STREAM QUEEN: two new horror comedies

Posted on October 5, 2020 by Daniel

It started out as a double my fun feature night with these two films, but was either of them a disappointment? Let’s find out.

VAMPIRES VS. THE BRONX (2020)

Fright Night meets Attack the Block in this little film that feels like Salem’s Lot for The Monster Squad crowd (which will forever be me).

A playful comedy about life in the ghetto in general, it’s also a commentary on gentrification and how rich white people devalue Black people, consider their communities disposable, and take advantage of them.

A white real estate agent is working with a clan of pretty, white metropolitan vampires to buy out all the black people in the Bronx with the promise of a better life in the suburbs. But naturally, the bloodsucking whities plan to make the black people their food.

It’s up to three boys—mixed race, Black, and Spanish—to figure out how to take down the vamps since none of the adults believe them.

All the classic clichés are in place—no reflection, garlic, stakes, crucifixes, coffins—as the boys use every trick in the book (and in Blade movies) to try to save the Bronx!

It’s cute and fun with excellent performances, mild suspense, some atmospheric vampire action, and plenty of heart and humor.

SCARE ME (2020)

Josh Ruben wrote, directed, and stars in this “horror” comedy that plays out like you’re just sitting watching two people act out scary stories for most of its running time. It feels very much like it could have been a play.

Josh portrays a horror writer that comes to a cabin in the woods to work in isolation.

When there’s a blackout, his neighbor from a nearby cabin (superhero Stormfront from the Amazon show The Boys) comes to hang with him by the fire. A more successful horror writer than him and quite arrogant about it, she challenges him to a game of scaring each other with stories.

This is not a wraparound for an anthology. Josh acts out a werewolf story brilliantly. Then she acts out a story. They make numerous references to horror movies. She pokes fun at his white manhood.

By the time they tell a story together, the film is limping along. This third story could have been left out and it would have greatly fixed the major pacing problem here.

Chris Redd from SNL and the porno horror comedy Deep Murder shows up as a pizza delivery boy, injecting a bit of a refresher into the humor. He joins in the storytelling and fits right in, but again, the story isn’t great. Although it has a musical number!

Personally, I would rather have watched Josh act out the werewolf story three more times instead of sit through any of the other stories. Not totally true. I’d want the musical number to stay.

The final act gets to the whole point. It saves the movie if you’ve sat through the whole thing, but I don’t know that I could say it’s worth sitting through the whole movie to get to it. However, it is worth sitting through for the great performances. I would definitely see this as a live play with the same cast.

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Time for some comfort slashers

Posted on October 2, 2020 by Daniel

This foursome of films definitely satisfied with a variety of slasher tropes and familiar plot templates, so let’s get right into them.

CRAZY LAKE (2016)

If you’re longing for the cheesy turn of the century slasher era, Crazy Lake is the way to go. This throwback makes it feel like 2002 all over again.

After a couple of opening kills, including an awesome death scene in which a tent is treated like a pincushion with a machete, we meet a whole lot of pretty people heading to a cabin in the woods.

The boys get just as much revealing screen time as the girls…

There’s killer POV in the woods, a sleazy religious freak, partying montages set to techno music, boy bods and girl boobs, some meta references, and fun kills spread fairly evenly apart to carry us along, with a fair share of gore.

I guess there are some “unexpected” plot twists at the end, but I wasn’t exactly in this for any mind-blowing surprises anyway.

The only real gripe I have is that there is no clearly defined final girl. Suddenly one forgettable girl is the final girl simply by the process of elimination.

THE CATCHER (1998)

Before I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer, there was low budget baseball slasher The Catcher in 1998. And considering the killer catcher is targeting just men on a baseball team who are often in the locker room, it gives the terms catcher and pitcher the whole other meaning…

It starts in 1981 with the Sheen/Estevez clan’s indie horror staple Joe Estevez abusively pushing his kid so hard to up his game that the kid becomes a pro swinging that bat…which lands him in a mental institution.

Years later, well, you know what happens. There’s a baseball team. There are a lot of shirtless guys in the locker room.

There are a few shower scenes and some man butt. There’s a guy in a catcher mask stalking them.

At first, some of the kills are subdued and some not even shown on camera, but then there are a few rockin’ brutal death scenes, including the catcher playing pitcher and sodomizing a pretty boy’s ass, and another guy taking it in the mouth from a pitching machine—the two best kills in the film.

And yet despite all the men in the cast, there’s still a final girl! WTF? Anyway, there’s a chase scene, body reveals, and a totally goofy bat battle on the baseball field.

It’s one of those low budget slashers that came in the wake of Scream, so don’t expect a work of art, but it does have some unforgettable moments. I would have missed it completely if a Boys, Bears & Scares follower hadn’t turned me on to it…along with two of the other three films in this blog!

THE GREENSKEEPER (2002)

80 minutes long, totally 80s direct-to-video vibe, meta references, lots of guys in Speedos, campy gore—I was so feeling this silly golf course slasher.

The premise is basic—a dude works at his parents’ golf course. A bunch of friends decides to have a pool party at the resort after hours. They tell a story of a horribly burned greenskeeper who now lives in a shed in the woods.

There’s a side story of immigrant girls working at the resort, the kids watch a horror movie called “The Milkman” and mock all the traits of a bad slasher movie, there’s a pool party montage…

And wouldn’t you know, as the kids have sex, someone in greenskeeper attire and a mask starts killing them off.

The film does slow down in the middle, but when it picks up with 30 minutes remaining, it is classic slasher fun.

Lightning is used to great effect, there are girl boobs and boy butts, the kills are over-the-top fun, there’s a chase scene, this lands on the does the gay guy die? page thanks to a gay cop scene…

And the denouement is cheesy slasher twist fun. This was a must-add to my movie collection.

A PSYCHO’S PATH (2019)

A Psycho’s Path gets fairly compared to Halloween I’d say. Difference is, while it has some good kill scenes and suspense, it focuses on a detective trying to track down the killer, so we don’t get to connect with any group of friends as in standard slashers. The victims in this film just come and go (in a body bag).

After a good opening scene, the detective narrates about his quiet town and how it all changed when this crazy killer escaped.

We get a big flashback to why he was locked away along with his escape from the loony bin. Do these people never watch Halloween? Never transport him. And if you do, don’t antagonized him on the way. The whole scene feels right out of Rob Zombie’s Halloween films.

There are plenty of kills of random victims, but the footage is exceptionally dark and shadowy, which is a bummer, because they are the highlight here.

The story doesn’t do much, and there are manipulative moments to get us to connect with characters. For instance, one guy is on screen just long enough to tell his story about how he became a cop to feel worth…so…you know exactly what’s going to happen to him and how we’re supposed to feel about it when it does.

The killer doesn’t wear a mask, which might be why they kept him shrouded in shadow (you have no idea how much I had to lighten these stills). There’s no final girl, but there is a final little boy!

Overall, I just needed a distinct, memorable character to carry me through the film, and I didn’t get it here since the killer wasn’t quite targeting anyone specifically.

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Monsters of the past: screaming through the 1950s and 1960s

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Daniel

Time to delve into four films from the black and white horror era, and they’re loaded with freaks and monsters.

DAY THE WORLD ENDED (1955)

Even if he didn’t have the money to make an impression with some of his movies, Roger Corman really was a trailblazer for plenty of horror and sci-fi concepts that are still recycled today.

After an atomic war, a handful of survives takes cover in the ranch of a survivalist and his daughter. As they dare to venture out during the day, they start to notice signs of something sinister: animal bones and huge footprints!

That doesn’t stop the girls from going swimming; shocker that they feel like they’re being watched. One guy who got pretty messed up by the after effects of the bomb is hankering for meat, but his hunting is cut short when a beast comes for his kill. Everyone is tense and fighting back at the ranch over various issues. And there’s even a sleazeball endangering the women.

The film is very slow, and the monster is ridiculous when it’s finally revealed! But hey, it was the 50s, so…it’s totally cool.

THE SHE-CREATURE (1956)

This bizarre little film is the epitome of misogyny in horror movies going all the way back to the early days. It’s uncomfortable to watch beyond the fun and silly monster attacks.

A hypnotist is wowing people in an ocean town, but he needs to up his game, so he hypnotizes his female assistant to resurrect the sea creature she was in a past life. What? I haven’t experienced horror this absurd since…well…since I finished writing the most recent novel in my Comfort Cove gay horror series.

The monster is awesome fun and the body count is good enough for the time—I especially love when the monster kills a couple making out in their car by pushing it off a cliff. But the plot of the whole movie has a bunch of white guys in power making a woman their Guinea pig.

THE MASK (1961)

Back in the 80s when I was a teen, a few 3D movies from the 1960s were revived on broadcast television, with the novelty being that you had to get your blue/red cellophane lens cardboard frame glasses from a fast food restaurant tie-in promotion. My point is, I think this may have been one of the movies that aired, yet I feel like if it were I would have recalled, because the 3D rox compared to the killer gorilla movie I remember watching.

The Mask is touted as the first Canadian horror film, and if that’s the case, they were sure playing to stay in the game. The film opens with a woman being chased through the woods at night by a psycho. The score perfectly sets the mood, and the whole scene is a blueprint for the openings of numerous backwoods movies to this day.

Ironically, this isn’t a backwoods horror movie. Most of it is set at a psychiatrist’s place…and he’s practically the only one in the movie.

A patient comes to him, tells him he is in possession of a mask that makes him do awful things, and then sends it to the doctor right before committing suicide. So of course the psychiatrist puts the creepy ass mask on immediately.

And that is the catch in this movie. Just as in Freddy’s Dead, it’s only in 3D for certain segments, in this case when the doctor puts on the mask—and a scary voice repeatedly commands us to “PUT THE MASK ON!”

I imagine the hallucinatory, hellish dimension of occult rituals into which the doctor is sent during these parts caused quite a stir with audiences back then. Even now it’s all quite eerie and ominous, with creepy, hypnotic music enhancing the trippy vibe. It actually feels to me like it may have been the inspiration for the hellish segment of the found footage film Voodoo.

The mask segments (there are three of them) are the highlight. Otherwise it’s just a basic film about a guy losing his mind from wearing the mask.

THE BLANCHEVILLE MONSTER (1963)

Originally titled Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror, this film is loosely based on The Fall of the House of Usher.

To me it feels very much like William Castle films of the time, particularly House on Haunted Hill, with thunder and lightning striking at all the right times and a terrified woman exploring shadowy halls by candlelight.

She’s a young woman about to turn 21. She comes to her family castle, where her brother lives. She’s under the watchful eye of a creepy maid.

Pretty soon a disfigured man is terrorizing her…or is it all just a figment of her nightmares?

If you’re a fan of the old black and white gothic horror of the 1960s, this is a good one to check out.

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STREAM QUEEN: horror comedies, vampires, and crazed killers

Posted on September 30, 2020 by Daniel

Two of these four flicks are heavy on the humor before getting to the horror, one vacillates between action flick and horror, and one is like 80s Spielberg with a darker horror edge. Let’s take a closer look at each.

RACHEL GETS STRANGE (2011)

Argh. This horror comedy had so much potential, but takes an hour of its 80-minute running time giving us character development…mostly through dialogue. Is it funny dialogue? Yes. Is it at all related to horror? No. It’s all about Rachel’s man problems.

She lives in an isolated house in the desert and is looking to rent out a room. Her best buddy from childhood is clearly in love with her. Her ex works at a hospital with another young doctor who needs a place to stay and wants to rent the room.

The comedy revolves around Rachel looking to get laid. She has long conversations with other characters about it, the highlight being with a pizza delivery guy who I think was the funniest one in the bunch.

With 20 minutes left, all of a sudden a bunch of Lost Boys wannabes shows up (yet we barely see them), and things get suspenseful for the final act.

It’s a fun and funny horror comedy sequence, it’s just too short. And the ending, while quirky and ironic, is too abrupt to give us any sense of closure with all the vampire stuff.

CAMP WEDDING (2019)

As with Rachel Gets Strange, Camp Wedding relies on its humor for a majority of the running time, but at least along the way it focuses heavily on meta horror references and tropes. The banter is quite funny here and delivered by actors with excellent comic timing.

When a bride-to-be rents a summer camp as the location for her wedding, she, her girls, and her gay BFF head there to set up (landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page).

Archetypal horror characters abound, and stories come of the camp’s dark past: a drowned girl, Indian burial ground, witchcraft. You name it, it supposedly happened at this place.

Then the groom and his men show up, and before long, everyone is splitting up in the woods to have sex…and getting ominous texts. In fact, much of the plot is told through texts, but this film plays it smart. Sure, the text bubbles pop up on screen and are virtually impossible for my worn out eyes to read, but they’re also given voice-overs by the characters that sent them.

The film plays out like a comedy of errors, reminding me of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. And although this seems to be a slasher, things take a crazy turn in the final act when the horror comedy elements really kick in—and make a statement about phone obsession.

Along with that, there are two guys running around in their undies and a weirdly funny aspect of the film that entirely relies on a Teddy Ruxpin Teddy bear.

AMONG THE LIVING (2014)

This French film gives off a Stranger Things vibe…except it came before Stranger Things. In other words, it gives off an 80s Spielberg vibe. It opens on Halloween with a pretty vicious scene, but after that the holiday is out the window, so this isn’t a Halloween themed horror film.

It’s about three adolescent delinquents that get into more trouble than ever when they sneak onto an old rundown film studio lot and see a masked, mutant creep abducting a woman. Eek!

Then this somehow turns into home invasion horror! The creep from the film studio tracks down all the boys at their houses—don’t ask me how.

Suspense abounds, but the film is oddly restrained with the gore until the very last battle with the mutant creep. At that point the gore kind of rocks.

The mutant is uber freaky–almost robotic yet calculated in his slinky movements. There’s a long, cruel torture scene of a character that really didn’t deserve it, and a final trip to the killer’s lair for a straightforward surprise conclusion that isn’t much of a surprise after all.

PENANCE LANE (2020)

It was fun to see Scout Taylor-Compton and Tyler Mane reunited—and working on the same side of the horror—but this film gets stuck somewhere between gritty horror movie and hokey action movie.

Tyler, an ex-con drifter, comes to a small town and helps Scout out of a jam. She and her mother welcome him into their diner, and then he goes and takes a job working for John Schneider at an old house.

Somewhere in the middle of the movie, Mad Max wannabe freaks come crawling out of the woodwork and wreak havoc. The film briefly feels like a hardcore psycho family horror flick (House of 1000 Corpses comes to mind), with the freaks terrorizing Scout, Tyler, and some unfortunates that make their way into the house, but eventually it takes a really odd turn.

SEMI-SPOILER: Remember that really weird ending of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation with the guys in suits? This movie seems to take that jarring surprise and completely run with it. The entire third act feels like Tyler Mane as an action hero single-handedly battling the mob.

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Killer ghosts, a killer witch, a deformed killer, and a killer creature

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Daniel

This foursome of films has a little bit of everything, including found footage, slashers, the supernatural, and a creature feature. Let’s see which ones delivered on the horror.

REEL EVIL (2012)

This routine found footage film is from the director of Dark Walker, Cryptz, and Patient Seven. Right from the start I knew I’d seen this, but I have no record of ever having blogged about it. Also, it was tossed in as a free DVD under the title Specters when I ordered something else from Full Moon. Tells you everything you need to know…aside from the whole plot, which I’m going to do now to save you 77 minutes:

—three filmmakers are about to do a documentary on a movie being filmed at an old hospital. But first, how about a found footage sex video with huge boobs bouncing in the camera?

—they get to hospital, explore creepy halls, we see flashes of scary specters every now and then behind them, and they walk in circles and can’t find their way back, killing an hour of the movie.

—there’s more sex on camera, flickers of a freaky surgeon ghost, running, screaming, spastic camera, and finally, the last man standing…and then falling down dead and dropping the camera as in every other found footage film.

BLOOD BAGS (2018)

This Italian film fluctuates between languages, forcing you to sometimes read subtitles. I’m more of a one or the other kind of guy.

It’s a classic deformed human hiding in an abandoned building story. Two young women sneak into an old mansion for fun. There’s great atmosphere, shadowy corners, unnerving camera angles, and warped monster POV, plus we don’t have to wait for the horror to strike, because the mutant begins attacking right away.

That means other people start cycling into the house to up the body count, and that’s fine. The killer is classically creepy with bandages around its head, information is lying around the house gives us its backstory, and there are some pretty good kill scenes.

After jumping right into the horror, the film inevitably hits a slow spot in the center as other characters are introduced. Blah. Once it gets back to business, it ends with the usual chase scene and battle to the death. Overall, this is a satisfying if predictable little film.

THE CANDY WITCH (2020)

The director of Pet Graveyard gives us a terror tale about a killer witch that uses candy canes as her main weapon. There’s some good witch action here, but also a lot of backstory talk, mystery solving, and rehashes of things we’ve seen in other movies.

The candy cane kill, for instance, has been done before, only it’s usually a Santa in a Christmas horror movie. The very first scene borrows the on/off light baddie appearance shtick from Lights Out.

The witch uses cookie cutters to dig the skin off a victim (this has been done in numerous movies I’ve watched in the past few years, but once again, usually in Christmas horror). There’s a ghost hunter couple helping the troubled family (and the guy is a sexy hunk).

Despite all that, the atmosphere is quite good, the witch is creepy, and the kills are brutal enough to satisfy slasher fans. The plot gets much more complex as the death toll rises, so pay attention to all that plodding dialogue and investigating.

ISLAND ZERO (2018)

Island Zero is well put together with tense atmosphere, an intriguing build to its premise, and some effective suspense. It even takes place at Christmas, landing it on my holiday horror page.

It’s also a creature feature, which highlights its major problem: no creature. Rather than put any money towards a creature design, practical or CGI, this film goes with an invisible creature. Literally invisible for the whole movie. Sigh.

There are a couple of cutaway kill scenes that allow cuts back to victims that have been disemboweled or had their limbs torn off, which gives us some good aftermath at least, since we never see anything happen on screen.

For instance, the people living on the island are trapped there because the ferry has stopped coming. Most of them get on two privately owned boats to head back to the mainland. We learn the creatures have infiltrated their boat during a CB radio conversation that ends in bloodcurdling screams. Sigh and sigh again.

If I wanted this type of horror-free horror, I’d torture myself by sitting through Pontypool again.

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Direct to streaming and Blu-ray: the horror of Jesse Thomas Cook

Posted on September 25, 2020 by Daniel

I’ve already blogged about several films from director Jesse Thomas Cook (Septic Man, The Hexecutioners, Monster Brawl), so after gravitating to another film of his on Prime, I figured it was time to complete my viewing of all his films…and of him. Gotta love a horror director with a beard.

DEADSIGHT (2018)

With Deadsight, Cook offers a zombie film that has two unique aspects—the leads are a blind dude and a pregnant cop.

Other than that this is as basic as a zombie movie gets, with a simple plot—stay alive and try to escape.

The zombies are ferocious enough, but they are presented in a cycle of one or the other character getting jump scared by a lone zombie then having to fight it off. Over and over and over.

The settings are cold and stark, so the atmosphere and tone are tight, but there’s really little to grasp on to here to carry us through. The final escape through red-lit tunnels is pretty cool, though, and the one that made me most fidgety.

THE HOARD (2018)

With this charming haunted hoarders reality show found footage horror comedy, Cook delivers plenty of humor that had me laughing out loud. Even my hubby was laughing and quite entertained when he walked in and joined me…and stayed!

After a TV show introduction to the small town the crew is infiltrating, which makes some social and political references true to our current reality, we meet the quite likable and campy cast of the show, including a smart female host, three bearish boys that do renovations, a funny doctor that assesses the psychology of hoarders, and two over-the-top ghost hunters.

The cast is charismatic and funny, but perhaps funniest of all is the hick older man who owns the property where all the hoarding is happening, because his performance is incredibly understated and realistic as he gives the cast tours of all his junk.

Icky situations occur (bad pipes…ew), surprises pop up (a redneck bear jerking off in a tub….yum), weird happenings creep out the ghost hunters (mostly in their minds), and there’s a cleanup montage that could easily have been cut to tighten up the running time.

Not that everything wasn’t entertaining, it just takes way too long to get to the actual horror elements, which don’t hit until the last 20 minutes.

That final act is a blast, it’s just over way too fast.

All fun aside, Cook even manages to give us some pin-up material in the form of the adora-bear doctor.

SCARCE (2008)

While it could be argued that this is just another movie with kids encountering cannibals in the woods, Scarce is one of few films that focuses on the horrifying nitty gritty of what it would truly be like to be captured by one of these psycho clans—a detailed presentation of what the conditions would be like and all the horrible things they could do to you while keeping you alive.

First cementing us in reality, we meet the three guys who will be going on a snowboarding trip as they just act like dudes, drinking with their friends at a house party and flirting with girls. Much of what makes this film different is that these are average Joes. They’re not muscular, not studs, not cocky, and definitely not heroes. They absolutely do not know how to cope with the predicament they get in.

Once on the road, their car crashes in the middle of nowhere during a snowstorm, so they walk to a nearby home. The redneck that lives there is very down-to-earth, welcoming them in and offering them food and cover for the night. What is so unnerving about this whole segment is that the dude seems quite hospitable and warm, and we just know in our gut what’s really going to happen.

Then they learn the horrible truth. This film takes its time making us simmer in the grueling conditions of the lair and the agony of the boys just hanging, bound up, for days as they are verbally and physically tormented and tortured by the cannibals.

They don’t have a plan, they are helpless and at the clan’s mercy, and all hope seems lost. It only gets worse when they are dragged out into the snow and set free to be hunted. They can barely function by that point, and it looks like the actors worked in the actual snowy wilderness while barefoot and hardly dressed.

The film isn’t super gruesome, but what we see and what’s implied is enough to be horrific. And the film also reveals what has happened to other victims in unnerving flashbacks that come out of nowhere. The whole movie is a distinctly different approach to the backwoods cannibals subgenre and therefore gave me more of a visceral reaction than most others do these days.

If I had any gripes about the film, the first is that one baddie wears a slaughterhouse mask, but only for short periods of time. For instance, he removes it immediately after he’s introduced, and we see he’s just another everyday redneck cannibal. It seems pointless to even have him wear the mask when all its power is so quickly taken away, not allowing our minds to whirl with thoughts of what horror might be behind it.

The second issue is that the film exclusively focuses on these cannibal men abducting other males, with one psycho even demonstrating his sexual desire for them. However…

…right near the end we see female victims and boobs, and they just feel totally out of place. It sort of denies these cannibals the distinct trait of being all about the man meat.

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Back in time with 4 vampire flicks from my brother’s collection

Posted on September 24, 2020 by Daniel

Another dip into the selection of DVDs left to me by my late brother, and this time it’s all vampire movies. This is the stuff he was watching when I was just a wee child…right before he started grooming me for a life of horror.

CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER (1974)

This Hammer film is as hokey as the title suggests. While I like the concept—a vampire that sucks the life out of people, causing them to age immediately, the few shots of decrepit old faces aren’t enough for me to overlook that it’s a silly, swashbuckling vampire hunter period piece.

When young women begin turning up dead and aged in the forest, a local doctor calls his vampire hunting buddy Captain Kronos for help. After that, I have no idea what’s going on.

There’s some ominous religious imagery, a woman’s face is attacked by a bat, and there are occasionally more victims. But all the farcical filler failed to keep my interest until the okay denouement, when the truth is revealed about who the vampire actually is right before a swashbuckling finale.

GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE (1972)

The director of Garden of the Dead helps break the sanitized mold of horror from previous decades, beginning this film with a warning that you shouldn’t watch it if you’re disturbed by the sight of an infant nursing on human blood. Awesome.

The film starts strong, with a couple parked in a cemetery when a vampire rises from its tomb, rips their car door off, and takes care of bloodsucking business with the guy. He drags the girl into his tomb and we later learn he raped her.

She gives birth to the vampire’s baby! This is where the baby feasts on boob blood, but it’s not visually depicted as gruesomely as it sounds.

In the meantime, the vampire is out there feasting on other women to stay alive and working as a college professor. Little does he know he has a son that is going to grow up…

…to enroll in his college course all about the occult!

A shower scene is perhaps the best horror this movie has to offer after the cemetery opener. It’s mostly about the son plotting to confront and do away with his murdering rapist vampire father. It’s a cool plot weighed down by lots of dialogue and even a romantic relationship segment that really hurts the pacing.

THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967)

It felt really icky watching this considering it’s directed by perv Roman Polanski and features his murdered wife Sharon Tate in a role. The good news is that this is a total vampire farce, so it got my mind off the disgusting and morbid elements of its reality.

While my DVD has the full length film, apparently it had previously only been available in an edited version that cut 20 minutes from the movie. Supposedly the studio wanted to tighten it up to exploit the humorous aspects and Polanski was furious.

Honestly, I’m with the studio. Whether Polanski likes it or not, this is purely a goofy satire, and the slapstick moments are watered down by lots of unnecessary filler. Faster pacing would have made it funnier. Large chunks of the film are quite boring, and the uneven injection of the humor just feels weird.

An Einstein looking scientist and his male assistant travel to Transylvania to do some vampire hunting. At the inn in which they are staying, there is garlic everywhere but no one talks about vampires.

But then a vampire abducts Sharon Tate. The vampire hunters track her to a castle, where they are welcomed by the vampire master. He has a hunchback assistant and a flamboyant gay son who makes several advances on the younger vampire hunter, which is some of the funniest stuff here and quiet refreshing for a film made before the 1970s. It also lands this film on the list of does the gay guy die? movies.

The vampire hunters are a comic duo not unlike Abbott & Costello or Laurel & Hardy, the tone is a precursor to many of the slapstick horror themed comedies of the 1980s, and the final shenanigans at an undead ball are quite fun even if the movie’s timing is a little off beat.

DRACULA (1974)

I’m a huge fan of director Dan Curtis (Dead of Night, Trilogy of Terror, Burnt Offerings) and writer Richard Matheson, but I’ve always found their take on the Dracula novel completely uninspired.

It closely follows the original plot of the novel, beginning with Harker being held captive at Dracula’s castle, and then eventually focusing on Lucy sick back home and Van Helsing hunting down the vampire.

The tone and look of the film just feel very sterile and staged to me. Trying to get the vibe of a period piece causes the costumes and set pieces to all look too theatrical. For instance, the darkest underground labyrinths where all the vamp and coffin action happens is so brightly lit there’s no grit to the setting.

Also, there’s nothing truly gruesome here, obviously because this was made for TV, and I don’t find Jack Palance at all menacing in the role of Dracula. So basically this one is worth a watch if you’re not looking to be creeped out by a horror movie and simply want to get a general idea of the plot of the original novel.

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STREAM QUEEN: what to watch, which to skip

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Daniel

It was time for a slasher break, so I dug through my watchlists and here’s what I came up with—a blend of trashy, cheap, commercial, and kind of creepy films.

SLAUGHTER STUDIOS (2002)

It’s always fun to indulge in one of these post-Scream, direct-to-video slashers.

Nothing new here, right from the basic setup—film crew is using a haunted attraction for a location shoot. They immediately make the mistake of accidentally summoning something….

The characters are caricatures and mostly annoying (bimbos mostly—movie is clearly made for straight guys), and most of the movie features them just wandering through the maze-like haunted attraction to set the tone.

Even so, the film delivers on two of the most important aspects of a slasher: lots of sexual situations and eventually lots of kills (it takes a while). There are ridiculous amounts of asses and boobs getting right in the camera, and the kills are generally nice and hardcore for a low budget slasher. There’s even a surprise in store at the end.

LOVELAND (2019)

I know this is like a no budget film, but when a 67-minute movie is predominantly padded with road trip preparation montages and a loooooooong hangout session at a campfire, you probably should have just made a short film.

A group of diverse friends—white and straight, lesbian, black guy—goes camping to a location with a reputation for having been the site of a killer.

The main lesbian girl is on meds and keeps seeing flashes of a masked killer, even before they know anything about the trip or murders. In this day and age, that leaves us with two predictable endings—she’s actually the killer or we’re being led to believe she’s the killer.

To make things interesting between the filler, the lesbian has visions of killing all her friends and hooking up with one of the girls in the shower.

Right near the end, someone realty starts killing the friends off quickly in uninspired, low budget death scenes, and then we find out if the druggy lesbian actually did it.

For me, the best part is a completely out of place, humorous moment involving a woman sheriff.

THE JACK IN THE BOX (2019)

The Jack in the Box follows the template of new millennium supernatural slasher movies like Darkness Falls, Boogeyman, and Lights Out.

There’s an awesome opener of the oversized jack-in-the-box claiming a victim, showing us exactly what we’re in for.

We then meet our main guy 12 years later, a cutie working at a museum. He scores a large, intriguing jack-in-the-box, and you know what that means.

There are various kills along the way, with people dying in different ways. Sometimes a hand comes out of the box and just drags them into it, and other times the clownish looking Jack comes out of the box and stalks and kills them.

Meanwhile, our main guy figures out people are disappearing, becomes convinced Jack is doing it, and starts his own little investigation tracking the box’s history and origin.

It’s simple and predictable in its scares, but they work, and Jack is a freaky good killer that should definitely appeal to fans of creepy clowns.

THE CLEANING LADY (2018)

The Cleaning Lady takes the general concept of obsession thrillers from the 1990s and injects a more intense dose of gruesome! It may be a bit predictable in general, but there are plenty of gnarly and disturbing elements to better satisfy horror fans.

A pretty woman in therapy for love addiction offers a repair woman with bad burn scars on her face a job cleaning her apartment. It becomes clear quickly that the cleaning lady is drawn to the pretty woman, who is warm and welcoming to her and even tries to build her confidence.

But this cleaning lady’s scars run deep. Flashbacks reveal her fucked up past, she has crazy shit going on at her home now, and even has a mother who looks like the doppelganger of Kate Pierson of The B-52s.

When the cleaning lady begins to do freaky stuff to her employer without her knowledge…Eek! It’s a perfectly slow burn at first, and we’re sucked in as we wait for the cleaning lady to snap and see just how far she’ll go. The final act is pretty damn twisted and goes to places you’d not fully expect for a change—most of all leaving the scene of most of the action and taking us on a bit of a journey.

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Horror of the 1980s: beginning, middle, and end

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Daniel

Reveling in some new acquisitions to my DVD and Blu-ray collection, I knew it was once again time to blog about the 1980s. So here’s a selection of flicks I haven’t yet covered spanning from 1980 to 1989.

CONTAMINATION (1980)

I can never get enough badly dubbed, gory, synth-drenched Euro horror of the 80s in my collection, and Contamination delivers in that way. However, it’s not a very entertaining movie and in no way scary.

It’s often accused of being an Alien rip-off because a small group of scientists is investigating slimy eggs found on an abandoned ship in New York. If you ask me, it’s actually Scanners on antacid.

See, these eggs never hatch into facehuggers or anything like that. They simply burst, covering people in green slime that within seconds causes the victim’s belly to absolutely explode!

There are plenty of exploding belly scenes, but other than that, the small group of heroes does a lot of talking as they travel from one location to another trying to uncover the truth about the origin of the eggs. They find it eventually in the form of a goofy one-eyed alien in a scene that goes on way too long to be thrilling.

DEVIL FISH (aka: Monster Shark) (1984)

Lamberto Bava directs this silly but fun movie that is better titled Devil Fish than Monster Shark, because it looks like a mutant fish with tentacles, not a shark. It almost seems like the movie Beneath borrowed the look of this fish monster’s face.

We only get glimpses of this fish monster—mostly its mouth and tentacles—for most of the film, but there are plenty of gory shots of bodies being pulled out of the water along the way.

After the attacks begin and drive the dolphins at the marina nuts (very Jaws 3D), the researchers there go out on a boat to hunt down whatever is making blips on their underwater radar (very Jaws The Revenge, although this came first).

Occasional random kills keep us entertained, as do the hilarious lines that are made even funnier due to the dubbing. For instance, a baddie that wants to kill all the researchers before they can discover the fish monster chokes a woman to death while growling, “Croak! Croak!”

The score is Euro horror cheesy at its best, there’s a classic video game moment, and the fish is eventually lured to…a river? The tight, swamp-like setting of the final act at night is a blast, with plenty of man munching and fish monster footage.

There are a couple of men I’d like to munch in the movie as well.

I’m not sure what, but something compelled me to grab this particular still shot…

DEAD RINGERS (1988)

David Cronenberg delves into the horrors of gynecology enough to make women cross their legs while watching and men to feel sympathy pains, but this isn’t one of his most exciting weird films.

Jeremy Irons plays twin brother gynecologists, one an alpha the other a passive man who eats up his brother’s sloppy seconds when it comes to women. Catch is they never tell the women they’ve been handed off to a twin.

However, the latest victim of their game, a patient with fertility issues and a twisted sexual appetite, discovers there are two of them and becomes involved in a complex, voluntary swap once she meets them both.

The passive brother gets the girl and starts to lose his mind. This psychological thriller has him believing women have mutant genitalia and special ordering nasty surgical tools to fix them. If only it were all as visually gruesome as you’d expect from a Cronenberg film.

Instead, Dead Ringers is more like an acid trip drug addiction story, and that’s just so not my thing.

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1989)

Edgar Allan Poe gets loosely adapted into a cheesy late 80s slasher that will catapult you right back to the era if you’ve never seen it.

With its polished “old” castle setting and vibrant colors, this feels like a Charles Band film of the early 90s. A photographer sneaks into an exclusive party to get some juicy photos, and someone in a red cape and mask begins killing people. Get it? Rather than the figurative masked red death of a plague from the original story, this one is literal.

There are numerous awesome music video performances by a totally 80s pop rock band.

Frank Stallone has a role in the film, but he doesn’t get any songs on the soundtrack like he did when his brother directed Staying Alive. His career wasn’t that far from over by the time this movie came out…

A bunch of quirky characters is at each other’s throats so that we have no idea who the killer could be. There’s also a court jester stalking the photographer, and he’s actually creepier than the killer!

But the real highlight of the film (aside from the pop rock band) is the death scenes. As hokey as this is, the kills often feel as extravagant, grisly, and odd as the kill sequences in an Argento movie! It’s an unexpected touch in such a silly movie.

And the movie doesn’t forget how silly it is in the end. The hubby and I were laughing out loud as the final battle played out between the main girl and the killer.

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STREAM QUEEN: the woods just keep calling me back

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Daniel

You never know what you’ll find when you watch a movie about people heading into the wilderness. So which of these four films were worth the trip?

(THE DEVIL’S FOREST TO) WOOD WITCH: THE AWAKENING (2020)

So much of this found footage film is filler of The Blair Witch Project variety. Two couples heading to the woods for a weekends excursion hear about a legend of a witch in the woods that was turned into a tree.

They ask around, get enough information to locate the tree, and explore the woods for a while.

When they find the tree, they read a spell to release the witch…and the film suddenly cuts to them running around the woods in terror. I was so annoyed that after all that foolish footage, we weren’t going to even see anything!

But the film saves itself and becomes a fun, cheesy SyFy style horror, with the tree witch coming to life, chasing after them, and shooting green laser magic at them.

The final girl even delivers some funny lines as she battles the witch tree while rockin’ music serves as the soundtrack. There’s even a promise of a sequel.

BEYOND THE WOODS (2018)

When a group of friends gathers at an isolated vacation home, talk turns immediately to a dark legend of a nearby sinkhole.

Although we never see the sinkhole, it works in the film’s favor. We feel the presence of the sinkhole—or perhaps something that came out of it. This director clearly studied old school cabin in the woods horror films, because we always sense something is out there just waiting to strike.

There also seems to be something inside the house. The film relies mostly on building tension and suspense, uses one unnecessary dream sequence (considering we see what was in the dream minutes later in reality), and even got me with the most obvious jump scare ever.

While there’s some slowdown in the middle of the movie, I like that it is like an odd mashup of Evil Dead and Friday the 13th. The final act has people getting possessed and a fricking killer with an axe! Awesome. A double dose of throwbacks in one entertaining flick.

30 MILES FROM NOWHERE (2018)

You know a cabin in the woods movie means business when it begins with an overhead view of a car on a road winding through the woods to its destination. At least it should mean business, but I can’t even believe what transpires (or doesn’t) after that opening.

30 Miles From Nowhere is painful to watch if you’re expecting either a cabin in the woods horror film or a horror comedy, as this film is labeled. Most of what passes for comedy here is the constant campy scream reactions to faux scares, and that kind of humor only works a few times before it needs some backup comedy.

The plot finds a group of college friends “reuniting” due to a funeral. Despite their loss, they immediately start taking jabs at each other’s lives, so I felt no love for any of them. But I continued watching.

When they arrive at the house in the woods and someone references The Big Chill, it’s more a warning than a meta joke, because most of this film plays out like that film rather than delivering any actual horror or suspense. Any scary moments are not clearly defined as real or imagined, on top of which they aren’t even related, so there’s no telling what is actually going on or what we might possibly need to be afraid of.

In the end it’s all about the group discovering the truth of exactly how their friend died. Carrie Preston of True Blood steals the show with her weird performance, and when she gets a monologue that’s about fifteen minutes long, it’s almost as if she’s saying, “I spent years blending into the background as a waitress in a bar on a hit show, so step aside bitches, because I’m about to eat the scenery.”

BARRICADE (2012)

The director of zomcom Fido goes in a completely different direction with this film…and steers right into a snow mound. 

Eric McCormack stars as a man who brings his daughter and son to a cabin in the woods for Christmas a year after the loss of his wife.

Immediate faux tension builds (the son is missing! Oh…he’s in the shed) and flashbacks of the wife’s death paralleling every move McCormack makes in the present are red flags about just how uninspired the film is going to be.

Shadows, knocking, the kids panicking, the dad seeming to suffer from hallucinations…it seems like either a lifeless ghost story or a case of grief sparking deadly delusions movie. But don’t expect to find out which, because the film keeps negating the truth it reveals right up to the bitter end.

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