Nature got its revenge in 1970s horror movies

Posted on January 27, 2021 by Daniel

And yet we learned nothing from all those environmentally aware, cautionary slices of cinema. When I was a kid, there was what was called “the 4:30 movie”—a daily movie was shown every day after school, and each week had a theme, like all the Planet of the Apes movies or the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price. The first film in this bunch I’m blogging about was one of the movies shown on “nature strikes back” week.

FROGS (1972)

Frogs is a classic in my world, but it’s also basically Hitchcock’s The Birds with a bunch of different animals, mostly reptiles and amphibians. While it is in no way a masterpiece like The Birds, the constant close-ups of the various critters and the swampy environment make the film unnerving. It also features intense kills by the likes of snakes, leeches, spiders, frogs, lizard, and an alligator, along with plenty of body reveals.

 

Ray Milland plays a crabby millionaire that invites his family to his island for his birthday. Joan Van Ark invites Sam Elliott, a photographer doing a layout on pollution, to the party. He has no mustache, which left me totally confused and feeling empty inside.

Anyway, Milland thinks man is the king of all creatures and Elliott thinks we’re destroying the planet and the animals are striking back, so the two spend a lot of time verbally sparring.

Then the bodies start turning up, and finally the survivors decide it’s time to escape the island. You’ve seen it all before, but this is one of the early ones.

THE LONG WEEKEND (1978)

I sure am glad I didn’t blind buy this one when it was released on Blu-ray. It’s a nature strikes back movie, but it’s barely a horror movie. I will give it this—it creates a sense of impending doom, and has a sort of a The Hills Have Eyes feel to it. If only there were some crazy cannibals, things could have been great.

 

Instead, a couple with a contentious relationship goes camping. This is a) a film about respecting the planet, and b) kind of an anti-abortion film, again circling around the idea of fucking with the natural order of things.

So what happens? The couple hunts, litters, uses bug spray, etc., and the animals of the woods get revenge. The couple is attacked by an eagle, a rodent, bats, and other critters, so why they never just pack up and get the fuck out of there is beyond me. Why I didn’t just stop the movie before it ended is also beyond me.

BARRACUDA (1978)

Now it’s time for two from the post-Jaws era of the late 1970s.


Hey! It’s hospital security guard Mr. Garrett from Halloween 2!

Barracuda starts off fine, with the predictable fish POV underwater and a gory opening attack. The kills in general are pretty good, building up slowly as various people dive underwater before we get a jump scare as the Barracuda attacks.

And quite frankly, that’s the best this film has to offer. The kill scenes are mostly in the first act, with the second half of the film weighed down by lots of dialogue…kind of like the second half of Jaws. YAWN. Let’s face it, Jaws is simply no Jaws 2.

 

Anyway, the plot focuses on a dude investigating the possibility of government experiments that are causing barracuda to attack people.

Naturally he’s right. And naturally the government tracks him down. The film even ends with a gun fight…and no barracuda.

UP FROM THE DEPTHS (1979)

A few glimpses of a freaky looking giant fish with razor sharp teeth is the only money shot in this awful attempt to cash in on the Jaws craze. And those glimpses are brief because there obviously wasn’t a ton of money dedicated to special effects in this silly creature feature (yet I still thought the monster was awesome).

 

It’s as typical as these movies get. A variety of different, random people go in the water for one reason or another, there’s monster POV approaching them, they splash with their arms so we know they’re being attacked, and then we’re bombarded by close-up shots of bloody, bubbling water.

The best part is the mandatory “get out of the water” panic sequence. If I’m not mistaken, I think this film actually pokes fun at the absurdity of such scenes. Everyone is screaming as they run away from the beach, and one couple has a little exchange in which they’re like, “Why are we still running? Fish can’t walk!”

If only the film had then cut to the giant fish walking onto land, this could have become a lot of fun.

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The hunt for 80s horror continues

Posted on January 26, 2021 by Daniel

If you’re itching for something from the 80s, but you feel like you’ve seen it all, here are four more you could check out. But should you?

BLIND DATE (1984)

If Eyes of Laura Mars, Dreamscape, and Looker melded reels, it would be something like this sci-fi slasher thriller, which hit me more with the VHS nostalgia than giving me the slasher feels.

An unseen psycho is attacking women—who always manage to have their tops off—and cutting them up with a scalpel. All we ever see is the scalpel. Sadly, there’s only one actual slit throat moment in this entire movie.

A dude whose girlfriend was raped by a group of men hasn’t seen her since the incident, so in between making love to coworker Kirstie Alley to the sounds of a cheesy 80s pop rock song, he sort of starts spying on his girlfriend (with binoculars while she stands naked in front of a window—something that was a regular occurrence in the 80s if movies have anything to say about it).

When the dude accidentally runs into a tree branch, he goes blind (yes, I just typed that) and is fit with a special device that lets him see images from reality in his head that often look and sound exactly like the video game Super Breakout…because he attaches it to his Atari 2600 (yes, I just typed that, too).

Basically, his special vision helps him track and chase the killer all over town. Not even good horror lighting and a melodramatic 80s horror score help this one serve as anything more than an awesome time capsule film.

DEMON OF PARADISE (1987)

This creature feature has nothing in terms of gore, but at least we see plenty of the rubber suit monster in the final act. Plus, it comes from the 80s.

A surprising explosion in the water of a resort town has locals believing a legendary creature has escaped from underwater. They’re right.

A female resort owner teams up with the sheriff to investigate as people are occasionally attacked by a creature. The creature first gives us a money shot 35 minutes in when it pops out of the water. And of course there’s another resort owner that uses the legend as a marketing tool and makes a game out of it for tourists.

Would you believe the monster comes on full force when it’s time for a big outdoor party?

There’s plenty of footage of the goofy creature running around the wild and being chased by a hunting team, but this is purely bottom of the barrel 80s VHS horror.

DEADLY DREAMS (1988)

I never saw Deadly Dreams back in the 80s, and I hesitated for a few years to pick up the Blu-ray, because the trailer just didn’t look like a horror movie to me. It’s easy to say it’s a slasher or that it’s like A Nightmare on Elm Street, but really, it’s a thriller in which a guy has repeated nightmares about being stalked by a hunter in a wolf mask who occasionally uses a hunting knife instead of a rifle. Mostly, he uses a rifle.

It starts with a family being blown away by a hunter at Christmas time. This lasts for less than five minutes, so I won’t be adding this to the holiday horror page because it really is not a Christmas movie.

One young child survives the massacre and we meet him as an adult. He has a dick friend and a dick brother. He meets a girl and begins a romance with her.

All the while, he keeps thinking he is being stalked by the hunter, and he has recurring nightmares that the hunter shoots someone in his life, and then just as the hunter is about to slit his throat with the hunting knife, he wakes up.

That’s it. That’s the whole movie. Over and over and over. And none of it is scary. Eventually, everyone ends up at the cabin in the woods where it all happened when he was a kid, and the film’s truth comes out…it’s a whodunit thriller, not a horror film.

DARKROOM (1989)

I wasn’t expecting a movie called Darkroom about a crazed photographer to take place at a farmhouse, but here we are with this bizarre little slasher.

A young woman returns home to spend time with her family. Her boyfriend, who has hair that could land him in the lineup of Night Ranger, comes to visit, and he’s a photographer.

Now that would be too obvious wouldn’t it?

Her sister has an ex-boyfriend who is kind of crazy and lives in a trailer home nearby.

Too obvious?

The film is a weak attempt at a whodunit as family members get killed off while the couple goes through typical growing pains of young love. The sister’s ex is running around being crazy, and then bodies start turning up.

Nothing in the way of scares or suspense here, and the kills are lame, but the killer does eventually infiltrate the house, leading to some good chase scenes.

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Taking on the After Dark Horrorfest flicks I missed Part 2

Posted on January 25, 2021 by Daniel

Time for five more After Dark Horrorfest films I had yet to see, and I’d say most of this batch is better than the last set, with one being an all-time favorite of the series so far.

AUTOPSY (2008)

Every After Dark Horrorfest film should live up to the midnight movie madness of this one from the director of the Night of the Demons remake.

After leaving Mardi Gras, a group of friends gets in a car accident. They are brought to a hospital to be checked out…and all immediately split up.

This desolate hospital has it all: it’s eerily quiet and empty, there’s plenty of lighting right out of an Argento movie, creepy patients lurk in the shadows, and horror and sci-fi king Robert Patrick plays a mad doctor.

Sure it’s all cliché with minimal character development, but this is a gorefest purely for the entertainment of it, and it’s awesome. The horror atmosphere is ideal, and these poor kids get “operated” on left and right…without anesthesia. Ouch.

Most importantly, after she involuntarily stars in some torture porn, the final girl kicks ass. This is definitely one of my all-time favorite After Dark films.

SLAUGHTER (2009)

If, like me, you’re a fan of good old “rednecks with a human slaughterhouse on their farm” movies, you should like this one despite a ridiculously uninspired title. And yet I wasn’t enthralled with it…although I now realize why as I start to write this blog about it.

A young woman named Faith is trying to escape her abusive boyfriend, who keeps finding her. She befriends a young woman in a bar, and soon she goes to live on the friend’s family farm.

They get along great at first, but things start getting weird when Faith realizes the friend is a bit of a slut that likes to bring guys home to fuck.

Meanwhile, the friend’s dad is cold and distant…and the closest you get to a hillbilly here. Which I think is why this one was a letdown. There’s just nothing very ominous about this film. Sure there’s a building the dad doesn’t want anyone going into on the farm, but there also isn’t some mutant inbreed in hiding or anything like that.

As a result, the slow burn of Faith finally getting the courage to go into the building isn’t very suspenseful. The final cat and mouse chase around the farm at the end is okay, but there is no gore and no genuine scares. It’s just very flat.

THE BROKEN (2008)

It always annoys me when novels or movies start off with some profound quote from a horror master like Edgar Allan Poe, as this one does. It’s like, stand on your own damn merits, especially if you can’t live up to the genius of the person you’re quoting.

The Broken is too much of a slow burn for the cliché plot that unfolds, and lacks suspense or scares.

A woman is shocked to see herself walking down the street one day. She ends up getting into a car accident after, and when she recovers she feels like everyone in her life is not actually the same anymore.

Visual references to mirrors abound as she unravels the truth of what’s going on. Quite honestly, the final twist is the best part of a derivative plot that—dare I say—mirrors a doppelgänger themed horror/sci-fi classic.

PERKINS’ 14 (2009)

Although it’s slow at first and a heavy character study, I really enjoy the way Perkins’ 14 starts off as a story of a sheriff trying to solve a decade’s worth of missing person cases in his small town—including that of his own son. He thinks he has made a breakthrough when the man believed to have abducted everyone ends up in one of his prison cells.

What follows is a sadistic verbal mind game as the prisoner antagonizes the sheriff as he tries to draw out the details of the crimes.

And then, midway through…

 

This becomes an infected movie! People in town start getting attacked by vicious crazies, and the sheriff is forced to change course to save the rest of his family.

The infected are traditionally manic (always a good thing), the action and suspense are great, and there’s nasty gore. This is classic infected horror.

My only disappointment here is that the sheriff’s fatal flaw, wanting to believe he can find and save the son he hasn’t seen in ten years, is too fatal and causes unthinkable devastation.

VOICES (2007)

Eh. Coming from a decade that gave us some great Asian horror that got under the skin, this one is a huge disappointment. It’s essentially a tame supernatural thriller.

 

It’s as simple as this. A school girl is present at a wedding that leads to her aunt jumping or being pushed off a balcony. Pretty soon, everyone in the girl’s life seems to be attempting to take her life.

It’s a curse. A family jealousy curse. She spends the whole movie dodging knife blades as everyone tries to kill her. Yawn.

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A variety of horror subgenres in this foursome

Posted on January 22, 2021 by Daniel

My movie selections were all over the map for this streaming marathon, with some supernatural stuff, a slasher of sorts, a home invasion film, and a film that never quite lets us know what it is trying to be…

BODY CAM (2020)

An extremely timely social commentary film meets Ghost in this supernatural revenge film.

Mary J. Blige plays a cop back to work after being out on leave for a brief period of time. Following the death of her former partner, she drags her new rookie partner into investigating a woman seen in the inexplicable body cam footage.

While the themes here may seem pretty obvious—race and police corruption—and turn off those who hate “politics” in their horror, they are presented quite objectively if you pay attention. Scenes of cops on the beat truly make you feel how frightening it must be for a cop to suddenly be thrust into a potentially life-threatening situation. Not to mention, while ripping stories right out of the headlines about the way police interact with the Black community, the film also shows that the corruption isn’t just limited to white cops.

The supernatural sequences of a dark, ominous, form showing up at the scenes of crimes and wreaking violent, gory havoc deliver fantastic horror moments as they’re weaved into the mystery story.

Aside from some questionable details in the plot that I can easily let slide, the only real disappointment here is that the script fails in giving any layers or depth to Mary J.’s character, who has gone through some tough stuff but shows virtually no emotion throughout the film.

HANGMAN (2015)

Predominantly boring found footage films like this are no one’s fault but our own as horror fans. We watch them left and right, so they keep getting made.

Hangman feels to me like a combo of Sinister, Paranormal Activity, and The Strangers.

Jeremy Sisto (May, Wrong Turn) is the famous face here. He and his family come home from a trip to find their house has been ransacked. They go on with their lives, not knowing that a home invader is watching every move they make!

For a majority of this film’s runtime, multiple camera angles show us that the invader is always just a room away, or just around the corner as the family members go about their daily business. But don’t expect to find out a motivation at the end for why the invader chose this house and this family. Where have I heard that one before?

If there’s one thing good about this film, it’s the final scene, which is quite intense.

THE FINAL SCREAM (2019)

 

This one comes from director Scott Jeffrey, who makes basic, competent horror flicks and has a regular roster of likable actresses he uses as his final girls.

Sort of like Starry Eyes or 2 Jennifer, this film features an inspiring actress becoming the star of her own horror movie.

The main girl goes for a final call to an isolated location, where only a skeleton crew is around to work with the director, who quickly starts acting weird and pushing her for a better performance.

Naturally, when the camera finally begins to roll (45 minutes in), the main girl learns the director is nuts.

 

So she bands together with the few other girls forced into the film and they make a plan to escape.

There are chase scenes, plenty of good gore, and even some gruesome torture porn, just don’t expect anything you haven’t seen before. Although, there is a penis hacking scene that delivers an impressively large member.

INTERLACED (2018)

Interlaced has a lot of style and effective horror touches, with a washed out look, trippy sequences, and unnerving camera work. It also has so much going on it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Dare I say I feel like I actually might watch it again at some point to better make sense of it all, because there’s a lot of information to be extracted throughout the film that’s easy to overlook the first time.

 

A young boy’s sister strolled off into the woods during her birthday party two years ago and was never seen again, soooooo…he goes camping alone to get over his fears.

The film combines standard cinematic perspective with a POV from the boy’s camera. Once he sets up camp, he immediately starts to feel paranoid. There are noises and movements outside his tent at night, but he barely seems concerned. He catches glimpses and shadows of a figure, and he communicates with his sister through an electronic device.

Is there a monster? Are there ghosts? Is it aliens? Is there a killer lurking in the woods? None of the above? Anything and everything is on the table as the boy roams around brazenly capturing eerie footage that is never explained. There are also various hints of family issues interspersed that just muddy clarity even further. And the conclusion of the film uses one of the dirtiest tricks in the book as a twist—but it’s the very reason I want to watch it again.

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DIRECT TO STREAMING: more from MJ Dixon

Posted on January 21, 2021 by Daniel

I’ve been keeping an eye on director/writer MJ Dixon’s films for a while and have already covered a bunch of them:

Slasherhouse

Slasherhouse 2

Legacy of Thorn

Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clowns

Cleavers: Killer Clowns

Hollower

So I was thrilled to find two new ones on Prime, as well as one of his short films! So let’s get right into them.

ROUGH PATCH (2017)

I’m always happy to start a marathon off with a short film as a warmup, especially a Halloween story, and Dixon delivers with this 9-minute film drenched in his trademark orange and green light palette.

A guy brings two girls to steal pumpkins, where he tells a story of the scarecrow in the field once being alive.

Guess who comes to life? This one gets right to the point with some quick kills and eerie atmosphere.

THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY BANNISTER (2019)

The original title of this film was Bannister DollHouse. Yes, it’s a killer doll movie! The title change doesn’t signal that there’s a doll…and it’s also a rip-off of the movie title The Haunting of Molly Hartley. This is the kind of thing distribution companies make indie director’s go through with their titles for cheap marketability, so I imagine that might be what happened here.

Molly gets a doll for Christmas even though neither of her parents bought it. She says Santa got it for her. Molly seems a little old for dolls and Santa, but you just have to go with it.

One sister is convinced the doll is watching her and following her around the house. And when someone is murdered in the house, a second sister and the father believe so, too. But the mom loses her shit, separates from the father, and won’t let him see his daughters.

Then Molly really starts acting weird, bonding with the doll and talking to it like it’s human.

This is familiar doll horror territory. There’s movement in shadows and under doorways, and plenty of effective jump scares and creepy lighting and camera angles. If you’re looking for cheap scares, that’s exactly what this film is going for, and if you like scary doll movies, that’s also what this film is going for.

If that all seems too cliché for you, I can attest that there are some surprises at the end that make this one a little different. Not to mention, there are some harsh death scenes.

PANDAMONIUM (2020)

This is a perfect example of why I keep up on the works of directors that show potential from the start—as in this case, where the films I’ve seen by MJ Dixon make it clear he studied the best of bunch from my favorite eras of horror.

Pandamonium is my favorite MJ Dixon flick yet. Not only did it fill the void I’ve been feeling during this drought of fun, simple slashers lately, he has also created a film that I knew I needed in my DVD collection before I was finished streaming it.

The film wastes no time in getting to the point. Douche bag guys hire strippers to party at their office…and everyone starts getting slashed.

This is not your ordinary masked killer. This prim and proper looking dude wears a business suite and panda mask (Pandamonium—get it?), and casually speaks one-liners in a British accent as he kills his victims in a variety of ways.


A camera angle like this never works out for a dude…

There are plenty of funny parts, one of the douche bags is adorable and goofy, the camera angles, setup shots, and lighting are classic horror perfect, the meta moments are fresh and smart instead of cliché, and when our final girl at last accepts her fate as the final girl…she steals the show.

If I remember correctly, this is MJ Dixon’s first attempt at horror comedy, and I think he found his niche, because it’s a blast.

 

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PRIME TIME: a trio of vampire oddities

Posted on January 20, 2021 by Daniel

I’m always happy to watch vampire films that depart from the norms…as long as they’re good. Let’s see what you can expect from Blood and Stone, Dreamland, and Mimesis: Nosferatu.

BLOOD AND STONE (2020)

If you ever wanted to learn how much the lives of vampires are as dysfunctional and boring as those of mortals, this dragged out film is for you. But be warned…it’s no What We Do the Shadows.

A Jason Momoa type hunk hangs around bars getting guys drunk so he can drink their blood and get drunk himself. Yep, he’s a big vampaholic. And he spends the whole movie brushing his long, mussed hair from his face, the way guys with long hair do because they think it’s sexy.

He has a couple of female vamp friends. One is trying to have a relationship with a mortal and struggles not to give into her bloodlust.

The other is totally blasé and is actually the most entertaining one in the bunch with her laid-back, devil may care attitude.

And that’s it. Really. This move is two hours long and nothing happens. It’s like Reality Bites for depressed vampires with no goals or direction in their undead lives.

DREAMLAND (2019)

I almost ran screaming from this one when I saw it was from those who tortured us with the agonizing movie Pontypool, but the promise of Henry Rollins and Juliette Lewis kept me watching.

The film had me for 45 minutes. Stephen McHattie plays a double role as a hit man and the jazz player whose finger he is hired to cut off. Trippy stuff.

His boss is Henry Rollins, who is selling children into sex slavery, including a fourteen-year old girl to a vampire that plans to marry her.

The vampire’s diva-esque sister, played fabulously by Juliette Lewis, is planning the wedding.

Juliette has one great scene. Henry has one great scene…same great scene the vampire has. The rest of the movie turns very boring until everyone ends up at the wedding, which leads to a gun fight…in a “vampire” movie. Therefore, I can’t exactly recommend this as a horror movie. It’s more like, I don’t know, a dark comedy fantasy?

MIMESIS: NOSFERATU (2018)

I’m a fan of director Douglas Schulz’s film Mimesis: Night of the Living Dead, so I was psyched to see his take on Nosferatu.

Despite being forced to tune out the fact that he cast crazy conservative Kristy Swanson in the opener (I guess if you can’t afford Sarah Michelle Gellar for your vamp film cameo…), it’s a great setup scene of a mother going into the bedroom of her son, who takes his obsession with Nosferatu to the extreme.

The film focuses on a school drama club that is set to do a stage adaptation of the original silent film. Annoyingly, the drama teacher takes a jab at glittery vampires. It’s a tired joke and people seriously just have to let go of the fact that Twilight exists. That series hasn’t in any way hindered my appreciation of vampire horror movies.

Anyway, the film turns oddly into a battle of the cliques, as the drama kids are bullied by and then take revenge on a bunch of assholes at school.

There are some gruesome scenes here, and generally I liked the concept, but honestly, none of it makes much sense. Basically, everyone takes their love of Nosferatu too far, so there are Nosferatus running around all over the place before all is said and done. This essentially a commentary on kids in modern society cloaked in a faux vampire theme.

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Taking on the After Dark Horrorfest flicks I missed Part 1

Posted on January 19, 2021 by Daniel

My obsessive side is always finding something new that I haven’t fully consumed yet, and this time around it’s the After Dark Horrorfest films that were all the rage over a decade ago. Turns out I’ve seen, blogged about, and own a majority of them, so I’m going back to fill in the gaps, starting with this first blog featuring five films.

TOOTH AND NAIL (2007)

Not exactly a frightening film, and riddled with clichés, Tooth and Nail at least has some brutal violence, some familiar horror faces, and female heroes.

The planet has mostly come to an end after being depleted of all gasoline. Not exactly the most green-positive plot, huh?

Anyway, survivors living in a vacant building find a young woman in trouble on the road and take her in. They soon discover that she was followed by a gang of cannibals that looks like something out of The Lost Boys.

The film turns into nothing more than a cat and mouse game, with the woefully unprepared survivors becoming sitting ducks when the cannibals infiltrate their building and hack them up with axes. This simply isn’t suspenseful, and the cannibal dudes lack any sense of menace. Not even Michael Madsen.

Only a twist in the cat and mouse game saves the film somewhat in the last act, but it doesn’t really save it enough. It’s still disappointingly generic.

WIND WALKERS (2015)

This “infected” movie has more plot elements than it has actual infected people.

A Native American man opens the film, speaking to the camera and establishing that after the white man invaded their land and their lives, something known as “wind walkers” came to prevent future invasions.

Next we meet a group of men, one of them military (and quite pretty), looking for their other military friend who went missing in the Everglades. Then the film pointlessly breaks chronology, momentarily flashing back three days to when the guys first discovered their friend was missing.

Back to the Everglades, this turns into a headache of a soap opera. Is there a lone Native American zombie running around (that’s right, I said lone. Just one.)? Is the military man suffering from PTSD and actually killing his friends? They seem to think so, therefore, he must convince them that an infection has followed him back when he was on duty. One of the most effective scenes is a flashback showing what exactly happened when he was a prisoner of war.

It’s not until almost ten minutes before the film ends that there’s truly some thrilling zombie action.

While it’s satisfying stuff, and while I really like something about the look and feel of the film, I’m not sure any of that justifies sitting through this one, although it is at least a little different than the usual zombie fodder.

UNREST (2006)

The premise of Unrest is initially really enthralling. A group of med students begins to believe that the cadaver on which they are working is alive…or that her soul isn’t happy with the way they are treating it.

As a few of the believers in their group begin to investigate the life of the corpse woman, others aren’t so kind to the body, and they begin to get killed off.

Like I said, cool concept. It’s just at the point when the pretty blond girl and even prettier boy in class begin having sexual relations that the film falls apart.

Dramatic Omen music abounds, they start digging around repeatedly in a vat of formaldehyde—even diving into it—with absolutely no side effects, and they learn of the corpse woman’s completely Aztec background, which just seems irrelevant when the plot is as simple as dead bodies not liking to be messed with. But I guess the kids needed some sort of playbook on how to placate the soul, so there you go.

CRAZY EIGHTS (2006)

Crazy Eights is crazy confusing and just another disappointing horror film dipping into the trends in horror at the time of its making.

After onscreen text informs us that kids were dropped off for experiments in the 1970s and never seen again, we meet a handful of people that comes together after a friend dies. They follow a map he left for them and find a box with a corpse in it.

Then they stop at what looks like an old house…and somehow the inside is an abandoned hospital. Becoming trapped inside, they spend the movie exploring the place, and each of them is murdered in off-screen kills, and we are occasionally treated to tween strength jump scares.

Who’s murdering them? We never find out. Why are they being murdered? We never find out. Why do they all seem very familiar with the layout of the hospital? We can only assume they were somehow some of the kids that disappeared during the experiments, but we never find out.

My favorite part of the film was a funny moment when Traci Lords, who appears in the film, has a mini-meltdown when someone gets killed by a slamming window (off screen).

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 3: REVELATIONS (2009)

It’s just weird that the third movie in a weak franchise would be forced into an After Dark Horrorfest, but while I never watched the first two films, I can say this one is a standalone movie and sort of plays out like a pretty gory slasher with time travel.

A Casper Van Dien type dude has the ability to go back in time, and in true Back to the Future fashion, if he messes with things, he changes the present.

While he won’t discuss with his sister what actually happened when they were kids resulting in the death of their parents, she does help monitor him when he travels back in time to determine who murdered his girlfriend.

Problem is, each time he goes back, he manages to get someone else murdered!

Not a bad plot as long as you have the patience to follow all the time jumps, and the brutal kills with an electric saw as the weapon of choice along with some naughty sex scenes gave me flashbacks to 90s thrillers. Plus, the surprise ending is kind of tragic and rather twisted.

 

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PRIME TIME: it’s all alien to me

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Daniel

I don’t often dabble in the alien realm, but when I do, it’s gotta be fun…or a totally unique take on aliens. These two films definitely kept me watching. Let’s find out why.

XENOPHOBIA (2019)

An indie film reminiscent of The Fourth Kind, this fun little midnight movie plays out like an anthology film as members of an alien abduction support group describe their experiences.

The special effects and monsters are mostly fantastic, with plenty of practical effects and just fleeting slips into SyFy style effects now and then, which made the hubby and me giggle. Yet even those added to the spirit of the film. now on to the stories.

First story has a kid sucked into a spaceship in the desert for some probing. This is the most traditional of the tales.

In the second story, a young woman and her husband have an alien encounter in the woods while camping. There’s an awesomely freaky, two-faced alien and a good gore moment at the end of this tale, which feels very old school 80s in tone and style.

For the third story, horror queen Brinke Stevens recounts her daughter’s disappearance while babysitting. It takes a while to get going, but this tale is a blast, with the young woman being chased around the house by a little octopus looking alien thing. It’s quite campy, and also reminiscent of that classic Trilogy of Terror tale.

The final story delivers some nasty torture porn as several women start mutilating a man they think is a rapist. When the alien shows up, it totally rox.

And finally, there’s the conclusion of the wraparound, which ties all their tales together. The film adds a unique and actually logical take on those that have experienced alien encounters, setting it apart from the usual.

ALIEN EXORCISM (2011)

If you’re really fascinated with alien theories, this is quite a unique little indie to check out. It’s deep, visually hallucinogenic, and quite complicated, with numerous elements in play.

The very first scene is like a disturbing acid trip, from the viewpoint between a woman’s legs as various aliens bicker over which one gets her. Eek. And Ick.

Then we meet a doctor who believes aliens actually fill our bodies as souls to live among us and is focusing on a troubled young woman. While he has her hypnotized, the alien takes over and won’t release her from her meditative state. It’s quite cool to see that she actually makes even a visual transformation.

So the doctor and his sidekicks take her to a priest that defected from the church, and they attempt…what else? An alien exorcism. As long as you’re not married to religion, the concepts presented here, blending the occult and extraterrestrials, are quite thought-provoking and mind-boggling. This isn’t a film for mere cheap thrill seekers.

Alien eroticism, possession, religion, spirituality, government conspiracies—it’s all here in this intriguing film. Hell, it even manages to make a rave a crucial plot point.

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It’s never too late…or early…for Halloween horror

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Daniel

Halloween is behind us and ahead of us, so it’s always the right time for a Halloween horror marathon. Meaning I’m totally presenting you with a trio of Halloween films I’m adding to the complete list of holiday horror movies.

BLACK PUMPKIN (2018)

Black Pumpkin is pure indie Halloween slasher bliss drenched in 80s retro vibes.

The opening kill, complete with a black pumpkin on a front step, clips of Night of the Living Dead on a TV (naturally), a wicked jump scare, and delicious gore, gets us in the mood. There are also clips of a TV show the main characters watch throughout the film featuring a creepy dude singing an 80s style, earworm of a Halloween song (which is included in full as a bonus video on the DVD).

The plot is as old as time. A teen is supposed to babysit her younger siblings on Halloween. Her friends would rather she go with them to the site of the Bloody Bobby legend. At the same time, her younger brother and his funny friend are making a video for the Internet about the Bloody Bobby legend.

And of course there’s a nut running around town trying to warn everyone to beware Bloody Bobby.

And for good reason. Bloody Bobby is a freak of Halloween nature! Like a more demonic version of Sam from Trick ‘r Treat, he dices and slices up the main girl’s friends in brutal ways.

It’s gory, suspenseful, the main characters are likable, the Halloween atmosphere rox, and the main girl’s boyfriend has BJ lips made in heaven.

If there’s any flaw here, it’s that it appears at least some of the actors may have had to re-dub their dialogue back in after filming was complete, because the audio feels and sounds somewhat off at times.

THE LEGEND OF FALL CREEK (2021)

I was quite excited to discover that only months after I bought Black Pumpkin on DVD, companion film The Legend of Fall Creek was announced. I think it may simply be a reworked, re-edited, reproduced, reshot, or all of the above version of a seemingly unreleased Bloody Bobby movie listed in IMDb by the same creators, so I assume Black Pumpkin is actually the sequel.

It doesn’t matter which order you watch the two films in, but I would suggest watching this one first to save the best for last. Fall Creek has more of a gritty, dark look and feel, setting it apart from Black Pumpkin nicely, however, the creators didn’t need to splash the definition of grindhouse across the screen as the film starts. We’re a horror audience; we know why it looks the way it does.

As the title implies, Legend of Bloody Bobby recounts the origins of Bloody Bobby. How does it do that? For starters, it explains it in a narrative accompanied by scrolling text at the very beginning. The film takes place 20 years after the incident, and simply has various characters tell the same exact story of what happened to Bobby on Halloween night in 1988. He disappeared after kids picked on him. That’s all we get. No nasty details at all. Not even a flashback.

The main guy comes back to town, and he is still traumatized by whatever it is that happened when they were all kids. He’s acting really weird as he connects with old friends again at a Halloween party, but at the same time, he’s kind of funny. Guess he uses humor as a coping mechanism.

Meanwhile, people start getting killed off by someone in costume who doesn’t even vaguely live up to the creepiness of Bloody Bobby in Black Pumpkin. That version of the killer could so easily become iconic. Here he’s a letdown, especially since he’s cloaked constantly in quick edits with blurred focus. Bummer.

On top of that, not even a grindhouse filter can mask the detached narrative that loosely ties scenes together as we are presented with mostly forgettable, disposable characters. Plus, the slashing feels almost incidental rather than being the glue that holds the film together. That said, some of the kill sequences rock, especially when Bloody Bobby “trick or treats” at one woman’s house right before she takes a shower. There’s even a good old sex scene kill. Yay!

In the realm of why even bother including it in the film, there is some oddly forced, homophobic ranting in two scenes by different characters, but at least in both cases the phobes get theirs.

I will be adding this to my DVD collection when it’s released next month due to my completist compulsions, but I can definitely say you don’t need to see this film to enjoy Black Pumpkin, because they feel like they come from two different worlds.

SCARE ATTRACTION (2019)

Toss in elements of the most obvious fad movies of the last two decades and you get this generic, 72-minute film.

There are some Hellhouse LLC moments as a reality show host gives us a found footage style tour of his new Halloween scare location, while repeatedly referencing rooms inspired by the Saw movies.

The cast comes in, gets a tour of the scary attraction, and then gets trapped in what’s assumed to be an escape room.

Then they get gassed and wake up tied to chairs. A disembodied voice tells them they must solve riddles involving their most sinful acts or else they will die.

Sound familiar? If so and Saw is your thing, you may get some slight satisfaction from Scare Attraction. As a guy who was in it for a Halloween horror flick, I was left totally unsatisfied.

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Counts and Countesses at the beginning of the 1970s

Posted on January 11, 2021 by Daniel

This is it. I’ve at last reached the final four DVDs I inherited from my late brother, and they’re from 1970 and 1971, when I was barely into my terrible twos (I still am).

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970)

Somehow I landed back in Hammer Films hell after I thought I’d gotten through all of them. Dang, my brother loved Hammer movies. I had high hopes for their take on vamps this time, because instead of once again retreading their Dracula movies, the focus is on a female vampire!

The opener delivers classic Hammer atmosphere as a vampire hunter waits by a cemetery for a creepy specter to rise from the ground. Great scene. I swear, the specter looks better in motion.

Then we get into the thick of the plot. Some woman keeps dropping her pretty daughter off with random families. Each time the daughter joins a household, a young woman in the family falls ill, dies, and is found to have two puncture wounds on her neck.

Good thing Peter Cushing is around. He and a group of guys that also lost women to this vampire chick go hunting her down, aaaaaaand…it becomes just another cookie cutter Hammer film. Well, I guess not totally, because this lady vamp seduces women. Eek! It’s lesbian Hammer horror!

COUNTESS DRACULA (1971)

This is poorly titled, because this is an Elizabeth Bathory concept, not vampire. A recently widowed countess learns she can remain youthful if she bathes in the blood of young women. So she gets her servants to help her kidnap and kill victims.

Things don’t go as planned. In between ridiculous soap opera bed-hopping nonsense, she starts looking worse!

Turns out she was supposed to be dipping only in virgin blood. So, the plan is altered to fit the new parameters.

Just boring. Not gory, not scary, just boring. I could barely find a single enticing still shot.

COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE (1970)

Yorga most definitely steals a lot of Drac’s style, but maybe just because he isn’t named Dracula, I found him a bit more provocative.

He holds a séance for a woman who recently lost her mother, and after the woman freaks out during the séance, one couple at the gathering drives Yorga home. After dropping him off, they have sex in their van, which turns into a pretty dang good vampire POV scene.

That’s one of just several really effective horror elements here, the next being Yorga’s female victim getting caught feasting on a cat. Eek!

Tradition never goes out of style, so the count comes to her window at night (after she feels up her tits first), and then the men of the movie, including The Facts of Life headmaster Mr. Parker, start to realize she’s a victim of vampirism.

As the Count builds a little army of vamp babes, the men plot to take them all down by infiltrating his lair.

The final act is creepy vampire stuff for its time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if parts of this film were the inspiration for Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot.

THE RETURN OF COUNT YORGA (1971)

Somehow the Santa Ana winds have brought Yorga back to life. What kind of Frosty the Snowman bullshit is that?

Also back is Mr. Parker, but playing a different character. See? Horror has been doing this kind of dumb crap for decades. And keep an eye out for a young Craig T. Nelson of Poltergeist fame.

This time around, the Count becomes obsessed with and abducts Mariette Hartley, who is a teacher at the orphanage. She remembers nothing, so he convinces her he took her in to take care of her after an accident

I prefer this sequel to the first film, because they’ve upped the creep factor in numerous scenes. For instance, the vamp ladies rise from the ground and chase a little boy in the woods, the count does some great slow mo chasing, Mariette is assaulted by a cacophony of creepy laughter while trapped in a room, and there’s a great scene of Yorga’s vamp ladies taking down a room full of shrieking people.

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