Back to the 40s and 50s with vampires, zombies, and grave robbers

Posted on December 14, 2020 by Daniel

This may be the best movie marathon I’ve done yet of horror oldies from my late brother’s DVD collection, so let’s get right into them.

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)

This 69-minute movie seriously delivers on the creepy voodoo vibe. It could be heralded for having a significant number of Black actors, but considering they all use voodoo rituals to fuck with the privileged white people in the film, it could also be interpreted as presenting Black people as evil. However, they are actually just getting revenge for the way they’ve been wronged.

A nurse is hired to help the wife of a plantation owner in the Caribbean. The wife roams the creepy house at night as if in a permanent sleepwalking state.

The nurse learns the backstory of the couple from the locals, and she decides to help heal the wife…by taking her through a frightening forest to a fricking voodoo ritual. Unfortunately, in doing so, she puts a target on her own back…and discovers that everyone around her has dark secrets.

THE BODY SNATCHER (1945)

Based on a Robert Louis Stevenson short story, The Body Snatcher deals with a popular horror theme from back then: scientists robbing graves to use the corpses for experiments. In this case the doctor means well; he’s trying to make a wheelchair-bound girl walk again.

Unfortunately, he selects Bela Lugosi as his assistant and Boris Karloff as his body snatcher! What keeps this movie’s plot moving forward is that everyone starts blackmailing each other for robbing graves when essentially they are all accomplices!

Two moments really stand out here. First, the one scene in which Karloff and Lugosi come face to face is worth the price of admission. Second, the final scene really steps up the horror, with the scientist being terrorized by a corpse he’s transporting in his coach. Awesome.

THE RETURN OF DRACULA (1958)

This little 77-minute movie is how I would have wanted my Drac flix back in the 50s, instead of all that boring period piece Hammer stuff I blogged about recently.

It’s modern day, and Drac is being hunted in Transylvania. So he boards a train, kills a dude, and assumes his identity.

This lands him in the home of long-distance relatives in the U.S. who think he’s their cousin. But they soon notice he acts kind of weird and comes and goes at odd hours.

There are some classic Dracula elements here. He avoids mirrors, he visits a victim in her room and turns her into one of his minions, he hates crucifixes, and he sleeps in a coffin. Yet we never actually see him deliver a bite or flash his teeth.

However, the final act rox because it revolves around a Halloween party! And when one of the vamp minions is staked, the film does something shocking for its time…it suddenly turns full color for an instant in a close-up of blood gushing out from around the stake. Awesome.

THE VAMPIRE (1957)

This is another delicious vampire flick from the 1950s. In this one, a doctor acquires an experimental brain pill from a deceased scientist and accidentally takes it.

The pill was made with bat blood.

EEK!

Our doctor begins having blackouts, and soon realizes that every time he does, someone dies, and puncture wounds are apparent on the necks of the deceased.

There are a satisfying number of kills, however, we once again never actually see the vampire bite anyone. Guess it was taboo back then. Even so, we eventually get to see the doc transforming into the vamp a few times and he is pretty dang creepy looking. There’s also a freaky casket opening scene that reveals a gnarly corpse inside.

This probably would have been another fave of mine if I’d been around back then.

 

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SHUDDER AND SHRIEK: a castle freak and a couple of freaks

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Daniel

Since I’m running out of movies to stream on every single service, two new ones that just hit Shudder were a welcome chance to blog about something. So let’s get right into the Castle Freak remake and Anything for Jackson.

CASTLE FREAK (2020)

I’ll give this remake credit…it definitely updates the vibe while touching upon basic elements of the original concept. The only real problem I had with Castle Freak 2020 is that it’s quite boring for a majority of its running time.

It opens mostly the same as the original, with a woman feeding then beating the castle freak in its lair. This woman, however, gets a welcome backstory that is revealed slowly throughout the movie–as is a more complex backstory for the Castle Freak.

Next, a blind woman and her husband come to the castle, which belonged to her deceased mother. The blind woman has dreams she believes are connecting her to her mother. She’s also convinced someone is in the castle with them.

Of course there’s someone in the castle with them! It’s the sexually repressed castle freak, who just loves watching them screw.

Those aspects take up the bulk of the movie. So what about the prostitute tit munching scene? Doesn’t happen. Instead, the castle freak meets up with a druggy in the underground tunnels and messes him up gory good.

Finally, a group of friends visits the couple. And yet…still nothing happens as we wait impatiently for the body count to start.

I’d say the last twenty minutes or so is where all the horror fun happens. It’s nasty, it has a whole new realm of plot compared to the original movie, and there are some really icky situations. If only the fun had been spread out over the span of the run time.

Note—stick around through the closing credits for a tag scene.

ANYTHING FOR JACKSON (2020)

Dare I say I didn’t expect anything from Anything for Jackson? That’s a good thing, because my lack of expectations sometimes leads to happy surprises, as is the case with this pretty damn creepy and original film.

Like a mashup of Misery and Rosemary’s Baby with the feel of dread the Overlook Hotel instilled in us in The Shining, this is the tale of an older couple that abducts a young pregnant woman.

The pair has special plans for her baby, which involves doing a ritual and reading incantations from an occult book.

Their magic goes horribly wrong, unleashing frightening entities that haunt their home.

I don’t often like when the bad guy is the protagonist because I never feel concern for them, but there is something so gullible and misguided about this couple that the terror of what they begin experiencing really comes through.

Nightmarish specters and frightening situations abound (a Halloween segment is one of my faves), but like most excellent films, this one is not without its flaws. The pacing is moving along fantastically, but suddenly things come to a screeching halt for a while when a minor character is brought to the forefront, which I personally felt disrupts the flow.

Thankfully, the final act gets back on track, drawing us in once again with the tone and atmosphere it delivered earlier on.

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Two from the 1930s, and two from the 1940s

Posted on December 8, 2020 by Daniel

So exactly how horrifying are these four oldies…and how much influence have they had on everything that came after them? Let’s find out.

REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES (1936)

Amazing that this movie from almost 100 years ago features a plot that has been mimicked even in recent years during the zombie craze overkill.

It’s all very basic…turning men into zombies that can be used to do your bidding, like being your servant or fighting your battle in war! Although, in this film, the evil men just tend to make their servants into…servants.

An archaeological team is sent to Cambodia to find and destroy the secret to making zombies. What transpires is…a love triangle? Yes, the majority of this film focuses on two men competing for the love of one woman.

There are a couple of scenes in an eerie ancient structure and a trek through a dark swamp, but nothing scary goes on here. And wouldn’t you know, the zombie hocus pocus is used in an attempt to win over the girl! Oddly, Bela Lugosi’s eyes get credit for being in this film as archival footage.

INVISIBLE GHOST (1941)

Bela Lugosi can’t catch a break. Even when he’s not the ominous villain making scary faces…he’s the ominous villain making scary faces.

Here he plays a man whose wife ran away to be with another man. Little does he know she had a car accident and is being kept in hiding in the house by the gardener.

When Lugosi does finally catch sight of her, she fricking hypnotizes him into being a killer. He sneaks into bedrooms choking people out with his coat. There’s nothing scary here since there are no surprises. We know he’s the killer, we know why.

As a result, all we get is a bunch of talking and investigating by detectives until the truth is finally revealed at the end—and the conclusion just doesn’t seem fair!

THE VAMPIRE BAT (1933)

There could be nothing more satisfying than a movie from the early days of cinema that is riddled with talk about, demons, vampires, bats, blood, and more.

When dead bodies begin turning up drained of all blood, talk turns to the possibility that vampires are running rampant. But the detective on the case is skeptical.

However, there’s a loony tunes dude running around scaring people and talking about his love of bats. He is even hunted down by men with torches and hunting dogs. It’s sooooo classic horror. Not to mention, Fay Wray has a small role in the film.

The only disappointment is a conclusion that debunks the whole damn point of the plot!

THE DEVIL BAT (1940)

Many of these old horror movies seem to have two commonalities: a) the films are mostly mysteries with underlying horror themes, and b) we the viewers know all along who the bad guy is and his motivation. In other words, there are no surprises when watching the damn things.

But, hey, at least we get Bela Lugosi again, and he’s in familiar territory, playing with bats.

He is a scientist who goes through a hell of a lot of trouble to kill people from a company that made huge profits off his work. He a) creates giant bats in his lab b) creates an aftershave that makes the bats attack c) gets the aftershave into the hands and onto the bodies of his enemies, and d) unleashes his bats to go attack them.

Lugosi and the puppet bat attacks are all this silly film has going for it.

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CHRISTMAS HORROR ROUNDUP 2020

Posted on December 6, 2020 by Daniel

They are few and far between this year, but I did manage to hunt down a trio of new Christmas horror movies available through Prime and for rent on Amazon to add to the complete Christmas horror movie list, so let’s get right to them.

HAPPY HORROR DAYS (2020)

Much like the film Holidays, this anthology covers a full calendar year as it ticks off the holiday of each month. If I have one complaint about this one, it’s that many of the stories feel rushed, incomplete, inconclusive, or too disconnected from the holidays they represent. Here’s the breakdown of stories:

New Year’s Eve – a cool concept about the legend of Father Time needing to be reborn by inhabiting a baby born on January 1st.

St. Patrick’s Day – shot in first person POV, this short, odd little tale is…I think…about an Irish family’s ritual to anoint one of their own as “Patrick”.

Easter – this one is a stretch. It mostly plays out as a possession film, and the nod to the holiday is a family dog that wears bunny ears. WARNING/SPOILER: dog lovers won’t be happy with what takes place by the end of this one.

Fourth of July – this brutal home invasion tale is a political story that will have conservative horror fans screaming liberal propaganda, but damn if it isn’t a timely statement on race in the U.S.

Labor Day – artistic liberties are taken on the meaning of the holiday name in this tale that plays out like a mini version of the French film Inside. Unfortunately, it uses a dream loop to deliver scares, which quickly dilutes its potency.

Halloween – a couple moves into a new house…but the previous owners left something behind. It’s a really good, scary story, my fave in the bunch, and even features a fun, flamboyant weirdo. The down side? The lack of Halloween. One plastic pumpkin and one Halloween mask are all you get. Not to mention, there’s snow on the ground during outdoor scenes!

Thanksgiving – if you’ve seen Absentia, this will feel very familiar. A young woman is nagged by her mother to a) stop smoking, and b) go get a can of cranberries. This requires traveling through one of those creepy pedestrian tunnels under a road…

Hanukkah – yay to including a Hanukkah story, but a big what the hell were they thinking? to the fact that it’s a tale of two women fighting over a Jewish man for his money?

Christmas – a young girl is terrorized by a Santa that comes knocking when she’s home alone. Nothing new here, but it does what a simple killer Santa story needs to do. Plus, there’s an appearance by gay horror film creator Michael Varrati!

THE NIGHTS BEFORE CHRISTMAS (2020)

This is a sequel to Once Upon a Time at Christmas, one of my faves from a previous December Christmas horror roundup. At the time I watched the first film, the sequel had been announced as Twice Upon a Time at Christmas. I would have preferred that title for this direct sequel, because the title The Nights Before Christmas makes it feel very detached from the first movie.

The crazy Claus couple from the first film is back, and once again deliver the goods with fantastic performances, although this time Mrs. Claus doesn’t get as much screen time.

While the first film was more of an authentic slasher, the sequel focuses heavily on two FBI agents hunting down the killers.

I just can’t get drawn in as much when too much time is spent on those hunting the psycho…unless it’s Donald Pleasance tracking Michael Myers. Too much investigative focus takes me out of the terror of the stalker/slasher/killer aspects.

Having said that, the hack n slash kills are savory here, there’s plenty of Christmas atmosphere, there are good old fashioned gratuitous boobs, and like I said, psycho Santa rox.

Even though the character he was stalking in the original is back (played by a different actress), the plot and motivation are much more complex and seem way too elaborate for two freshly escaped mental patients to pull off, to the point of distraction. But it makes more sense by the end of the film, even though it still relies too heavily on the viewer’s suspension of disbelief.

That’s not to say I can’t wait for the announced third film, currently announced as One Christmas Night in a Toy Store. Awesome.

DEATHCEMBER (2020)

This anthology opens with sweeping visuals in a cemetery and music reminiscent of the Tales from the Crypt theme. There is no wraparound, so it jumps right into the stories, all of which are brief.

The good and bad news is that the film is 131 minutes long. Good news: 26 stories, so you’re sure to find a bunch you like. Bad news: 26 stories, so you’re sure to find a bunch you don’t like. There are a variety of styles from numerous countries and in varying languages. Personally, I enjoyed the quickies that keep the month at the forefront while delivering on camp, creepiness, dark humor, gore, or the good old Creepshow zinger style ending. Some stories try too hard to make you think, causing you to think too hard and still not get what they were going for. Others seem to totally overlook the fact that this is a movie focused on December.

Here are some of the highlights for me:

  • a gluttonous kid that eats all the advent calendar candy in one sitting gets taught a very hard lesson.
  • yay! This dark comedy clip is from gay horror creator Michael Varrati, and features Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick and horror queen Tiffany Shepis. She’s as “Karen” as it gets in a store, and her reaction to not getting her way rules.

  • a young man is welcomed into the home of his girlfriend for Christmas dinner, and things get slithery and icky.
  • an eco-conscious tale of a man who takes his son deer hunting.

  • indie horror king Peter Stickles in a slasher about a greedy upper class family gathering for Christmas.
  • a dad makes the mistake of using the legend of Krampus to scare his kids into behaving on Christmas.
  • horror king A.J. Bowen is a Grinch of a dad, so his son asks for Santa’s help…
  • a gruesome girl power tale of females that target a perv at a dance club.

  • a very twisted, gory, old school Euro horror style clip of 2 women that go ice skating.
  • a tale from horror queen Pollyanna McIntosh about a group of crazy carolers.
  • it’s horror queen Barbara Crampton vs. a psycho Santa.

  • things go horribly wrong when a stripper Santa drops in for Christmas.

Note that the closing credits begin rolling with 19 minutes remaining, but there’s another tale midway through them, and another at the end of them.

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PRIME TIME: kiss all your friends goodbye

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Daniel

It’s a trio of movies featuring kids looking for fun and finding fear instead. But do we get any fun or fear out of them?

CLOWNERY (2020)

Clownery often feels like it is trying way too hard to be an artsy horror film, which tend to work against the fact that it’s a basic slasher at its core.

The opener delivers great promise, with a guy masturbating before being plunged into a short but highly effective suspense sequence.

Then we meet a young woman on her birthday. We slowly see through flashbacks that she had a traumatic experience with clowns when she was younger. Therefore, she’s not a fan of her birthday, and she has recurring delusions that she’s being terrorized by a couple of clowns.

Maybe if she’d stop continuously stepping voluntarily into Argento mood lighting she’d be okay.

Eventually, friends that wanted to throw her a party begin getting sliced and diced by the two clowns. They are most definitely creepy, the gore delivers, and there are sexual situations in true classic slasher style.

However, I could see very quickly who the killer was going to be when it was time for the big reveal at the end. I imagine anyone with any experience in this genre would.

ALL THE WRONG FRIENDS (2016)

For no discernible reason, this one takes place in 1998. It doesn’t even try to go for a 90s retro vibe, unless you consider kids heading to a music festival a 90s thing.

I’m really not going to get into this one much, because there’s not much to get into. It’s mostly a film about kids behaving badly towards each other, not a horror movie.

This gang has tension from the start, and it only gets worse once they reach their weekend house in the woods. Especially when they find a dead body in the tub.

It all becomes a game of who can be trusted and who killed who as they mess with each other’s minds and bodies pile up. The sad part is, a gun plays a major role, so this isn’t exactly a slasher.

MANGROVE SLASHER 2 (2011)

This 47-minute spoof is not an actual sequel. The only thing wrong with it is the spoof part. Buried within the excessive, lowbrow goofiness is an ominous killer and some quite satisfying kills and gore.

Lowbrow comedy is not a problem for me when it works, but here it feels derivative. If you’ve been watching trash cinema for any length of time, you’ve seen most of what you get here.

The nonsense that comes before the kills includes the usual adolescent humor–jocks torment geek, gym coach seems sort of gay, drag queens flirt with coach, girls pillow fight, and everyone heads to the beach for a big party, where the ridiculous caricatures live on…until they start to die.

The first kill is 25 minutes in, and the slasher scenes are taken seriously and tightly orchestrated.

It’s a jarring contrast to the continuing silliness in between. But hey, the film is only 47 minutes long, so you might want to check it out just for the fun of the slashing.

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How about a flesh eating threesome?

Posted on December 1, 2020 by Daniel

It’s time to check out a trio of low budget indies that feature a whole lot of gut munching—and one even gets an honorary spot on the homo horror movies page.

WENDIGO: BOUND BY BLOOD (2010)

 

Despite Bound by Blood being only 73 minutes long, there are so many movies based on the Wendigo legend that I don’t know that you should bother with this rather rough film.

Not unlike some other Wendigo films I’ve blogged about, this one doesn’t actually have a monster. It’s more of a possession situation that turns people into zombie-like cannibals.

There’s a sheriff and doctor investigating murders, there’s an assassin subplot, there are a couple of people being protected by government agents, and there are a bunch of oblivious hunters.

Eventually everyone ends up running through the woods shooting at each other and getting eaten by those who’ve already been affected by the Wendigo curse.

It’s all a bit confusing and not a very polished production. Plus…it’s implied that the last victim is a puppy! WTF?

PIT STOP (aka: Acid Pit Stop) (2020)

Pit Stop tries so hard to work as a low budget zombie rave horror comedy. It even features a cameo from veteran actor Bruce Payne, but the ridiculous curly-haired wig he wears makes him look like a clown, so it’s impossible to take his performance serious…even if this is a zomcom and he is comic relief…

A group of frenemies—two guys and two girls—ends up carpooling to a rave. First they stop at Payne’s house for drugs. He proves to be a bit of a nut case, and the reactions of the stars to what they’re experiencing at least assured me that they can hold their own with the comic timing.

They then head to the rave. This is one of those situations where it looks like the director had a bunch of friends dress up as club kids and filmed the whole thing in someone’s basement.

Soon after the drugs are passed around and someone keels over from taking them, the raving turns into craving, with dancers going all zombie and feasting on each other. Even as low budget as this scene looks, there are some promising gore moments, over-the-top situations, and funny fights with the zombies.

But the film dies as quick as the dancers for most of its running time. The foursome is abducted by the mastermind behind the drugs, and his excessive exposition just drags the movie down.

The last few minutes resurrect the zombie battles, but that’s not enough to save the movie. Not to mention, we needed more of this muscle zomboy…

GHOUL SCOUT ZOMBIE MASSACRE (2018)

At last it’s time for the honorary gay horror flick. This had potential to be a queer cult horror film if it didn’t run 111 minutes long…which could have been achieved by cutting out excessive filler that seems to be going for a John Waters trashy vibe, something that never works for me (including when John Waters did it).

A mad scientist who makes gay porn creates a serum to turn pretty boy rockers into his sex slaves. And the movie doesn’t hold back in depicting gay porn scenarios and a gay relationship.

The scientist has his muff diving prison guard sister and the inmates from her female prison spread the formula to the boys by bringing them laced Girl Scout cookies.

During a gig, the guys begin turning into zombies and eating the concertgoers. This is where the film finds its footing as a low budget zombie flick. All the zombie action is awesome, and the zombie makeup is quite serviceable.

Unfortunately, the zombie plot is watered down by endless schlock that isn’t as funny as it intends to be. For instance, we don’t need to see the scientist’s man servant, who comes across as a mentally challenged geek version of Angel from the Rent film, sing the entire “Papa Can You Hear Me?” song from Yentl with spoof lyrics.

At least the numerous filler sex scenes after the gang hides out in the scientist’s house are sleazy enough to entertain…and segue perfectly into nasty zombie scenes.

There’s even a zombaby. How I wish the film would be edited down by thirty minutes to give us the tightly paced, trashy zombie flick that’s buried in the reel.

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Science gone wrong in four sci-fi flicks from between 1955 and 1965

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Daniel

Aliens, robots, androids, flying saucers, Martians. It’s a trip back to the sci-fi scares of the 50s and 60s.

THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955)

This is all veeeeery sci-if centric, meaning…it takes forever to kick into high gear (as in, 72 minutes into an 85-minute run time).

A nuclear scientist is called upon to help with an experiment at a secret location. A self-flying plane is sent to pick him up, he meets a bunch of weird scientists when he gets to his destination, and he also encounters an old flame.

After lots of talk and the eventual reveal of what’s really going on, the reunited couple tries to escape and gets sucked up into a spaceship!

And that’s when the fun begins. They are taken to a different planet to help aliens fight a war against other aliens.

Along with some pretty cool outer space and planetary visual effects, the big, bug-eyed alien money shot is awesomely 50s, even though the actors in the film supposedly thought it sucked. Personally, I wanted more aliens and less actors.

EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956)

Blah. This really is mostly earth vs. flying saucers. A scientist and his wife on their way to a military base get tied up in flying saucer drama.

The saucer lands at the base, and aliens that look like the robot from Lost in Space come out and disintegrate a bunch of military men using lasers that shoot from their hands.

There’s a plot to overtake the earth, but little in the way of alien action. However, the final battle does involve a whole lot of flying saucers, including some crashes. It was an okay ending to a fairly boring film.

THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK (1958)

Your typical “don’t play god” plot, this one focuses on a scientist who transplants his brilliant, deceased son’s brain…into a big scary robot!

While the scientist wants to continue his son’s work helping humanity by keeping the robot isolated and picking its brain, he unintentionally creates a monster with no social graces. Meanwhile, the robot gains mind control powers and learns to shoot lasers from his eyes. He also becomes quite “master race” in his attitude, feeling like most people the scientist wants to help should die.

It all culminates in a visit to a museum, where the robot is reunited with its brain’s family…and temporarily wreaks havoc with its laser eyes. It’s really a disappointingly underwhelming finale.

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965)

There are essentially two different movies going on here, held together by the tiniest thread. One movie is right up my alley, the other is a mess.

For starters, Frankenstein isn’t actually the Frankenstein monster. It’s a man-made, android astronaut that becomes deformed when its space capsule is shot down by Martians (we’ll get to them later).

“Frankenstein” looks pretty darn creepy and spends the movie terrorizing babes on the beach. Plus,horror icon James Karen of Return of the Living Dead fame has a starring role as a scientist.

Unfortunately, there’s the super hokey Martian story. These Martians have come to earth looking for women because all the women have died on their planet. It turns into a degrading beauty pageant as they bring babes up to their spaceship and parade them around judging them. And I can’t take these goofy bald guys seriously as aliens at all. What a way to spoil a darn good movie.

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Things are getting beastly with these four

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Daniel

It’s a foursome of modern day creature features. So which was my fave?

SEA BEAST (2008)

Pure SyFy creature fodder from the 00s, this film made me nostalgic for the days when they actually aired films like this. The creature is a mixture of goofy CGI and practical effects during close-up attacks, and a pretty cool creature it is.

The plot is typical—people begin turning up dead in a small fishing town, and no time is wasted in telling us why. There’s a “sea beast” that can go invisible, spits a fluid that renders victims immobile, and most importantly, walks on all fours and spends most of its time on land.

The creature is very campy, as are little clones that seem to pop right out of its back to start their own reign of terror. Like, they’re literally offspring…

We have a fisherman, the sheriff, and a biologist trying to figure out what’s going on, the local men going on a hunt for the sea beast…in the woods, and body parts chomped off left and right, so there’s a satisfying amount of cheesy gore. There’s even a total knock-off of the Quint character from Jaws.

TRICLOPS (2016)

This is essentially a playful remake of The Cyclops, which I just blogged about, complete with stop motion creatures and a throwback feel. Personally I would consider it an homage, not a spoof.

Don’t stop me even if you just heard this one before on my last blog. A woman assembles a search party when her man disappears.

This time their plane crashes when they are bombarded by giant birds. Once they hit the ground, rather than just normal giant critters, these critters are all deformed, some looking like dinosaurs, others like giant creepy crawlies right out of the spider pit scene in the 2005 King Kong.

Difference here is it’s made abundantly clear the triclops is her man…he even starts by picking her up and plucking off some of her clothes (so King Kong 1933) before putting her in a cage. Kinky triclops.

The other fresh twist is how the deformity issues start affecting the search party. Cool. But I do think this one is better appreciated if you’ve seen or are a fan of the original.

BEAST (Biest) (2014)

If you like slow burn wilderness creature feature movies, I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t be satisfied by this 66-minute movie.

A couple heads to a cabin in the woods to try to repair their fractured relationship, which doesn’t go very well.

In the meantime, a man comes knocking asking if they’ve seen his missing wife.

Through a series of suspenseful, atmospheric events, they end up in the beast’s lair. Eek. I found the final act of this short film to be a classic style monster movie in which the only CGI used is for an explosion and fire.

UNDERWATER (2020)

I saw this big Hollywood movie on cable with the hubby, so I figured I’d just slap it onto the end of this blog.

If you are a fan of movies like Deep Star Six, Leviathan, Alien, and Deep Rising, Underwater is like a throwback to that era, with a splash of 47 Meters Down thrown in (without the cage or the sharks).

Kristen Stewart stars as member of a team working in an underwater complex when the place suddenly starts blowing up. This leaves the cast spending a good chunk of the film moving from one location to another and one means of transportation to another to survive flooding. It’s all kind of boring.

We get a glimpse of a baby sea creature in the mix there, but the real fun starts one hour in. When we first see the creature, it’s pretty damn cool and frightening. The unique aspect of this film compared to the films mentioned above is that the creatures don’t infiltrate the team’s domain…the team actually goes out onto the ocean floor and gets attacked.

Suspension of disbelief comes in handy, but we do get an awesome final boss that looks and acts like something out of a Resident Evil video game, and for those who are into it, Kristen runs around in a skimpy bikini in the final act.

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4 creature features of the past

Posted on November 24, 2020 by Daniel

Creature features from the 1950s and 1960s rarely fail to disappoint me, so I had fun with a majority of these four films from my late brother’s DVD collection.

THE CYCLOPS (1957)

This silly, 66-minute movie is essentially patterned after the original King Kong. The biggest thing it has going for it is horror legend Lon Chaney Jr.

A missing test pilot’s girlfriend puts together a search party to find him. They crash on an island and soon have run-ins with giant spiders, lizards, hawks, and mice.

41 minutes in, there’s some giant, one-eyed POV. Awesome.

Soon after, we see the cyclops, but his one eye isn’t in the middle of his face! He’s been deformed, so one eye has been mutated closed.

The film subtlety suggests the possibility that the cyclops is actually the girlfriend’s man, affected by the same thing that created the giant size creatures. For reasons she can’t understand, she feels bad for the creature. And when a giant snake comes for her, the cyclops battles it to protect her, just like King Kong and his snake.

For me, the only really cool part of the film is when a dude nails the cyclops in its eye with a torch spear. Ouch.

WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST (1958)

This is a sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man, which my brother didn’t have in his collection of DVDs along with this one, I assume because it never got a U.S. DVD release as far as I can tell.

No need to worry about seeing the first film, because characters in the sequel fill us in quickly on how he became colossal and that he is believed dead. Plus, the monster eventually has flashbacks to the first story.

His sister believes him still alive, so she teams up with a military man and doctor to go find him in Mexico.

When they first see the man, he looks mysteriously like The Cyclops, mostly because it’s the same actor in nearly the same makeup making the same grunting sounds. And yet, a different actor played the role in The Amazing Colossal Man.

The military captures him and ties him down, so naturally he breaks free and weaves his way around or just demolishes miniature buildings that get in his way.

The highlight for me was a flashback in which a scientist tries to inject the beast with a huge needle, so the beast picks it up and uses it as a dart to impale him.

The film also uses the magic of color film as a gimmick…the movie is black and white, but both the colossal beast and us get a shock at the end when everything temporarily goes full color.

THE SPIDER (1958)

At 73 minutes long, this giant critter movie gets gloriously to the point.

After her father never returns home, a young woman and her boyfriend go looking for him. They find his vehicle near a cave with a danger/no trespassing sign, so of course they go in–a plot point that has echoed through horror ever since.

The place totally looks like Bogeyland from March of the Wooden Soldiers, right down to giant fishing net…I mean…spiderweb.

And then there’s the huge spider. A team is sent in and kills it. Or so they think. In another plot point that has echoed through the horror decades, a bunch of kids partying and blasting rock ‘n’ roll music waken the creature. Eek!

Interestingly, scenes of a spider walking through mini-building models is kept to a minimum, because the spider heads back to its lair, where the final battle takes place.

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1962)

Forget that this doesn’t quite stick to the details of the original novel. This is a classic sci-fi/horror scenario focused not only on the monsters in the movie, but the monsters that people become when the world begins to fall apart.

A meteor shower brings awesomely cheesy alien plants–essentially trees–to earth, offering up a kill and the monster money shot right pretty early in the film.

The Triffids walk on their roots, have faces, and eat people. If it weren’t based on a novel from a decade before, this film would seem to be a bit of a rip-off of The Little Shop of Horrors from 1960.

During the invasion, a military man pretty much on his own rescues a young girl, and together they try to leave the country while dodging monsters and dangerously desperate humans. Classic plot, I tell you!

There’s a scientist trying to figure out how to kill the plants, and much like War of the Worlds, also from a decade before, the key to taking them out is something quite abundant and obvious.

Despite its age, the film manages to deliver suspense, atmosphere, and a fun and creepy presentation of the plants. Also, the effective use of light and fog makes me think that perhaps this film was an inspiration for the John Carpenter classic The Fog.

Of course, there’s no denying that when an army of Triffids makes a final stand, the tree soldiers look like a bunch of stalks of celery….

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PRIME TIME: double the brutality, but is it double the fun

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Daniel

I guess this pair of exploitative indie horror movies does make a pretty darn good double feature, but whether you’ll really like them depends on how forgiving you are about their faults.

SERENA WAITS (2018)

Hunter Johnson, the director of 2 Jennifer, definitely likes to explore the sexually twisted places humanity can go and the harm that can be inflicted on others. Serena Waits is a basic rape/revenge flick.

There’s an opening scene involving someone in a mask and wielding a knife coming for a male dance teacher, and I’d forgotten all about it until I started using my notes to write this blog. That’s because it seems to have no connection to anything else that comes after it…unless I missed something.

After that the plot is familiar. Some dudes pick up a drunk girl as she walks home from a party.

At first they offer to help her. Then they bring her home. Then they do drugs. Then they rape her and leave her for dead.

Months later, the guys have some girls over to hang, and eventually they begin seeing signs that the girl has somehow returned and is coming for them. However, the girls don’t see anything, so they offer to have a seance…

It all comes down to the guys getting what they deserve, and they get it bad. Really bad.

These guys are subjected to some major male-targeted brutality, if you know what I mean. If this subgenre is your kind of thing, you may be bored for a while, but the violent finale definitely pays off.

THE FACELESS MAN (2019)

This whole movie is kind of faceless, because it never settles on being just one thing. It’s a sort of mob, crazy town, drug trip, supernatural killer, masked killer home invasion slasher movie, with some dark comedy thrown in for good measure.

If it had been cut by about twenty minutes I probably would have more fun just going with all the insanity, but at 106 minutes long, it tends to get lost in itself.

A young cancer survivor goes to a party with her friends, we see some man butt by the pool, and then they all decide to go to a cabin in the woods.

As soon as they roll into town, they get threatened for being city folk and land on the shit lists of a biker gang and an entire town.

Meanwhile, another guy is tortured by a drug dealing mob and reveals the drugs he stole from them is in the car of all the friends heading to the cabin in the woods.

Back at the cabin, the main girl keeps having hallucinations of a creepy, faceless creature. Things only get worse when she and her friends start doing drugs and eventually turn on each other…when they’re not running away from masked home invaders, sexual sadists in the basement (complete with a gimp), and mobsters.

It really is everything but the kitchen sink, and there are some brutally violent scenes, as well as oddly humorous moments, but as I said before, it just can’t fully sustain the mess that it is for the entire running time.

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