He also finds a way to get rich off the fortunes of his patients.

A detective and his partner look into deaths surrounding the asylum, going under cover inside the place. But Lee, who is on to them, uses his very special treatments method—hypnotherapy—to find out more and to put a stop to their interference.

How silly is this film? I mean, aside from the hypnotherapy “special effects” shown above? The detective gets tips from a young shoe shine boy, and at one point Lee hypnotizes a detective and makes him choo choo like a train…

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It’s October: how about a whopping 13 movie Peter Cushing marathon?

Posted on October 22, 2021 by Daniel

This big ass blog takes on the remaining 13 movies I hadn’t yet posted about from my collection of Peter Cushing films. I’ve now covered virtually every horror movie he was in (!), with just a few stray titles still on my list to get that have yet to be released on physical media.

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957)

One of Cushing’s earliest horror films, this is a creature feature with not much creature. We don’t see the Yeti until the last few minutes!

Cushing is on a botanical expedition in the Himalayas, and a group of men shows up looking for the Abominable Snowman. So they join forces to go into the mountains together.

The leader of the other gang turns out to be a douche who wants to capture and exploit the Yeti while Cushing is in it for scientific research—a conflict that will echo through creature features for decades to come. Unfortunately, the movie is also super heavy on scientific theory dialogue.

As in many of these movies, the men are their own worst enemies as they turn on each other and themselves, but there’s also a catch—it appears they are being mind-controlled by the Yeti (that we never see). Indeed there’s a much more epic backstory for the Yeti than in most modern films that take on the mythical monster. Difference is, modern films deliver monster action, and this film doesn’t.

ISLAND OF TERROR (1966)

As if to make up for the huge creature feature disappointment of The Abominable Snowman, Cushing delves into full monster movie territory with this sci-fi/horror flick.

After a man goes missing on an island and is then found as a total pile of jelly, Cushing is called in as a scientist to determine what the cause could possibly be. I’m fairly convinced the victim’s face was the inspiration for “Ring face”.

No time is wasted in giving us the full monster Monty, with tentacle attacks easing us in before we get to see the huge snail-like creatures that crawl along the ground. They also drop out of trees and into the arms of victims occasionally, which made me laugh every time.

It’s just old school monster fun as a team is assembled to go hunt down and kill the creatures in the woods.

NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT (1967)

The lame title of this sci-fi/horror film is as watered down as the movie itself. To have both Cushing and Christopher Lee in a film this sterile is rather disappointing, and it’s not surprising that neither of them proves to be the true star. However, Night of the Big Heat is noticeably one of the building blocks for many films that have come after it.

On an isolated island, an inn owner has a dilemma—the new woman he hires is a hot young thing he had an affair with, and she’s determined to ruin his marriage.

Meanwhile, inn guest Christopher Lee is a secretive scientist who creeps around the island taking photos and using mysterious equipment, after which he locks himself in his room.

The island is subjected to unnaturally high temperatures, people start dying after hearing a high-pitched sound, a guy reports his sheep being killed (in a modern horror film we would have seen the mutilated sheep), and the main guy’s wife sees something crash land in a field.

Concluding there’s an alien life form, Lee, Cushing, and the small cast come together to figure out a way to fend off the invasion. This is a slow film and lacks suspense or scares. And the alien life form? It’s a glowing, pulsing mass that simply dies when it rains. Lame!

The highlight for me was when the husband discusses his new employee with his wife and says, “She was a slut and I wanted her!”

CORRUPTION (1968)

To me, this film feels like someone was really itching to have Peter Cushing star in a Herschel Gordon Lewis sleazefest, so they just did it themselves.

The plot has been revisited in various horror movies over the years. Cushing plays a plastic surgeon with a beautiful fiancée.

When the pair attends a totally sixties psychedelic dance party, the fiancée is horribly burned by a photography light that is so big it actually would have pulverized her head when it fell on her.

Determined to regenerate her skin tissue, Cushing experiments…on corpses, of course. And it works! The catch is, he has to give his woman the treatment regularly and needs fresh flesh. And so his brutal murdering spree begins.

A spree of three in total. Yawn! But the kills are very bloody, it’s magnificent to see Cushing’s hair not only out of place but looking like he stuck a finger in an electric socket, and he gets to touch some prostitute boob if you watch the international cut. Interestingly, the cleaner cut of the film features an entirely different scene with the prostitute—played by a different actress!

THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR (1968)

Since this creature feature has such a cheesy giant moth monster, it would have served the film better to just fill it with monster sightings instead of keeping the death scenes enshrouded in mystery for so long.

After a promising opening kill, Cushing appears as a detective investigating the deaths of various young men who were sucked dry.

He starts snooping around the home of a professor who is of course the one hiding the truth about the moth creature…it’s his daughter, who transforms at night!

I’m all about pretty boys being seduced to their deaths for a change, if only the silly monster had been exploited. Hell, this moth lady doesn’t even transform during her transformations. No special effects, just poof and she’s a moth.

And Cushing’s final battle shooting the moth out of the sky is such a letdown…for both the moth and us.

INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED (aka: Bloodsuckers) (1971)

This is a film that mostly forgets about the horror rather quickly.

Cushing plays some sort of college bigwig who pushes for a search for a prestigious young Oxford man who goes missing in Greece. And that’s all we see of Cushing until the end of the film.

A handful of the young man’s friends (white guy, Black guy, young white woman) go to search for him with the help of their contact in Greece, original Avenger Patrick Mcnamee (no, not those Avengers).

The most mesmerizing part of the film is a scene of the missing man with the mysterious young woman he’s met as they delve into an orgy that goes full-on drug trip with psychedelic rock blasting, strobe lights, and quick, flashing edits that transition into a bloody sacrifice by people in masks.

As the friends go around asking questions and chasing leads, the only other interesting part, which isn’t expanded on quiet enough probably due to when the film was made, is the suggestion that the Black guy may be hot for the missing friend. He vehemently denies it, yet when they finally locate the friend shirtless and delusional, the Black guy sure does touch his bare body a lot.

This one could have been a lot more interesting as a horror movie if it better teased what is implied at the end…vampire cult!

It’s like this film took a classic Hammer Films vampire movie, updated it to modern times, and then gutted all the vampire stuff until the intriguing conclusion. At least Peter Cushing finally returns for a few minutes to relish the vampiric aspects.

TWINS OF EVIL (1971)

A follow-up to The Vampire Lovers, which was the first of a Hammer trilogy, Twins of Evil is quite cool because it a) blends witchcraft and vampires into one plot, b) uses a swapping twins plot, and c) brings more sex to the Hammer name than most of their films.

Cushing leads a vigilante group of witch hunters that burns innocent women, starting immediately with the first scene.

Meanwhile, Cushing’s twin nieces come to live with him, and one in particular loathes his rigid religious way of life and plans to rebel against him. So…

She gets involved with a handsome count who draws her into Satanism and vampirism. But her identical twin is really going to complicate matters…

It’s yet another Hammer vampire film, but this one delivers some sexy stuff, including the count’s hunky bodyguard, a sex scene in which a candle is stroked quite erotically, and hints of lesbianism, with a female vampire sucking on a tit. On top of that, Cushing performs a juicy beheading.

I, MONSTER (1971)

It’s another take on Jekyll and Hyde, yet both the title and the character names have been changed. There’s nothing new here, but a few things make this a satisfying adaptation.

a) Christopher Lee is the most fun I’ve ever seen him in the role of the devious monster.

b) We get to see Lee pitted against Cushing.

c) The monster attacks children. Yay!

FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1972)

This may just be a Hammer Films masterpiece, and I’m not just saying that because it’s not a period piece for a change. It’s not only an immersive suspense mystery, it is a fantastic stalker film.

Our main girl is about to start a new life with her teacher husband when she is attacked in her own home…and gets a serious surprise when she fights back. Problem is no one really believes it happened because she had a nervous breakdown recently. When she’s attacked again, even her husband doubts her.

The school headmaster, played by Peter Cushing, encounters her touring her husband’s new workplace, so he shows her around, but he is like a pervy old man. It’s a very uncomfortable scene that reminds us of how easily women can be preyed upon when they’re attempting to be polite.

Her paranoia leads to the best scene in the movie, which is also the most infuriating. Her husband has to leave for the night, so she gets a shotgun then proceeds to turn out all the lights before going upstairs! WTF? When she hears a noise, she has to go downstairs in the dark to turn them all back on!

But this shit turns into a kick ass chase packed with so many elements of slasher chase scenes that were on the 80s horizon. It had me totally braced to find out where the film was going, although it seemed pretty obvious, especially when you have a vixen like Joan Collins come on the scene.

Not sure if it seems predictable just because I’ve been watching these kinds of film for so long, but even so, there were still enough twists in the plot to keep this old horror whore interested.

TENDER DRACULA (1974)

I don’t know if something gets lost in the translation from the original language, but this French farce is an absolute nonsensical mess in which not only does nothing happen, but the material that does fill the time isn’t even vaguely funny.

Two writers and their girlfriends are sent to the mansion of an actor who has decided to give up his career playing vampire roles to do romances.

That actor is played by Peter Cushing, who at least finally gets to lighten up and smile quite a bit for a change.

Beyond that I have no idea what was going on. I can’t even vaguely describe a plot to you. I can tell you there are a couple of really annoying musical numbers, including one in which the two main girls sing naked.

And the only other moment of note is Cushing taking a woman over his knee and spanking her. Seriously, that is the highlight of this film because it’s so out of character for this iconic horror actor.

LEGEND OF THE WEREWOLF (1975)

It might be directed by a Hammer alum and star Peter Cushing as a doctor hunting down a werewolf that looks very much like Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werewolf, but this is not a sequel or a Hammer film.

It’s an illogical story of a baby raised by wolves. He grows into a feral boy and ends up as a sideshow freak.

When he becomes a man, he starts turning into a werewolf even though he was never bitten by anything!

He then falls for a prostitute at a brothel and kills off any John that pays for sex with her. Funny considering this judgmental werewolf is the one living in the sewers.

Killer POV is represented by the screen going red, there are often injections of close-ups of the bloody werewolf mouth, and the real killing spree starts 65 minutes in.

After that, Cushing and his team grab their werewolf hunting necessities and go down into the sewer to take care of business. It’s a fairly boring film overall.

THE GHOUL (1975)

Pre-dating many slashers and backwoods horror flicks that came after it, The Ghoul doesn’t quite deliver on the horror the premise lends itself to.

Elitists at a country estate are having a car race. One couple’s car runs out of gas, they split up, and the woman is welcomed into the estate of Peter Cushing. He serenades her with his violin, which he spends most of the movie playing.

Meanwhile, William Hurt is a psychotic gardener, there’s a witchy woman living in the house, and there’s something in the attic…

The movie pulls a Psycho, with a lead character switcheroo deep into the movie. There’s even a kill scene in a bed that seems to take its style—hearing more than seeing the gore—from the famous shower scene.

More snobby victims show up at the mansion to be killed off, but this film is way before the time of high body counts, so it’s ultimately rather tame. As is the thing in the attic when it’s finally revealed.

THE DEVIL’S MEN (aka: Land of the Minotaur) (1976)

Donald Pleasence vs. Peter Cushing in a battle between good and evil sounds like it can’t go wrong, right? Wrong.

It virtually feels like there’s no script for this film, just loads of scenes of a cult kidnapping blonde girls in Greece and then worshipping a big statue of a Minotaur in a cave. Over and over and over and over.

Half the time I wasn’t even sure if shit was really supposed to be happening or if Donald’s priest character was experiencing nightmares or hallucinations while investigating the disappearances of the tourists.

Whenever Donald gives a speech about evil, it feels like he’s rehearsing for his role in Halloween two years later. The few times Cushing appears on screen it feels like he’s collecting a paycheck. And all the black, red, and white hooded cultists just gave me icky Klan vibes.

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2 Halloween horrors, an 80s slasher remake, and a home invasion gone wrong

Posted on October 20, 2021 by Daniel

Just like everything else, there’s a shortage of Halloween themed horror movies this year, but I managed to find two more to add to the holiday horror page, and I tossed in a couple of non-holiday themed horror flicks just for fun. Let’s see which ones were worth the watch.

WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME (2021)

Justin Price, director of werewolf film Dark Moon Rising, takes on the “criminals commit crime then hide out in house with monsters in it” plot. Having been left completely befuddled by Wrong Place, Wrong Time, I just looked back at my blog about his werewolf film to refresh my memory. It isn’t surprising that one of my sentences in the Dark Moon Rising blog was “Endless disjointed scenes baffle rather than give any sense of what the fuck is going on.”

This film somehow takes the most basic concept and attempts to complicate it, which piles on the plot holes. I watched this with the hubba hubba and then we talked it through trying to make sense of it. We even watched the first fifteen minutes again to see if all the setup scenes (which we at first thought weren’t presented in chronological order) held some answers we’d missed. They did not.

The opener feels like it is in place just to let viewers know there will be action and blood in this film. Then we are introduced to the main characters with a painfully forced method—one character shows the “files” of each character to the guy hiring them as he describes them while we are presented with clips of them in action.

And the mission they’re hired for? We don’t see it executed. Suddenly they are on the run, one of them is wounded, and they decide to bust into some seemingly random house to hide out. There they find some people tied up.

Neither the events that unfold nor characters that are presented seem to fall into place. The good news is that the horror and “monster” moments totally rock and awesome practical effects are on full display instead of CGI. There’s even a great police cam POV scene.

Yet, as if the film doesn’t already have a confusing narrative as it is, the very last line in the movie, which seems to be intended to blow our minds with a new piece of information, instead leaves us wondering why the new detail would even be introduced at all.

REUNION MASSACRE (aka: Invitation to Die) (2014)

Would you believe this is a high school reunion/Halloween horror mashup? And it is all jammed into what feels like a 60-minute fan film made by someone who wanted to do reunion and Halloween horror movies but couldn’t even come up with enough ideas to fill an hour with both themes at their disposal.

Reunion Massacre, which was originally titled Invitation to Die, starts with a horror hostess introducing the movie with its original title, so the voice totally changes due to an overdub of someone else saying Reunion Massacre. This pretty much foreshadows the quality of the rest of the movie.

There’s a girl. She gets an invite to her high school reunion. Her friend convinces her to go…and then they dive into a Halloween decorating montage.

She heads to her reunion, but the address turns out to be a derelict house in the woods. A guy in a clown mask abducts her and ties her up in the house a couple of times. Each time she gets away she just roams around to pad the running time of this 1-hour movie. Two girls are also killed in between, and then the main girl has a final confrontation with the killer.

Three weeks later, she’s carving a pumpkin, and someone keeps ringing the doorbell. Guess who.

I don’t say this often, but I’d suggest avoiding this one at all costs (and my price was free with my Amazon Prime membership).

BAD CANDY (2020)

If Trick ‘r Treat collided with All Hallows’ Eve, you would sort of get Bad Candy. I’ll say immediately that this is a visual Halloween spectacle nearly from start to finish. It gives a gorgeously eerie Halloween vibe and glow, and the creepy ghouls and gore throughout totally deliver on the Halloween fun. Not to mention, a male narrator voice at the beginning is very reminiscent of the Tales From the Darkside intro.

The wraparound focuses on two DJs at a radio show taking requests for scary stories —Corey Taylor of the band Slipknot and Zach Galligan, who brings along some Gremlins references.

Much like Trick ‘r Treat, the stories all sort of take place in the same universe and overlap here and there. And like All Hallows’ Eve, an evil clown makes an appearance in most of the tales.

These are more like creepy vignettes rather than fully developed stories, and some are better than others. Now here’s the curious part. Based on the movie title and the themes of the tales, I’m thinking that these are tales of morality (the temptations of the sinners being the “bad candy”). However, there’s a catch if I’m reading things right. Some of the moral viewpoints are (hopefully) universal. However, others may have a rather right wing propaganda bent. I could be wrong, but I’ll give you some examples as I attempt to breakdown each separate “story”, which I’d consider “situations” rather than stories.

1st – remember the bratty kid who trashed Halloween displays in Trick ‘r Treat? There’s another one here, and the evil clown doesn’t like that. Yay! Bratty Halloween hating kid gets taught a lesson.

2nd – a young girl dressed as a witch has a pretty vile stepfather. She also has the ability to bring supernatural beings into reality by drawing them. Yay! Scummy stepdad gets taught a lesson.

3rd – the evil clown takes center stage when a nasty old man taints Halloween candy. Yay! Nasty old man gets taught a lesson.

4th – hm. A dirt bag is selling drugs at a party. Personally, I don’t think he deserves to be taught a lesson for being a dirt bag or for selling drugs to privileged white kids that demand it, but maybe that’s just me. However, when he goes into a bathroom stall, things get interesting. There’s a glory hole and also “for a good time call Pedro” graffiti punctuated with a pentagram. The drug dealer calls “Pedro”, which immediately left me wondering if it’s being implied that he’s gay, a Satanist, or both, and therefore deserves to be taught a lesson by the devilish killer that shows up.

5th – corpse fucker gets taught a lesson. Yay!

6th – a man beats a woman, and while I’m totally feeling his big gay club kid shorts, yay! Woman beater gets taught a lesson.

7th – this is a story that’s weird, kind of freaky in a good way yet goes on way too long, and could be troubling if not for the fact that it’s just convoluted enough to possibly be masking its true intent. Some guys bring a bunch of bound men in underwear with ball gags in their mouths to a pumpkin patch at night.

Earlier in the movie there’s a conversation between two of the abductors in which one obnoxiously calls the other one gay. This obnoxious guy is Derek Russo, the hunk from the Creepshow Christmas episode. He’s also leading the charge in the field and explains that he didn’t fight in the military man to have all these men bring shame upon the country by doing what they’ve done. Here’s the catch. We don’t know what they’ve done. We don’t know where they came from. We don’t know if they were already in undies and ball gags (maybe at a sex party?), or if their abductors did that to them.

One of the victims is wearing a wig, which seems to imply either drag or a non-male gender identity. Is this an attack on queer men? I’m not sure, but it kind of feels like it. However, if I’m reading the internet right, it’s interesting to note that actor Derek Russo appears to have done porn in the past and even dabbled in some gay erotic material. Not that it would matter or stop him from doing an anti-gay horror tale. Anyway, all the practically naked men are splashed in blood, have jack o’ lanterns placed over their heads, and are then let loose to run from a variety of horrors both human and monster.

8th – this begins as a ghost hunters tale, but it becomes a super confusing attempt to tie everything together, including the wraparound. It’s quite a mess, and personally I felt it kind of ruins the movie and is a huge letdown after all the horror and Halloween goodness that carried most of the film, despite those hints of queer persecution I may just be totally misreading.

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (2021)

The director of The Banana Splits Movie and the writer of Leprechaun Returns, both female, create what is possibly now one of my favorite slasher remakes yet.

They seem totally aware of the original 1982 slasher’s history of being written by feminist writer Rita Mae Brown, and how it became one of the major players in critical theory of the misogyny of 80s slashers. They then take that idea and totally flip the script, crafting a meta horror comedy that is so of the moment with how it tackles gender and race issues we are contending with both in society and in horror right now.

After a fantastic opener that takes place in 1993 at a cabin in the woods, with a killer that perfectly replicates the odd presence and physical stance and quirks of the killer from the original Slumber Party Massacre, we jump to present day.

A group of girls heads to a cabin in the woods…and immediately delves into a dance montage! Before long, some boys from across the lake drop by. They’re staying at the cabin in which the murders from 93 took place, and the girls realize they just might have to help save the boys should the killer make a return. Awesome.

And wouldn’t you know we get an all-male pillow fight along with plenty of other satirical reversals of gender issues in slashers, which can better be appreciated in this visual presentation (which happened to be a pain in the ass to create because I had to take pictures of the TV with my phone while the movie was playing to capture these shots).

The kills are fun and gory, there’s plenty of comedy, there’s a nod to the guitar playing killer from Slumber Party Massacre 2, there’s a nod to the infamous phallic poster art, and there’s a Black main girl.

There’s even a shower scene…which also deserves a visual presentation.

And if you watch closely during a scene in which the lights keep flashing on and off, there appears to be a little more than a bromance going on between two of the guys.

 

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DIRECT TO STREAMING: the horror of Charlie Steeds

Posted on October 15, 2021 by Daniel

Having covered his films Cannibal Farm, Winterskin, Death Ranch, and queer inclusive The House of Violent Desire, I figured it was time to do a blog specifically about a bunch of horror flicks from director Charlie Steeds. So I checked out the 4 that I hadn’t yet seen…and immediately purchased three of them on disc. Personally, I think he deserves a lot more attention, because he crafts quite polished indie films and totally nails a variety of different horror subgenres.

VAMPIRE VIRUS (2020)

Now this is refreshing. Vampire Virus is like a throwback to late 80s/early 90s erotic vampire films–and it’s totally queer, landing it on the homo horror movies page.

A rather uptight girl is convinced by her girlfriends to go out partying to just let loose. After getting some tips from her gay BFF, she hits up the club with her gal pals…while the gay BFF has his cop love interest over for some role playing sex! Holy shit, we actually get a man-on-man kiss first in this film.

And then, our main girl enjoys some foreplay with two bi guys on the dance floor before being seduced by a sexy vampiress and diving right into explicit lesbian sex. Awesome.

Of course our main girl soon realizes she’s starting to change, and so does her gay BFF.

And the lesbian vampire waits in the wings to wield her power over them, which means someone has to put a stop to her before she can get our hands on the pretty boys.

This is a sensual and sexy vampire story and a serious film, not campy or anything like that. And just be aware—there is a  gay bashing scene.

AN ENGLISH HAUNTING (2020)

For the more sophisticated horror crowd, this is a slow burning yarn (that’s right. I said yarn) about a young man who comes with his mother to the creepy, isolated manor of his mostly comatose grandfather to care for him.

After the cigarette smoking alcoholic mother makes some snarky horror jokes about the grandfather while they stand over his bed, both son and mother begin to experience mysterious and frightening happenings around the huge home.

Nicely atmospheric with some eerie moments, this one picks up steam once the son starts to suspect some sort of sorcery is in the air and then digs into the occult books he finds in his grandfather’s library.

And there are some notably dark ritual scenes in the final act that really deliver on the chilling tone this story establishes.

A WEREWOLF IN ENGLAND (2020)

Noooo! Not a period piece!

That was my immediate thought when this film started. But then…it proved to be a werewolf comedy with a fantastic cast of comic actors, two leading men with great chemistry, and some fun and funny werewolves that are presented with practical costumes and no CGI. Yay!

The story is about a lawman transporting a man accused of murder. The two are handcuffed together. They stop for the night at an inn.

They meet some of the odd staff and guests, including a hot daddy bear who tells them tales of some sort of creatures that lurk outside at night.

Before long (and after some humorous situations involving them being attached at the wrists), the pair realizes something is very wrong at this inn.

And then the horror insanity starts! Before long it’s a werewolf invasion, with the two leading men, the bear, a priest, a prostitute, and a woman with a baby trying to survive as these werewolves bust into the house and cause gory and goofy chaos.

There’s gross out werewolf shit humor (that’s a first for me), a runaway werewolf paw, the equivalent of a modern day vent scene (eek), and even a hot, naked man crawling around for a brief time.

I would say if you’re a huge fan of the werewolf comedy Big Bad Wolf as I am, you’ll probably really enjoy this one.

THE BARGE PEOPLE (2018)

Many of the same actors from the other films covered in this blog appear in The Barge People.

Starting very Texas Chainsaw, with black and white snapshots and onscreen text referencing disappearances on the waters, The Barge People delivers on its promise—deformed mutants and cannibalism. Yay!

The film is smartly short on the setups before delving right into the horror. A group of friends hops on a boat. After getting into altercations with some other douche bags that pass by on another boat, they are soon being terrorized by the troublemakers.

That doesn’t last long. The fricking barge people board the boat and it turns into total chaos and carnage! It’s like the original The Hill Have Eyes on a boat instead of an RV. There is some slow and bloody cannibalism as they eat their victims alive, and plenty of fighting back.

The barge people look gnarly and cool and even speak, the splatterfest level is way up there, there’s loads of flashing light to disorient viewers, and as soon as the horror action starts it doesn’t let up.

 

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A journey through my recent 1980s purchases on Blu-ray

Posted on October 12, 2021 by Daniel

Now I feel like I’m just getting desperate to remain as immersed in the best decade of my life as much as possible, considering a majority of my recent “80s horror” purchases barely qualify as horror. Let’s see if any of these five flicks satisfied.

A DAY OF JUDGEMENT (1981)

It’s kind of frustrating that so many good horror labels are bringing titles to Blu-ray that are barely worthy of the genre when there are still so many surefire horror flicks that have yet to make it to physical media. But I get that movies like A Day of Judgement may have been passed off as horror in mom and pop video stores in the 80s, and kids who saw it then will today only remember the few moments of horror and snatch it up for the nostalgia.

I snatched it up because it’s one of those rare 80s movies I didn’t know existed back then. As I was watching my new Blu-ray, I was reading the trivia on IMDb, where it specifically explains that this wasn’t a horror film so the studio releasing it forced the creators to insert some horror scenes for marketing. Ugh.

This is a religious film about a reverend deserting his town because its residents have deserted him. No one comes to church anymore, and various stories unfold of how money, greed, sexual sin, and violence have consumed the motivations of the townsfolk.

There’s supposed to be a new reverend arriving to replace the one that’s skipping town, and every once in a while we get glimpses of some sort of reaper approaching, cloaked in Argento lighting and fog machines. Uh-oh.

It almost seems like we’re finally going to get a hellish descent at the end of the film, but the film’s hopeful religious colors take over instead…

Avoid this film. Seriously. Don’t bother watching it, and even if you’re an 80s horror film completist like me, think twice about spending money on it unless you can get it used for at least half the price.

POSSESSION (1981)

It’s interesting to see this 1981 film for the first time over 40 years later and spot movies it may have influenced or may have been influenced by. Possession is a weird one many compare to David Lynch creations, and with a 2-hour run time it takes a while to get going, but it sure does have a freaky climax.

It’s just really hard to get through most of the film’s focus on the strained relationship between Sam Neill and his wife. Sam, learning she has been cheating on him, becomes extremely violent, so we are subject to a whole lot of spousal abuse.

However, the wife is definitely off, because she kind of goes with the flow. When it comes down to it, the plot feels like it’s about a woman whose husband sucks in bed, so she lures in other much more passionate men to dote on her. But, if you ask me, they also seem to be kind of…scratch that…really gay for Sam.

I was getting major Hellraiser vibes from much of what goes on here as the wife’s story unfolds.

At the same time, there’s a scene of a seeming possession that feels like a rip-off of a scene from the 1974 The Exorcist rip-off The Eerie Midnight Horror Show. Not to mention, I think the film may pay homage to Divine’s lobster scene in Multiple Maniacs….

DEVIL STORY (1986)

This French film laughs in the face of the convoluted creations of Italian horror directors of the 80s, giving us a series of unfocused, virtually unrelated events on a horror road to nowhere then calling it a movie.

Devil Story even jumps right into the aftermath of a massacre in the middle of the woods as a deformed killer “cleans up”.

Then he takes down a couple that runs out of gas on the road.

Then our main couple stops at a house at night during a rainstorm. Classic horror organ music plays, the couple is welcomed in by an older man and woman who tell tales of ships that go missing in the water and a woman and her misshapen son who live nearby.

Suddenly the visiting female is outside by herself being chased by a black horse. There’s a shipwrecked boat breaking through rocks on the shore (actually, a toy busting through a pile of sand).

There’s a King Tut tomb out of which a mummy pops to start pursuing the main girl. A woman in a white nightgown appears from a coffin and teams up with the mummy to pursue the main girl.

The original deformed killer and his mother pursue the main girl. The deformed killer starts to deform even more.

And all the while the black horse just keeps running in circles nearby.

I have no idea what this movie is supposed to be about, if anything.

SHALLOW GRAVE (1987)

More a suspense thriller than a horror film, Shallow Grave is still so perfectly eighties and begins with an awesome re-enactment of the Psycho shower scene—although it has the very 80s addition of big boobs and bush.

Next, four totally 80s girls go on a road trip to the south. It’s so totally racist when they get to a diner and are spooked by a big Black guy passing by their car. They’re in the south, and it’s a Black guy that scares them???

Anyway, they get a flat, one girl goes to piss in the woods…and she sees a beefy shirtless dude with fantastic 80s hair and a furry chest kill a woman.

Soon the girls are on the run from the psycho, who knows they know too much, and they begin getting picked off one by one.

The film plays out like a psycho stalker action road trip movie.

AMERICAN RICKSHAW (1989)

American Rickshaw is another weird movie that has a hint of horror and therefore got a Blu-ray release marketed to fans of 80s horror. Quite honestly, this movie about a rickshaw operator in Miami has less charm and less horror than Big Trouble in Little China, but at least it’s just as 80s.

After his breakout role in American Anthem, Olympian hottie Mitch Gaylord finished the decade with another movie in which he could take his shirt off a lot.

He plays the rickshaw driver, encounters a mysterious Asian woman with a cat, and then finds himself on the run from the law and organized crime after some dude filming him having sex with a stripper ends up dead.

This is 80s cable trash at its finest. Gaylord bangs the stripper various times. She’s working for a baddie played by the hunky lead from Elvira: Mistress of the Dark.

Donald Pleasence is a televangelist, but barely in the movie.

And Gaylord just continuously dodges trouble, for the Asian woman is some sort of witch leaving dead guys in Gaylord’s path by magically setting fire to them. This shit is so silly.

But hey, at least Gaylord has a non-judgmental conversation with a gay gym bunny coworker. He better with a name like Gaylord. That shit was a go-to insult hurled at the “different” boys in school back in the day.

The film plays out like a cheap action flick until Gaylord finally meets the Asian woman again and she explains the more occult aspects of what is going on.

All I’ll say is that in the end, Donald Pleasence tries to outdo Dee Wallace’s final scene in The Howling, and it’s the best and also most out of place moment in an otherwise horrorless movie.

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STREAM QUEEN: a big clown letdown?

Posted on October 11, 2021 by Daniel

I saw clown faces popping up in my watchlists, so I thought I had a common blog theme ready once again. But it wasn’t quite what it seemed with these three…

IT’S HERE (2019)

It’s Here is another one of those “anthologies” that appears to be just a bunch of short films assembled together for exposure and perhaps a quick streaming buck, this time under the guise of a “clown” collection. For starters, some of these stories don’t even fit the theme, and second, I think I’ve covered a few of them in other anthologies in the past.

Anyway, after a fun animated horror intro that gets us in the mood for some spooky tales, we jump right in with no wraparound:

1st story – after putting her whiny kid to bed, a woman has a date with a guy that turns into something demonic, but it’s not really a clown.

2nd story – a campy tale, this one is actually about a killer mime terrorizing a guy and girl as they watch horror movies.

3rd story – is there some sort of film class that requires students to simply remake the clown/babysitter tale from the anthology Amusement? If you want to be a filmmaker, stop doing this and come up with something of your own. Seriously, just stop.

4th story – a clown…clowns himself to death?

5th story – imagine if Samara escaped The Ring video dressed as a clown and you’ve got this tale.

6th story – a radio host has a psychic on his show. God calls. The Devil calls. No clowns call.

7th story – reporters accompany a couple into the woods to do an exchange to get their daughter back…from something we don’t see.

There’s a quick clown scene in a circus tent at the end of the movie, but I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be the end of the 7th story or just a standalone clip, which is a typical problem with these movies that are comprised of underdeveloped short films and don’t drop even a segment title card between each story to signify that one has ended and a new one is beginning.

CLOWNFACE (2019)

I see a theme forming to my blog about clown horror…which is that these movies are not clown horror movies.

This killer is called Clownface, but he’s really just a hillbilly in a tank top using human skin for a face. Not sure I can complain though, because let’s face it, that always makes for an awesome killer.

The story is a little odd and a little different for a slasher, and I don’t know whether that works for or against the movie. There are two female friends. The main girl leaves their place, the other is abducted by Clownface.

The film feels disjointed to me. I don’t know why Clownface decides to keep this one girl prisoner when he’s just killing everyone else. There’s another dude who comes to town and is investigating the kills because he encountered Clownface in the woods when he was a kid, so Clownface has apparently been hanging around for quite a while.

The main girl wants to figure out what happened to her missing friend, but that doesn’t stop her from going to a party, which is the most satisfying sequence because it’s when all the good old fashioned slashing starts. And I’m talking major bloody massacre. Kind of made me forget that the plot was confusing.

CRISPY’S CURSE (2017)

The general horror comedy concept of a Christian heavy metal band joining forces with a couple of ghost hunters and a gay psychic to take down a killer clown ghost seems like a treasure trove of fun. Unfortunately, Crispy’s Curse is anything but.

An agonizing 105 minutes long, this plodding film feels like endless disjointed skits that hold no relevance to any kind of plot and mostly fail to deliver any semblance of humor in the process. There are glimmers of golden opportunities and a few chuckles to be had, but they are spread so far apart it’s a chore just waiting for the next one. And before the various characters finally end up with one focused goal in the final act, some of the characters’ stories are just more entertaining and interesting than others—which kind of signals to me that those other characters weren’t even necessary and losing them could have vastly improved the pace and cut the runtime.

As for the killer clown, I guess he’s a campy jokester, but I honestly could not make out anything he was saying whenever he spoke. I think he’s supposed to be a drunk clown or something.

I give credit to the actors, who gave it their all and are definitely talented comic performers who could have done a lot with funnier material. Plus, we at least get plenty of goofy gore pay-off near the end when the clown goes crazy on a concert audience with a chainsaw. And of course the gay psychic lands this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

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STREAM QUEEN: if you miss the days of nature striking back on SyFy…

Posted on October 7, 2021 by Daniel

This foursome of flicks I found on Amazon Prime includes the kind of shark, big bug, and crocodile horror you might leave on if you accidentally stumbled upon it while channel surfing during a boring weekend about fifteen years ago. Does that make any of these worthy of your selective streaming time today?

CENTIPEDE (2004)

I figured I’d start with the real deal. You know it’s some serious made for SyFy creature feature nonsense from 2004 when it’s a full-frame aspect ratio.

Centipede is just goofy. After a quick opening attack scene, we’re off to a caving trip in India with a bunch of young people. They are partying for a friend about to get married, so there’s a silly dance montage that makes me long for happier times. And by that I mean a time not too long ago when we were generally happier as a society—or at least we believe there was hope that there might be a future.

Anyway, after a load of cave exploration and typical young partying people nonsense (except sex), there’s finally an attack about 50 minutes in, after which all the fight for survival action begins.

There’s really no gore or suspense, and the giant centipedes are what you’d expect from a SyFy creature feature. This is about as memorable as any other SyFy flick you watched fifteen years ago.

FROM THE DEPTHS (2020)

What the hell did I just make my hubby watch? I figured I was getting him into another bad shark attack movie. Nope. This is a very different kind of shark movie…

Look. If you go into this one with a really open mind and an understanding of what it’s about, you might be able to enjoy it for its silliness. Just don’t expect a shark movie.

This is a movie about a girl spiraling into madness because she was the sole survivor of a shark attack that killed her boyfriend and her sister. She sees this shark everywhere—swimming down her hall, popping out of puddles, floating past her therapist’s office window…

Meanwhile, this girl is a lesbian, is having intimacy issues with her girlfriend, and is convinced the shark is the crotch block.

WTF?

You only start to realize this is sort of a comedy when the main girl’s dead sister shows up as a corpse and starts cracking one-liners in between trying to convince her to kill her girlfriend. The sister corpse is actually the best part of the movie, especially when she pokes fun at bad shark movies on SyFy.

APEX PREDATORS (2021)

If you’re not even going to show anything but some stock footage of real sharks swimming through the water in your shark movie, don’t make a shark movie.

Not even tossing a bunch of B-movie horror faves like Brinke Stevens, Shawn C. Phillips, Peter Stickles, and Maria Olsen into the mix can camouflage a non-existent film structure.

It’s implied that people are being killed in the water by sharks. Brinke Stevens is a scientist on the verge of figuring out that sharks are evolving…into what we never find out because we never actually see anything but a couple of stock footage shark clips. The man in power wants to keep the beaches open. He has a contentious relationship with his hunky son, who spends most of the movie driving around in a car.

At least he shows off the beef in the last few minutes when he agrees to be human bait…and then wakes up from a dream and sees a cloud shaped like a shark? I have no idea what this move was about.

SALTWATER: THE BATTLE FOR RAMREE ISLAND (2021)

“Based on true events” should have told me all I needed to know about this killer crocodile movie that’s mostly about monologues being delivered on what’s clearly a sound stage that’s supposed to be swamps at night.

American soldiers are trying to get the better of the Japanese during World War II. Their guide through the jungle is a Middle Eastern guy who sounds like a 7-Eleven character from The Simpsons and is not surprisingly used as the only comic relief in the film.

Like I said, there are a lot of character monologues…and yet…there are barely any characters. Despite us seeing virtually no crocodile attacks and their being no suspense whatsoever, the movie just dwindles quickly to only two characters. It’s simply not worth sitting through this one just for a few shots of croc snouts. Really, it’s not worth it, not even for the postscript explaining what the true events were that inspired the movie.

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Bingo Hell vs. Black As Night

Posted on October 6, 2021 by Daniel

It’s old people vs. young people in these two horror flicks about groups in communities of color. It seems Amazon is trying to tap into the “people of color horror” market following the release of the newest Candyman, but they’re succeeding mostly only in the casting department.

BINGO HELL (2021)

In Bingo Hell, we meet Lupita, an older woman who is sort of the self-crowned queen of her community. Problem for me is she’s presented as so unlikable by her behavior the moment we meet her that I found it hard to even connect with her. There’s a difference between being a feisty old lady and just being a nasty old bitch.

Anyway, the Bingo hall where she hangs with her older friends is under new management, and they’re not happy about it. The man running the show is one of those sleazy creeps that comes into town in horror movies and seems to promise people riches beyond their wildest dreams.

The movie becomes a cycle of different characters dying in gruesome ways and then Lupita showing up to find the body. There are also supernatural bingo balls rolling around everywhere.

A horror movie about geriatrics banning together to take down a crazy bingo leader should be loads of fun, but this just isn’t. It’s uninspired, with a plot that has a muddled trajectory and bland, flat characters. It tries really hard to make them sympathetic in the second half, but by then it was too late for me.

BLACK AS NIGHT (2021)

This Amazon original doesn’t feel so much like a movie as it does merely an okay attempt at a pilot movie for a series.

An awkward Black teen living in New Orleans is slowly coming out of her shell with the help of her gay BFF (landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page). But everything changes one night when she slips out of a party and has a vampire encounter on her way home.

Realizing there’s a band of vamps targeting homeless people, she begins to assemble her own little slaying team to hunt down the master and save her community from the threat.

While the vampires are nice and snarly and the cast is quite likable, Black as Night doesn’t quite have the pacing or energy necessary to pack a punch, and fails to even stir up any suspense or scares. It may be Prime’s answer to the Netflix movie Vampires vs. the Bronx, but at most it feels more like a cute attempt at another teen horror show that might last for two seasons on the CW.

It does delve into social commentary about the Black community a bit near the end, but that’s all shoehorned in with exposition through a monologue to be as simplistic as possible with no need for the audience to put any thought into the ideas being presented.

Also, considering this is a Black horror film, it’s kind of a bummer that a decision was made to make another marginalized main character the only one in the group that doesn’t quite make it to the end. Although that could change if there’s a sequel, which seems to be promised…

 

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A feast of fiction for your October reading pleasure

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Daniel

Just in time for the Halloween season, author Steve Berman has released a collection of stories that will reveal just which gays have the biggest appetites…and the strongest stomachs. Eating goes from erotic to icky in this literary smorgasbord of thirteen stories. Here’s a tease of each tale:

“In Summer Broken” – four young men learn that life isn’t always a joyride, and the desolate roads we travel are strewn with ghosts of the past and the future.

“The Balm of Sperrgebiet Is the Krokodil” – there’s no telling what monsters man can create when food and water are no longer a convenience and he must resort to unthinkable alternatives.

“Capturing Jove Lunge” – when a man is called to a mansion to do a job, he doesn’t know if the work is going to involve pleasure, pain, posing…or something that’s living in the barn….

“Poetaster” – what could possibly go wrong when you run with a cannibal crowd?

“He’s So Tender” – you’ll never look at a hot dog the same way again.

“The Letter That Doomed Nosferatu” – despite the finality of the title, this story is more of a love letter to Bram Stoker.

“Unwelcome Boys” – a young gay wrestler can’t fight his urges for another boy, but he soon discovers there are boys with different kinds of cravings.

“The Haferbrautigam” – a man boards a train with an alluring young man who is more than he seems.

“D is for Delicious” – a school nurse learns about the witchy art of curing children of what ails them.

“The Unsolved ‘Case of the Club Tarrare'” – a writer reflects on the inspiration for and process of writing a story.

“Passion, Like a Voice That Buds” – a dark take on the bug chasing theme.

“His Mouth Will Taste of Chernobyl” – gay desire is ignited with the dark side of hazing serving as a backdrop.

“Bottom of the Menu” – for the main course of the collection, a man is salivating over what’s on his birthday plate.

Fit for Consumption is now available from Lethe Press.

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