Early 80s vs. late 80s horror

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Daniel

I went deep diving for my 80s fix with four in a variety of subgenres. So let’s get right to them.

THE LAST SHARK (1981)

Falling between Jaws 2 and Jaws 3, The Last Shark put in the effort to make a mechanical shark…at least half a shark. All shots of the fake shark are the same; the opened-mouthed head rising out of the water like something off the original Jaws poster. As limited in function as the shark is, this is a fairly fun and silly rip-off.

It stars the gorgeous leading man from Beneath the Planet of the Apes (left).

After a wind surfer disappears (the first kill), the leading man helps his daughter and her friends search for the guy, at which point he concludes there may be a shark in the waters.

Predictable scenes abound, from divers getting attacked to couples going out for evening swims. And when a wind surfing competition isn’t canceled (shocker), all hell breaks loose. There’s even a helicopter scene that—it kills me to say it—blows the helicopter scene from Jaws 2 out of the water.

Stay tuned for my upcoming 90s blog that covers a movie that was literally structured around scenes from this film and marketed as a new film…

BLOOD LINK (1982)

Not gory or scary, this psychological thriller reminds me of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers…with a touch of De Palma’s Sisters as well. Quirky 80s horror king Michael Moriarty playing a dual role as Siamese twins is reason enough to watch, even if the pacing is slow.

When good twin begins having visions of killing people, he decides to hunt down estranged bad twin…

It’s not until fifty minutes in that the brothers finally meet and things actually start happening. Moriarty plays bad twin wonderfully with subtle flamboyance.

Basically, bad twin swaps himself out for good twin in order to continue killing while good twin gets pinned for the crimes. A series of murders comes in the last half hour, but it’s nothing shocking or memorable.

The real haunting part of this film is what takes place right as we approach the final frame.

THE HOUSE OF USHER (1989)

Considering movies named after Poe tales are rarely adaptations by any stretch of the imagination, I won’t even address the issue here.

This is simply a woman held against her will movie. The lead actress from The Howling IV travels with her man to his uncle’s mansion. Before they can get there, they crash their car while avoiding ghost children on the road—ghost children that appear several times throughout the film but add nothing to it.

This movie is a mess. Following the accident, the leading lady wakes up inside the mansion. She’s told her man is at the hospital. Oliver Reed is the uncle, who has many rules and regulations she must follow, and his servants are nuts.

The main girl explores the gothic mansion at night and discovers the body of her man. Reed says they’ll have a funeral for him, but signs point to the possibility that he’s not dead. She also comes upon Reed’s brother, played by Donald Pleasence.

He wants her help in escaping the mad house, but she can’t even get away herself, because Reed and his mad doctor have plans for her.

It’s not much in the way of a horror film, with the only freaky part being when a starving rat is used to deprive a man of his manhood…

 

DARK TOWER (1989)

This film is oddly similar to the killer elevator flick The Lift. Michael Moriarty (he really was a horror king in the 80s) plays a clairvoyant investigator on the case when a window washer takes a huge dive from a newly constructed building.

The love interest from An American Werewolf in London stars as the building’s architect, and she seems to be haunted by a presence outside her office window…the window the washer was cleaning when he plunged to his death.

Moriarty has visions of her being killed. A security guard is killed. A shooter comes in and blows away a bunch of people. Moriarty calls in a parapsychologist who has a long conversation with the ghost. Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the douche congressman) joins the investigative team near the end for no apparent reason.

It’s soooooo boring.

Only the final scene, in which American Werewolf woman is chased by a corpse, delivers any kind of worthwhile horror. Even Moriarty doesn’t seem to have the motivation to deliver his usual unusual performance.

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Bruce Campbell’s mind and moon

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Daniel

It’s not as sexy as it sounds, although Bruce always is. My incomplete Bruce Campbell collection finally caught up with me and determined I was missing two of his sci-fi/horror flicks, so I swiftly added them to my movie shelves. So let’s get into Moontrap and Mindwarp.

MOONTRAP (1989)

I’ll say it up front; this is the lesser of these two movies.

Bruce and Chekov from Star Trek are astronauts that discover the corpse of an ancient astronaut, not realizing they’ve brought an alien robot life form home with it.

After a major gun battle with what turns out to be a pretty damn big robot on their ship, they hit up a strip club for the most 80s scene of the film with a stripper that looks like Frida from ABBA with the best bad 80s horror you could imagine.

Then they head to the moon, where we get a mixture of cool visuals and bad model space vehicles and astronaut dolls.

The guys find a human woman in the aliens’ base, and finally do some battling with the aliens on the moon.

There’s some silly fun to be had, but this is mostly a disappointing, cheesy sci-fi movie with just one cool moment featuring a freaky Bruce face.

MINDWARP (1991)

This is the 1990s doing predictive sci-fi/horror right. A young woman hates that life is all A.I. controlled virtual reality in her world.

Humans simply eat and go to the bathroom in between connecting to a VR system that lets them experience a wonderful life.

But she wants more. She rebels against the system, and as punishment for trying to break her mother free from the same kind of existence, she is thrust into the real world…post-apocalyptic life in a desert land where she is immediately attacked by deformed cannibals.

Luckily, gorgeous Bruce Campbell, a loner living out in the desert alone, saves her…temporarily.

After they quickly have sex (ah, the 90s…or in this case, 2037), they are kidnapped by the cannibal tribe and taken to a nasty underground lair where men are made to do forced labor and women are forced to carry offspring.


Bitch, Bruce was just a warmup. Come to papa.

Not to mention, there’s incest, gross water filled with leeches, and a bloodthirsty leader (literally) played by Phantasm icon Angus Scrimm.

Bruce is a serious hero for a change as he battles to rescue his new woman, the cannibals are gnarly looking, and there’s plenty of brutality and gore, making this a worthy addition to my complete collection of Bruce Campbell sci-fi/horror movies.

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A trio of horror flicks based on classic fairy tales

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Daniel

One is a dark adaptation, one is a fantastical supernatural take, and the final one embeds elements from a fairy tale into a typical slasher. Let’s take quick looks at Gretel & Hansel, The Curse of Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White: Deadly Summer.

GRETEL & HANSEL (2020)

Sophia Lillis of Stephen King’s It plays a maturing Gretel in this sinister adaptation of the classic fairy tale, while horror queen Alice Krige is perfect (as always) as the witch.

But the real star just might be the visual presentation of this narrowly cropped film (an aspect ratio of 1:55:1 rather than standard 1:85:1 widescreen). It perfectly captures the claustrophobia of the witch’s little house in the woods. Not to mention, the sets and settings are stunningly captured on camera.

The story is a fresh take on the plot as well. Gretel and Hansel run away, and by the time they get to the witch’s place, they decide to accept her invitation to stay a while.

As the tale unfolds, we get a backstory for the witch and nightmarish flashbacks to the kiddie food factory her little house really is. At the same time, the focus is on Gretel navigating her way into womanhood and her role as guardian of Hansel…which makes the twists that come at the end all that more delicious. Hell, there’s even a nod to the Wicked Witch of the West.

THE CURSE OF SLEEPING BEAUTY (2016)

The leading hottie in this film is reason enough to watch it, plus it has plenty of spooky horror scenes with a Silent Hill vibe. But damn, it is so hard to follow.

Pretty boy keeps having dreams of sleeping beauty…and a monster under his blanket. Metaphor much?

Anyway, he inherits a mansion from his uncle, with explicit orders to never unseal the rooms in the basement. I sense a guardian of the gates plot…

Pretty soon, he’s teaming up with his pretty real estate agent and opening up the basement.

The majority of the film has them being terrorized by mannequins that come to life. The creeps and the atmosphere are excellent, but the plot just spins out of control when Bruce Davison and some young dude show up to lend a hand because they have experience with the paranormal.

I continued to watch for the cool monsters, but I was disappointed that horror hottie Zack Ward is only in the film for about ten seconds. What a waste of a good man.

SNOW WHITE: A DEADLY SUMMER (2012)

David DeCoteau manages to keep it in his pants, giving us a backwoods slasher free of boys running around in tighty-whities. And I couldn’t quibble over the loose references to Snow White, because this one has fricking Marcia Brady as the wicked stepmother.

Indeed, Maureen McCormick talks to herself in a mirror and plots to send her stepdaughter Snow to boot camp. While she only appears at the beginning and end of the film, Maureen rules when she’s evil.

Snow has to contend with seven fellow dwarfs—I mean—boot campers, and a hard ass boot camp leader. There are tales of murders at the camp 25 years ago, and supposedly the killer was never caught.

Snow keeps catching glimpses of a dark, shadowy figure in the woods and having nightmares of each of the others being murdered, and then the bodies start turning up.

Is it a good slasher? No. Is there any gore? No. But fricking evil Marcia Brady. That’s all that matters.

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Nothing like a gay demon and gay vampire double feature

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Daniel

I was finally able to hunt down two gay horror films from the complete homo horror movies list on my site, one an exorcism horror comedy, the other a dark and moody vampire film. So let’s get right to them.

ECHORSIS (2016)

There’s a lot to unpack in this Filipino gay exorcism comedy, which isn’t as straightforward as you’d think it would be. If you want to check it out, at the time of this post it is available in HD with subtitles on YouTube.

You have to go into Echorsis realizing there are culture differences in the way gays are perceived and presented in Eastern countries vs. Western countries. It’s very easy to interpret what’s presented here as negative stereotypes about gay men. For instance, almost all queers are on a spectrum from extremely effeminate to virtually or literally trans, and all major gay characters are randomly in drag in several scenes with no benefit to the plot, solidifying the idea that gay men all want to be or act like women, and straight guys are all beautiful, muscled, masculine temptations.

The film tackles another sensitive issue in a way that may trigger some. Our main gay man—effeminate, out of shape, plain, closeted, lonely—doesn’t realize that he’s fallen in love with a hustler who’s taking him for a ride after he’s disowned by his parents for being gay. When the hustler takes off with his money, the gay man tries to kill himself in various ways, always through pop song montages and with comical overtones. Yes, the suicide attempts of a sad, unhappy gay man are used as a punch line various times.

Even his group of gay friends—bitchy, heartless queens—are extremely flippant about his predicament, even having a dance party with a bunch of muscle boys in the yard while he’s inside attempting to kill himself. It’s quite a statement about the gay community. Is humor used to soften the blow of a harsh truth? Maybe.

Some viewers may be quite turned off by all this. This “campy” segment unnecessarily takes up half the running time. Personally, I think all that time taken to establish the point of the story could have and should have been trimmed by about twenty minutes (down from over 50 minutes to about 30).

Once we get to the exorcism stuff, it’s all as fun as you’d hope, and the campy, queer, flamboyant tone poking fun at gay stereotypes feels naturally satirical and meant for a gay audience.

The gay man has put a curse on the pretty hustler, who becomes possessed…by homosexuality. He acts as gay as can be, and it’s mixed in a blender with plenty of homages to The Exorcist.

Plenty of it is funny, while some of it again may hit a nerve, like the hustler wanting to dry hump all his friends and even his own uncle now that he has uncontrollable gay urges.

There is also some balance struck. For instance, just when it feels like homosexuality is being treated as a sinful demon that gets inside you, a witchy woman comes along and points out that gay isn’t an illness that can be cured. And the young priest that ends up coming to perform the exorcism is struggling with his faith—both because of the awful way the church treats gays and due to the fact that a hot muscle devil keeps coming to him and tempting him to explore homosexuality.

The second half of the film is definitely a load of fun and negates the questionable comic choices of the first half. It’s all I could have hoped from a campy gay exorcism movie.

SCAB (2005)

I’m shocked that this gay vampire film isn’t more readily available, because it deserves to be better known than many of the poor quality gay vampire movies that are still in circulation on DVD and streaming services (I scored a non-U.S. DVD release).

The performances alone are much stronger than the amateur to bad acting we get in many sexy gay horror films, not to mention the writing and directing are tighter.

Taking a cue from dramatic, gritty, character-driven vampire films like Near Dark and The Forsaken and bringing that style to an urban setting, Scab looks at a night in the life of three buddies—one straight, two gay—after one of the gay guys is raped.

The opening scene starts off sexy as a pretty boy bottom gets into it with a muscle hunk. But things quickly turn violent, resulting in the pretty boy becoming a vampire.

Meanwhile, the other gay buddy is inexperienced and in love with the straight buddy, who tends to use that to his advantage. When the vamp friend reveals he was assaulted, they take a road trip to get away from it all and end up at a seedy motel.

There are plenty of other pretty young people around to flirt, fuck, party, and deal with relationship drama, but the real focus is on the breakdown of trust between the trio of buddies. It feels like a nineties film about twenty-somethings with no goals beyond the present. Interesting at first, but it does wear thin and pads the film to an unnecessary 103 minutes long.

That’s the biggest disappointment, because the sleazy, sexual, and nasty horror scenes in the film really satisfy. Less focus on the extraneous characters could have tightened up the pacing and brought the horror elements closer together.

There’s a disgusting toilet scene right after the main guy is raped, there’s a vicious scene with a prostitute, porn star turned actor and director Dylan Vox delivers a highly erotic moment in a video store, and there are intense predatory and feeding scenes.

On top of that, all the characters are so flawed you struggle to not like them and not hate them, because they’re all lost and alone even as they seem to have each other. Also of note is that the script refreshingly acknowledges sexual fluidity rather than going the black and white orientation and identity route.

 

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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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