SHUDDER AND SHRIEK: bad things happening at isolated houses

Posted on July 21, 2020 by Daniel

Chipping away at my current “Shudder originals” list, so here are my thoughts on four films set in houses and cabins.

REVENGE (2017)

I finally got around to watching this one, and I did only because it caught my attention several years ago when it was being promoted with pix of the hot lead guy naked and covered in blood. No, it’s not Zack Ward.

Personally, rape/revenge flicks aren’t my thing, and this is just an update of the I Spit On Your Grave concept…which has already been updated in an unneeded franchise of films in recent years.

A married hottie is banging a babe in his isolated home in a desert that apparently can only be reached by helicopter. His two sleazy buddies show up to up hunt, although I don’t know what they’re hunting in a fricking lifeless desert.

Following some metaphorical imagery covering toxic masculinity and female temptation, the babe sexy dances with them, and then gets raped. Sigh. Where’s Jodie Foster when you need her?

Facing the conundrum of what to do with her, the guys make things simple; they push her off a cliff and go hunting.

This is where the movie falls apart for me. The way in which they think she should have died…should have killed her. But no, she’s still alive and manages to escape…in a way that should have killed her. And yet she’s strong enough to start kicking man ass. And it all might be because of the power of the magical land on which she died. How lucky can a raped and murdered girl get?

I shouldn’t have to say this, but with the film running 110 minutes long and there being only three guys, this shit starts to drag. Just when I was wondering how the filmmakers didn’t see how boring it was getting with nothing happening, they seemed to realize It, so they threw in an obligatory, super long horror nightmare sequence of a dream within a dream within a dream to keep us interested. And a hot guy shower scene…

At least the last 20 minutes or so are filled with chase scenes, violence, gore, and the naked guy.

INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND (2018)

The director of the original Martyrs manages to bring us another disturbing film about two bonded young women, this time sisters.

They move with their mom into a house they inherited and are quite quickly victims of a violent and terrifying home invasion by a big bald goon and a creepy looking woman.

Years later, one sister, played by Crystal Reed of Teen Wolf, is a lover of a Lovecraft and a horror author herself. She returns home to help her mother deal with the sister, who has essentially lost her mind and is convinced the goon and woman are still after her.

And then, Crystal begins to experience weird shit, too.

The film breaks into a horrific game of cat and mouse as the girls are once again terrorized by the baddies, who dress them up like dolls to add to their collection of freaky as fuck dolls.

But what’s most disturbing about the film is its dark, brutal, emotional portrayal of PTSD and the different ways in which people cope with the same experience. The number of gut-wrenching screams and sobs of the two sisters went right through me.

As for the horror, the film is like a much grittier version of standard films in which the characters are terrorized and tortured by weirdos, but with a much more in depth (and more realistic) focus on the impact it has on the characters.

The only other thing I’ll mention, and don’t read on if you haven’t seen it yet, ***SPOILERS*** is that the woman, whose face is mostly obscured through the film, is played by a man, which I detected right away. For the entire film I wasn’t sure if we were meant to figure that out, but his wig comes off at the very last second in the film to let us know it was a man. However it is never addressed. We don’t get inside the heads of the baddies, so there isn’t a Dressed to Kill or Norman Bates explanation for it. Was he a gay drag queen? A heterosexual transvestite? Trans? We’ll never know, and we’ll never know if his gender identity is what pushed him to be a psycho.

LAKE OF DEATH (2019)

This Norwegian film is a whodunit (or whatdunit) at a cabin by the lake. Thing is, I can’t imagine anyone not guessing exactly what’s going on right from the start.

A young woman’s brother disappeared in the woods and she blames herself for his death.

Sooooo…she goes back to the cabin with her friends to get closure.

There’s lots of talk about myths and legends, one guy prank scaring everyone, cheap faux scares, weird things happening, like the sister sleepwalking and having visions of her friends drooling black goo from their mouths.

The group also makes plenty of references to horror movies, like when they find a trap door to a basement in which there is a mysterious book. See, it’s okay to rip-off Evil Dead if a character says “it’s just like Evil Dead!”

Things finally pick up a little in the final act, but don’t expect a body count. This is mostly a film about a girl being haunted by the ghost of her grief.

THE BEACH HOUSE (2020)

This one was getting so much pre-hype I just knew it was going to totally disappoint me. It’s one of those films that drags even when something is finally happening. For me, the attempt at building a slow burning sense of dread just didn’t work at all. I wasn’t scared or on edge.

I was thrilled that it stars Liana Liberato of the Hulu show Light as a Feather, who is teamed with a James Le Gros’s very pretty son.

They’re at a beach house alone when an older couple shows up thinking they have the house for the weekend. So the four decide to just hang together.

It all seems fishy, but…nothing ever comes of that.

Then comes the big red flag for me. They eat edibles and get high, which told me that in the end we’re not going to know if anything that transpires is real and it’s not going to make sense because they’re all tripping

Anyway, after 52 minutes of talking, things finally start happening down by the water.

It almost seems like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing, only coming from the water, but we’ll never know because we don’t know if any of it really happened.

There are some cool, gross special effects and the second half of the film at least delivers some entertaining horror moments, but even the continuous chase scene in the final act didn’t have me biting my nails.

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When the classic movie monsters went ape shit

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Daniel

Up next from my late brother’s collection are five flicks from a boxed set called Sons of Kong. The packaging is so cool I just have to share a pic.

Of course the prints on the discs are not so cool, but they were still watchable.

Not related to Kong at all, the ten films in the set are simply about killer gorillas. Okay, like half of them are apes, but I really wanted to say killer gorilla. I also had to blog about five of the films because they each star either Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, or Lon Chaney Jr. Awesome.

THE APE (1940)

Boris Karloff seems like a very nice evil doctor in this simplistic flick. He is trying to cure a young woman of polio with the spinal fluid of other people, which could be a challenge. What I want to know is…why is she wearing the Roseanne quilt?

Conveniently, the circus is in town, and a big ape escapes and begins terrorizing locals. Now is Karloff’s chance to tap into some spine!

But it’s not what you think. Ape scenes are disappointingly minimal, making this not much of a killer gorilla movie at all. And the surprise twist is rather absurd, mostly because it’s not presented in graphic detail as it would be in a modern day horror movie.

THE APE MAN (1943)

This is how you start an ape horror movie. Bela Lugosi is a mad scientist whose assistant brings Bela’s sister down to see what he’s been up to in the lab…he’s made himself half ape!

Meanwhile, a nosy reporter and his female photographer pal start sniffing around Bela’s house.

I don’t know what it was about spinal fluid back then, but Bela needs fresh spinal fluid to cure him of his problem. He also happens to have a gorilla, which he puts to good use killing people for their fluid!

This is a much more satisfying spinal fluid hunting killer ape flick than The Ape, and an odd character that appears throughout the film proves to be a crazy early example of meta movie humor at the very end.

BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA (1952)

Brooklyn Gorilla? These days we just call them gorilla juiceheads. Anyway, Bela Lugosi once again plays a mad scientist, and this time he wants to make humans into apes. See? Horror movies have always been unoriginal and ripped each other off.

Actually, this is mostly a comedy, and a very funny one at that thanks to lead Sammy Petrillo, who made a career out of impersonating Jerry Lewis. He had me laughing nonstop in this film about him and his singing buddy accidentally landing on a jungle island. The singer falls for a pretty female native…and sings to her twice. Meanwhile, an overweight female native is hot for Sammy, so her size is used repeatedly as the punch line of jokes.

Bela Lugosi’s monkey also has eyes for Sammy. The comedian becomes even funnier when he starts interacting with the monkey. And in a hilarious meta move, Sammy calls out Bela Lugosi constantly for being just like Dracula. This is definitely my favorite flick in this bunch.

Eventually, Bela succeeds in making man into ape, and that’s when the guys know they have to get off the island. Through all this madness, what’s most shocking is…there’s no other away to put it…it has a Wizard of Oz ending.

THE GORILLA (1939)

The Gorilla is sort of a comic reimagining of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, starring the comic trio The Ritz Brothers, whose shtick is very much in the same comic vein as Abbott & Costello.

With news of a serial killer known as “The Gorilla” running around town, a rich man hires detectives to protect his visiting niece and her boyfriend from the killer.

Bela Lugosi plays the butler, and while he speaks just like Dracula again, his role is underplayed, and the funny maid overshadows him. There are a good number of goofballs here, with very few actors in the straight man role to balance it out, so there’s plenty of slapstick comedy to go around.

As thunder and lightning crash outside and the Ritz Brothers are busy doing a comical investigation, secret passages and hairy arms reaching out from dark shadows abound…because there’s an actual gorilla on the loose in the house!


Hey, weren’t you in Creepshow?

And if you think twists upon twists are a new thing, think again. This playful little film is loaded with them.

BRIDE OF THE GORILLA (1951)

This one establishes a plot that could have been remade as an episode of Tales from the Crypt. It wouldn’t even need to be condensed much since the movie is only 65 minutes long (as is virtually every movie I covered in this blog).

Raymond Burr puts the bur in burly as a sexy man working for a rich guy on a jungle plantation…and wooing the rich guy’s wife. The rich guy’s witchy servant witnesses an altercation between the two men that results in the rich guy dying, so she puts a spell on Burr.

This time around, Lon Chaney Jr. is not the man turned monster, but a detective investigating the case.

With the rich dude out of the way, Burr’s life with the widow starts to look up…until the curse kicks in and he begins to think he’s transforming into a gorilla at night.

But is he, or is it all in his head? We will never know because the movie leaves it up in the air, and unfortunately it falls apart as a result, lacking any kind of suspense or scares.

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Exorcising that big gay demon

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Daniel

It’s a gay exorcism horror flick for the homo horror movies list!

If little sexy/sadistic religion-hates-gays indie A Closer Walk With Thee could have afforded some nasty demonic possession special effects, it would have upped its horror cred, because it definitely scores the homoerotic cred.

In fact, the sexual moments are the only thing that clarify that this is not a religious propaganda film about gays being possessed by the devil, because you know religious folk would loathe that they secretly loved sitting through such perverse visuals to get to the justification of their hatred.

The film doesn’t really clarify the circumstances (or the religion), but there’s this little cult of young people living in a rustic building in the city. Everything they do is so not structured to avoid sin. For starters, the guys and girls all live communally in the same building. And even worse (or better), the guys sleep in the same bed together in their underwear!

The focus is on a gay preacher who is perfectly hot, and his very queer assistant/buddy, who is perfectly closeted. His performance is actually excellent—you can feel his desire for the preacher and his fear of being discovered.

There’s lots of praying and singing of hymns, and to let us know this is a horror film, there’s a quick exorcism of a young woman.

This preacher sure is confident in his battles against the devil. He could practically run his exorcism business at a drive-thru window.

The film then gives us plenty of erotic moments of the gay boy lusting after the preacher. Now we can almost taste his desire. Yum.

Naturally, fricking girls get in the way, the gay boy is outed, and then he’s strapped down for an exorcism. The stark setting and the cold, emotionless, brainwashed performances of the other kids is unsettling when you realize there are people that are actually like this and actually do things like this to young gay people, so be warned if you have triggers.

The exorcism itself is kind of dirty, with the gay boy in his undies and the preacher saying filthy things to him about the perversions of gay sex with the devil. Again, if only there were some actual exorcism special effects, this would have delivered more horror, but I assume the notion is not that this is horror movie “devil possession”, but more realistically about the young boy being convinced that the devil is inside him.

Even without Linda Blair makeup, the young actor once again proves himself by getting super fricking creepy as he turns the tables on his exorcists and does some brutal damage.

As I said, if you took out the homoerotic moments, the conclusion of this film would have religious freaks screaming, “See? The gays really are evil and possessed by the devil!” As for a gay audience, you know we’re all screaming, “Yes! Whip out your demon and rip those motherfucking straighties a new one!”

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1970s Black horror double feature: Blackenstein vs. Devil’s Express

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Daniel

It’s a double feature of Black horror from the 1970s! Is it everything we expect from the Blaxploitation era?

DEVIL’S EXPRESS (1976)

I swear Devil’s Express is like The Last Dragon meets Raw Meat…with the vibe of 1970s cop shows like Baretta and SWAT, from the soooooo 1976 disco soul music to the city street action.

After an opening scene of men being sacrificed with a katana in 200 BC China, we meet our main cop/karate teacher and his student…who pack up and head to Hong Kong.

The scenes of them learning from martial arts experts are quite boring.

But then the student goes down into a creepy cave, which unleashes a demon…

…that hops into a guy on a boat back to The US, giving him possession bug eyes in the process.

He’s quite freaky, and eventually the demon busts out of him (awesome), but as bodies begin piling up in the subway system and detectives investigate, there’s no sign of an onscreen kill involving the demon. Bummer.

Instead we get one big montage of the leading man living and loving in the city for a majority of the film…when he’s not busy getting into martial arts fights with baddies on the street.

It’s a long time to wait to see the demon. We finally do when the main man dons a gold spandex outfit right out of Dance Fever to go underground and fight it.

The final battle rocked (or discoed), but I was a little disappointed with this one overall, which had a lot of horror promise that didn’t come to fruition.

BLACKENSTEIN (1973)

Blackenstein does a great job of bringing the vibe of Hammer horror to a Black horror film.

Our scientist, Dr. Stein, is a white dude experimenting with DNA when a former female student comes to him for help; her military man has been badly damaged in war. She wants the doctor to try to fix him.

Unfortunately, as she begins to work with the doctor, his other assistant starts having feelings for her. When she rejects his advances, he sabotages the doctor’s work.

Pretty soon, a monster has been created…Blackenstein! He looks like a traditional Frankenstein, and he seems to have it out for horny couples.

I had my concerns when the first kill was done fricking shadow puppet style.

But after that, Blackenstein hits the town and kills for the camera.

After an unnecessary club scene complete with stand-up comedy and a singing performance, Blackenstein gets a gander at a girl’s tits in an alley (that’s as exploitative as it gets), and then goes home to take care of those who made him a monster.

Aside from a flash of guts, this isn’t a gory film. There are classic horror shadows and dramatic lighting, but the kills are 1970s tame. It’s entertaining enough, but this is no Blacula. For a more campy Black Frankenstein tale, check out this SNL sequel…

 

 

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You don’t seem like yourself lately…

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Daniel

It’s a smorgasbord blog of four flicks about infected people and human hungry creatures.

THE DUSTWALKER (2019)

The Crazies meets It Follows with a dash of Under the Dome in this melancholy Australian film, which definitely delivers some chills, thrills, and surprises. However, there is an odd clash of melodramatic tone and underacting that brings down the energy level, as well as some wonky editing that effects the flow of events at times.

In a small desert town, something crashes to the earth, and then locals become infected by a red dust that causes half their face to get slightly deformed. At first they just stand outside houses and buildings staring blankly, but then they start chasing after and killing people. There are some very cool scenes of the crazies swiftly moving, crawling, and jumping.

The sheriff, her deputy, and a female scientist (best character in the film) try to make sense of it all, while also attempting to capture and lock up the crazies instead of killing them in case there’s a cure. But as they become outnumbered, they hole up in the precinct with a handful of survivors…right about the time that something comes crawling up from the ground. WHAT?

Yes, this one has an unexpected sci-fi creature feature twist, but be warned—absolutely nothing is explained at the end, leaving us with one big string of dangling plot points. I can’t imagine what was going on in the minds of the creators, because they sure didn’t tell us.

DON’T SPEAK (2020)

I have unintentionally gravitated towards films by director Scott Jeffrey in the past years (The Bad Nun, ClownDoll, Cupid), so imagine my surprise when yet another one landed in my watchlist only days after I watched ClownDoll.

I think Don’t Speak might be this prolific horror director’s tightest film yet. Reminiscent of classic creature features of the 80s and 90s, it features a traditional man in a monster costume that is much more terrifying than CGI. It also explains why we get the full monster Monty in the very first scene, because it’s that cool.

When a woman’s father falls ill, she, her husband, and their kids travel to her parents’ home to see him. But when they get there, something is very wrong.

And they soon find out in an amazing, chilling scene when the daughter first encounters the creature. From that moment on it is nonstop horror action as they are terrorized and torn apart by the creature.

Somehow the dad figures out in an instant that the creature is using sound to hunt them…which makes it that much more annoying how much the women scream when being chased! Shut the fuck up, be-otches!

There’s a vague reference to military experiments nearby to explain the creature’s existence, but the backstory is really not expounded upon. This is a movie that focuses totally on a nuclear family fighting a monster to the bitter end. There’s just one tiny detail that could have been added as to what the monster was, and I’m kind of shocked it wasn’t used as a plot twist…unless we were meant to think it anyway and the director just didn’t feel the need to spell it out.

PROJECT ITHACA (2019)

It’s…Saw on a spaceship with emotion harvesting aliens?

Project Ithaca is set mostly in a confined space where a group of random people wakes up trapped in goo and wrapped in tentacles, with no memories of how they got there. As they slowly talk it out, their individual pasts are revealed in flashbacks, and they begin to realize that the alien tentacles come out to suck on their energy when they feel emotions. Eek!

A couple of surprises are thrown in to keep things interesting, but there’s not much more to the plot than that. It’s sort of slow and struggles to unfold, but it does start to come together as it reaches its conclusion. Not to mention, the effects are excellent.

DON’T GROW UP (2015)

This infected film is more of a coming of age character study with the infected as a background element.

A small band of “delinquent” kids is suddenly faced with the horrific reality that all the adult have become violent crazies.

As the kids cope with the trauma of their troubled pasts and the unknown possibilities in their futures, they begin to bond, lean on each other for support, and explore their feelings for each other. See the irony? Don’t Grow Up is a movie about kids that don’t want to grow up because they will become monsters, yet they begin to mature as the movie progresses. Talk about a conundrum.

While there aren’t many infected in the film, and they don’t get much screen time, the attack scenes are suspenseful and violent. The limited number of infected actually creates more tension than having constant hordes of them coming at the kids, and leaves us feeling the sense of isolation and abandonment the kids must be experiencing with no adult guidance.

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STREAM QUEEN: clown killer overkill

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Daniel

I watched these four because a) one was from a director whose work I follow, b) one was a sequel from a director whose work I follow, and c) the other two were a film and its sequel. Does any of that matter, or was this more clown horror than I needed all at once?

CLOWNDOLL (2019)

Scott Jeffrey, director of The Bad Nun and Cupid, never fails to keep my interest with his brand of indie horror.

ClownDoll may not have the most original plot, but there’s a fresh twist in this killer clown/killer doll hybrid that makes it stand out among the numerous clown/doll indies.

Generally using the Chucky formula as the reason for the doll coming to life, the film focuses on a young woman carrying a baby for her brother and sister-in-law. She’s compelled to buy a freaky looking clown doll in a store and sits it in a rocking chair in her awesome home, which is a converted church.

She begins getting calls from a guy who dialed a wrong number, and his voice is perfectly creepy. Meanwhile, the clown begins to move and kill people.

The death scenes are fun, and the common kill techniques are elevated by MJ Dixon’s style and visual presentation. On top of that, the main girl is very likable and quite good in her role, so I was quite satisfied with this one. But perhaps the freakiest part of this film was some Three Men and a Baby horror. During a scene in which a woman is supposed to be alone with the clown in front of her, she stands up quickly, and both the hubby and I noticed a flash of what appears to be a person behind her! I’ve freeze-framed and brightened the moment in the pic below.

CLEAVERS: KILLER CLOWNS (2019)

MJ Dixon’s sequel to Cleaver begins with the clown escaping with a young girl and a sheriff on Halloween 1995, and then jumps ahead five years.

The sheriff’s deputy is still hunting the clown. The film takes place right before and on Halloween, but the holiday isn’t the focus. Instead this feels more like a backwoods family horror flick, with a family on a road trip getting lured to the house of the clown and his clan.

Meanwhile, the deputy captures and interrogates a young woman hoping to find out more info on the clown’s whereabouts.

This goes on for fifty minutes before there are finally a few kills in a row. The clown has a young woman in training helping him take care of business, so the deputy has her work cut out for her. And she better brace herself, because she’s going to stumble upon some surprises.

Definitely not as good as the first film and mostly very slow, this one promises a third film at the end. Of course I’m going to check it out…

LOON (2015)

Loon is clearly a low budget killer clown movie right from the start, from the acting to unnecessary dead space filler that slows the pace.

After a creepy opening scene of a brother and sister being chased by a clown in an abandoned haunted house attraction in the woods, we jump ten years ahead. The siblings are now older, but their friends still don’t believe they encountered a clown. So…they all head to the derelict haunted attraction.

Surprisingly, this segment of the kids being beaten to death with a bat one by one isn’t the meat of the movie. It comes to a quick conclusion and then this turns into an amateurish detective story as a detective hunts down the clown killer and uncovers a not so riveting backstory.

Only at the end does the detective finally head into the woods to battle it out with the clown….who really just wants back a picture of his dog. The thrill for me was when the detective gets some help from a shirtless pretty boy.

LOONS (2016)

2 hours and 1 minute long is inexcusable for a low budget indie sequel to a low budget indie—especially when most of your movie has nothing to say.

 

Loons makes the first film look like an okay slasher. In this one the detective is back and has become somewhat of a recluse (and is played by a different actor).

Meanwhile, two street gangs are battling it out for the haunted house property in the woods where the clown died. WTF?

One gang deserves the property just for their dedication—they wear clown masks, throw a clown party celebrating the anniversary of the clown’s death, and plan to resurrect the clown!

After that I don’t even know what’s going on. It’s sooooo boring with loads of talk and a gun battle at the end. There might be a pretty interesting supernatural resurrection story buried in here, but I simply stopped digging for it after about an hour. I don’t even know why I’m still bothering to write about this one. Okay, I’ll stop.

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Lady horror of the 1960s and 1970s

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Daniel

As I take a break from new stuff to continue my journey through my late brother’s DVD collection, I focus on four that are so of his era, and they all feature a woman or women in sci-fi or horror plots.

THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960)

This one was in my brother’s collection as a double feature DVD with Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth, which I already have in my collection, but I thought perhaps this was a sequel I didn’t know existed.

It’s not. And although it’s a Roger Corman movie, it’s not even horror. And perhaps because this is a cheap, crappy budget 2-on-1 DVD, the version included is in black and white when it’s actually a color film.

After a credits sequence exploiting the female body, this is a pretty intriguing concept, and I imagine it could be made quite dark as a modern remake. A rich man and woman out scuba diving with their lawyer friend come back to shore to discover everyone in the world but them is dead. A few dead bodies as they walk down a deserted street is as horror as this gets.

After that it becomes like the long boring stretch of the original Dawn of the Dead, with the trio just going on with life and setting up home on their own.

The conflict creeps in as the lawyer friend makes it clear that because there are two men and only one woman, he wants to get some action. Basically the two men fight over the woman for the rest of the film…and the tragic denouement takes place in a church to bring some religious perspective to the situation.

Speaking of religion, if I had my way this film would have been the story of Adam and Eve and Steve, and both men would have wanted the last woman on earth gone…

VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1968)

The title alone should tip you off that this is a Roger Corman production, but the director is credited as Peter Bogdanovich, who would go on to direct The Last Picture Show and Noises Off. He, however, has claimed he only directed ten minutes involving scenes of the women that gave the movie its name.

It’s easy to believe because the scenes with the women seem spliced into a different movie about a trio of men on a mission to Venus with a robot they stole from the Lost in Space in space family. The men and women never actually interact!

According to the narrator, it’s 1998…which is now over 20 years ago, not 30 years in the future.

After lots of classic 60s space exploration scenes—because Star Wars was the future then—our astronauts discover that the planet Venus is loaded with a variety of dinosaurs and alien creatures with tentacles. Then they start to hear melodic voices like those of a siren…

The monsters are pretty cool, and the visuals, tone, and atmosphere, with fog machines, grey skies, and the hypnotic whir of 60s sci-fi/horror music, are quite good. Plus, the guys have a space car that also becomes a little submarine car! Soooo futuristic.

Even though the astronauts and women of the planet never meet (the forced scenes of the women not doing much of anything are pointless), the plot has the men killing a pterodactyl that turns out to be the god the women worship. You’ll never believe who they make their new god once they chase the men from their planet….

LADY FRANKENSTEIN (1971)

This is a dastardly little flick that needs to be remade as a campy horror comedy with someone perfectly snarky like Samara Weaving as “the lady.”

The set, thunder, lightning, and classic laboratory sights and sounds perfectly capture the Frankenstein vibe.

The original plot is compressed into about 30 minutes. As soon as the monster comes to life it kills the doctor and takes off to throw a naked wench into the river.

Meanwhile, the devious daughter decides to create a hunky man to hunt down and kill the monster that killed her father.

She picks the man, tests out the bod, then convinces her father’s assistant to kill him. In return, she will transplant the assistant’s brain in the hunk and be his woman.

The dude fricking goes for it! How is this movie not a comedy?

QUEEN KONG (1976)

Considering horror parodies started becoming a thing in the 1980s, this monster movie parody was ahead of its time.

The same year the remake of King Kong was released with Jessica Lange giving a ditzy bimbo performance that shockingly didn’t end her career right then and there, Queen Kong mocked the sheer male chauvinism of the original by simply reversing the roles of the sexes.

A domineering female director is furious when a clearly gay guy in the male lead of her jungle women movie walks off set. Her hunt for a passive man to play the role is a short one, because she saves a Mick Jagger looking dude when he steals something from a store and is chased as Benny Hill style music plays. She then drugs him and makes him her leading man bitch.

Horrible 1970s muzak score and “Queen Kong” 70s pop theme song aside, the movie is ridiculous right from the start, beginning with women in “we wear short shorts” shorts singing a “Liberated Lady” song on a boat, the exploitation of their bodies easily negating the whole point of the song.

While the film spoofs the King Kong plot, it also pokes fun at pop culture of the time, including The Exorcist, Jaws, and even President Jimmy Carter.

The overall concept does a great job of emasculating the male character Ray Fay (get it?). He is sexualized and feminized, wearing a pink boa and screaming in terror whenever a monster comes for him…yet the film once again negates the whole point by having him tell Queen Kong how to fight the enemies each time!

Aside from the slapstick spoof, which wears thin fast and becomes painfully unfunny, Queen also battles goofy looking T-Rex and pterodactyl monsters before being shipped back to civilization to take down a city while hunting for her man. Despite its flaws, if you grew up with King Kong, it’s easy to appreciate the purpose of this spoof.

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It came from 1989…four times

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Daniel

The day I can no longer dig up lost 1980s films I’ve never seen is the day I will stop living in the past. Okay, I’m lying. But this foursome was a delicious dive into first time viewing of horror from the peak of the VHS horror era…1989.

SOUNDS OF SILENCE (1989)

I think Sounds of Silence could have been a bit more entertaining with better pacing, which could easily have been accomplished by trimming it down from 105 minutes to 90.

The cute alien guy that impregnates a human girl in the original V plays a photographer who suddenly inherits a mansion from a long lost relative.

Right here is an example of how badly the film needs editing. I can’t tell you how unnecessarily long the sequence is of him having a hard time finding the mansion. It serves absolutely no purpose.

Anyway, he moves in with his woman and her deaf mute teen son, who immediately starts seeing pasty-faced ghost children and scary adult men ghosts all over. And over. And over.

The film has very atmospheric music, settings, and visuals, but it becomes agonizingly repetitive. It only picks up when the leading man and his woman look into the history of the house and realize the boy is experiencing something very frightening aside from the scary children. It’s a big scary dude with a sledgehammer!

FAMILY REUNION (1989)

Family Reunion has the feel of a Tales From the Darkside episode—the grainy film quality, the iffy acting, the weird tone, and even the score.

After a cheesy black and white scene of a cult sacrificing a baby, the movie begins its descent into making no sense.

A family, including grandpa, hops in a car for a Christmas road trip…to a ghost town?

Meanwhile, a sleazy guy with magic powers is arrested by police. On the way to the station with him, the police meet the family on the road and warn them away from their destination. So the magic guy immediately forces their car to drive to the town.

It’s really that bad.

The son is a prankster, the daughter likes Madonna, grandpa seems to know a secret about his family’s past and the town, and the dad blames grandpa for weird, satanic cult nightmares he has suffered for years.

The family kills a lot of time exploring and looking for each other in the town, but eventually the magic guy escapes prison, gathers his cult together, and drags the family into their ritual. It’s as bad as direct-to-video horror of the 80s gets.

There’s a scene at the end that’s filled with Christmas spirit—finally.

SHOCKING DARK (1989)

80s Euro horror director Bruno Mattei (Rats, The Other Hell, Scalps) couldn’t give us a creature feature more perfectly “late 80s weekend video rental” than Shocking Dark.

Despite the film being titled Terminator 2 in some markets because there’s an indestructible headhunter character, don’t let that distract you; this is purely a creature feature loaded with pre-CGI monsters right from the start.

Geretta Geretta is a member of a team of soldiers that heads into Venice after it has been evacuated due to a toxic cloud hovering above it. They find a guy trapped in a sort of web and then…out come the monsters. Yay!

There’s plenty of red light, fog machines, and monster attacks, but Geretta Geretta ends up taking a backseat as a white woman becomes the hero, trying to save a young girl from the monsters and the T2 man.

In true bad Euro horror fashion, the main girl and the little girl melodramatically scream constantly to the point that they’re looking directly at the camera to be even more annoying. Safe to say they just don’t make them like this anymore.

THE IMMORTALIZER (1989)

All hail the companies still digging up obscure 1980s horror to bring to Blu, because my life would not have been compete if I didn’t have Re-Animator meets The Rejuvenator knock-off The Immortalizer in my collection before I died.

This is so purely 80s, from the moment we meet two couples on a double date in their 1980s fashions while a totally 1980s song plays in the background. As they walk home after seeing a horror movie, they are jumped by muscle head zombies and taken to a mad scientist’s facility, where rich old people buy hot young bodies for him to transplant their brains in. The Golden Girls tried something similar in Rose’s dream once…

One of the cute guys on the date wakes up and spends the rest of the movie on a rescue mission to save his friends from the scientist’s evil clutches. He battles burly zombie men and mad scientist assistants, and even enlists the help of an old lady who poses as a prospective client to infiltrate the facility.

With gory brain and body swaps and a neon green hypodermic right out of Re-Animator, this is silly 80s horror bliss and definitely my favorite of this foursome from 89.

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Something queer is going on…or is it?

Posted on July 4, 2020 by Daniel

This handful of films has or supposedly has a queer bent, and a couple of them were brought to my attention by my readers, which I always appreciate. So do these four land on my does the gay guy die? page? Let’s find out.

DANIEL ISN’T REAL (2019)

I include this one from the director of Some Kind of Hate on this list only because I heard murmurings of gay vibes between the lead Luke and his imaginary friend Daniel. I just want to make it clear that I personally didn’t interpret it as homoerotic at all, and I think it is seriously time to stop desperately reading gay into every horror movie and actually watch gay horror movies or read gay horror fiction if you want your horror gay.

Having said that, I feel that Daniel Isn’t Real is a horror version of Drop Dead Fred with a good dose of Hellraiser Cenobites thrown in to intensify the horror.

Mary Stuart Masterson is back from the eighties and plays Luke’s mentally ill mother. When he’s a child she makes him lock his troublemaking imaginary friend in a doll house.

As a twenty something, Luke resurrects Daniel (played by Schwarzenegger’s son), who pushes him to be mischievous. For instance, in class Daniel removes his shirt…to reveal he is covered in answers to the test Luke is taking, not to turn him on.

He also pushes Luke to get with a girl. When it finally happens, that jealous look on Daniel’s face? Not gay. It’s because he realizes he can lose his friend Luke to this girl. Therefore he begins to sabotage that, first by taking over Luke’s body and fucking another girl. So not gay.

Then Daniel’s dark side comes out and he turns murderous, doing some freaky melding with Luke’s body to take care of business, which is not an uncommon theme in horror films (think Elm Street 2—the most homophobic, not homoerotic horror film ever).

Add to that the Cenobite type demons that terrorize Luke, and there really are some great horror scenes here, which elevates the film above an otherwise cliché plot.

THE DINNER PARTY (2020)

From Miles Doleac, the director of Hallowed Ground, this is a fairly predictable film that suffers from a waaaaaaay tooooo looooong running time.

A playwright comes to dinner at a mansion of pretentious artsy types in hopes of getting his career off the ground. In typical mainstream film fashion, it seems like a gay couple is throwing the party, but the most they share is a touch on the chest.

So to be honest, unless I was too busy wishing the film were gayer to hear any blatant references to their status, I can’t guarantee they’re supposed to be gay other than some stereotypical mannerisms. Meanwhile, the lesbianism in the film begins with a woman completely naked and ends with a lesbian kiss, and all women involved are of the lipstick variety. I’m going to guess Miles Doleac is straight…

Anyway, there’s almost an hour of talking around the table, with all the guests being bitchy and telling disturbing tales, plus there’s a bit of dabbling in a sort of Tarot card reading session. Through all of it, we learn mostly nothing about anyone. So much for using that hour to at least develop characters.

Suddenly (52 minutes in) the shit hits the fan, and this plays out like a high society version of the dinner scene from The Texas a Chainsaw Massacre…and simultaneously feels like an indie film company trying to make its own version of Ready Or Not.

JACK GOES HOME (2016)

Indie actor Thomas Dekker directs this semi-horror flick that has plenty of creepy situations suggesting something sinister or supernatural going on. However, this is more of a psychological horror and character study in the tradition of movies like Jacob’s Ladder. In other words, is the character really experiencing and seeing the things he thinks he is or is he just losing his mind?

Rory Culkin stars as a man who comes back home after his father passes in a car accident. Rory seems callous, uncaring, and aloof with his mother, played with detached, post-traumatic distance by Lin Shaye.

Their scene together at the dinner table alone is uncomfortable and compelling.

Rory discovers some cassettes and video tapes that hint at something dark from his family’s past, and his mother warns him not to go in the attic.

As Rory ponders life and his family’s dirty secrets, he becomes friends with the pretty gay boy next door, but it’s a contentious relationship and Rory is kind of a dick to him, even tossing some slurs his way at one point. But just like everything else in this film, the question of sexuality is at the forefront yet never fully developed or tied in to any concrete explanation as to what is going on. Still, this is the first film in this bunch that deserves a spot on the does the gay guy die? page for having a clearly openly gay character and gay situations.

There are some incredibly eerie moments, and Rory is even terrorized a few times by some ominous figures, but like I said, none of it ever comes together or makes any tangible sense. Despite some major developments along the way, we are left never knowing what was real and what was only in his grieving mind.

THE UNTAMED (2016)

It isn’t often that I have the patience for a slow burn, but just like Jack Goes Home, Spanish film The Untamed is hauntingly compelling…not to mention it has major sexual and homosexual themes.

Most significantly, it’s about oppression of sexuality in traditional Spanish family life, and it’s quite tragic even beyond its sci-fi creature feature aspects.

But be warned, after a sexually horrific opening of a woman being pleasured by “something” in a cabin, it’s not until an hour later that the creature really comes out to play. When it does, it is handled with such restraint yet so much dark eroticism that it’s quite icky.

Basically, a woman is trapped in a strained marriage, unaware that her husband is fucking her gay brother—in a good sex scene that even presents versatility between the two men!

Now that’s how you do gay in your horror. Because of its heavy focus on a gay character and a self-loathing, homophobic gay character, this one is going to get an honorary spot on my homo horror movies page.

A young woman befriends the brother and then sister and convinces both siblings that neither of them needs the husband…because great pleasures await in the cabin. Eek!

The film can really be read in a variety of ways, depending on how you want to interpret it. Either it’s suggesting that repressing our sexuality and sexual desires can lead us to do monstrous things or it could be saying that giving into our sexual desires and not leading a clean, “normal”, God-focused family life can have disastrous consequences. Viewer discretion decides.

The omnisexual sci-fi elements of the film remind me quite a bit of the film Harvest Lake. My only real gripe is that despite having a graphic gay sex scene between two human men, it’s only implied that the brother has a sexual encounter with the life form in the cabin in the middle of the film. It would have helped to present visual hints of his visit (like the opening scene with a girl) to offer a midway tease of what was yet to come, for a good chunk of the film plays out like a family drama without any promise of the horror on the horizon.

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They’re not your everyday 1980s horror films

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Daniel

Every time I think I’ve covered just about all the horror the 1980s had to offer, some lost films resurface. So let’s take a look at The Nesting, The Strangeness, Beaks, and Dream Demon.

THE NESTING (1981)

Before there was Girl On the Third Floor there was this mess of a haunted whorehouse movie.

An agoraphobic female author finally goes outside and comes upon a unique, isolated house she simply must live in. She doesn’t listen when the handyman tells her she should reconsider.

Once nestled all snug in her new home, she begins having creepy dreams about being assaulted by sleazy men. She hears noises. She’s afraid to go outside—yet not afraid to climb out a window onto a ledge in a very weird scene that leads to a death.

She argues with the handyman and he gets his ass beat by supernatural forces. She gets surrounded by female ghosts. She somehow ends up being chased in her car by a psychotic dude. She has some confrontations with John Carradine, because that just happened in movies back then.

And she has one of the weirdest final encounters with the ghosts after learning the truth of what happened at the whorehouse in the past. A disaster, but who cares, because it’s the 80s, baby!

THE STRANGENESS (1985)

This is definitely bottom of the 1980s creature feature barrel. After an initial “what we don’t see is sometimes scarier” opening, we watch for over an hour as a group of assessors explore tunnels in a gold mine.

Nothing. Happens. For. Over. An. Hour.

Not even the 80s Euro horror style music can make this any more interesting.

When the first victim finally gets grabbed by the monster in the tunnel, the mine is suddenly drenched in red lighting. O…kay.

There are some cool scenes of bodies trapped in some goo on the ceiling but…the monster. The claymation monster. What a disaster.

Its jerky movement in the horror lighting could have been creepy actually, but unfortunately, the one time we see it attack a man, the man is also claymation. Seriously, it’s like watching Mr. Bill get attacked by a cave creature. Oh noooooooo!

I’m kind of convinced that’s a Han Solo Star Wars figure…

BEAKS (1987)

This one escaped me and my video store in the 1980s and couldn’t even get recognized as The Birds II, a title some other movie claimed in 1994.

This mess not only steals numerous scenes from The Birds, but it is like a touring company of birds on a plane, on a train, in a house, and even on a parasailing woman.

The lead girl from Waxwork is a reporter covering in-your-face stories of nature striking back in the way of bird attacks. This movie doesn’t even try being subtle about its message. The reporter travels all over to interview people who have suffered from bird attacks, like having their eyes plucked out.

Christopher Atkins is her cameraman and somehow he looks more like a boy than he did five years before in The Pirate Movie and seven years before in The Blue Lagoon.

That’s basically it. They travel around interviewing bird attack victims and “doves” keep attacking people. Most of it looks like stock footage of pigeons being dicks in Central Park in New York City, but I have to admit the close-up attack scenes are vicious and gory.

DREAM DEMON (1988)

While not shying away from gore, Dream Demon is one of the more heavy-handed horror flicks of the 1980s.

Initially it feels like an episode of Freddy’s Nightmares—virtually every moment of horror in the film is a trippy dream sequence the main character is having.

She’s about to marry a handsome, prestigious military man. She is hounded by two reporters—total pricks who are absolutely awful to her. She’s just moved into a new home. And she drags her cool friend into her nightmares, which are riddled with violent and bloody situations that all point to repressed memories and distrust of men.

It’s not exactly the most subtle presentation of female issues, but it does add dimension beyond the Freddy nightmare concept of a main girl believing that anytime someone dies in her dreams, it happens in real life.

There are plenty of religious themes, including symbols of heaven and hell, but by the time she’s running around trying to protect a little blonde girl in her dreams at the end, I once again felt like I was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, and was just waiting for the little girl to start jumping rope and singing the Freddy’s coming for you song.

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