Four horror flix and thrillers from the 1980s

Posted on March 1, 2021 by Daniel

A killer knight, a big bug, a sexy psycho, and even a gay stalker in my latest marathon of films from the 1980s. Let’s get right into them.

PANIC BEATS (1983)

Director/writer/actor Paul Naschy pumped out Euro horror flicks for decades. Here he stars as a man who brings his sick wife to convalesce in his family’s home.

Right from the start things go wrong, putting the wife’s health at further risk. She gets mugged, she finds a snake in her bed, she sees body parts in her food. And all along, other members of the family talk about the curse of a descendant—a violent man who rises from the grave once a year in knight armor and seeks revenge on family members.

Naturally, despite his wife’s psychotic meltdowns, the husband has to go away for a short period of time, which is when things get even worse for her. Is the knight all in her head or is there really a supernatural presence after her?

If you can’t see the truth from the very start of the film, you’re definitely a horror movie amateur. Yet as routine as this film is, I do like how everyone in the family is terrorized by the end.

INSECT! (aka: Blue Monkey) (1987)

The director of Funeral Home, Spasms, and Killer Party doesn’t disappoint with this creature feature about a giant, mutant praying mantis running rampant in a hospital.

Even better, horror king Steve Railsback is awesome as the detective on site when all hell breaks loose.

I won’t deny the film takes a looooong time to get going. A man is brought to the hospital after being bitten by something in his garden. When a nasty worm thing crawls from his mouth, doctors plan to study it.

Don’t ask me why the hell sick children are allowed to just run rampant around the hospital, but sick little shits fuck around in the lab (yes, children can somehow get in the lab) and cause the worm thing to morph into a giant praying mantis.

The giant killer bug and the awesome 80s horror lighting are everything. Total classic, despite the ridiculous alternate title Blue Monkey.

THE PHONE CALL (1989)

Yay! A gay thriller from the ultimate era of thrillers that gets a spot on the homo horror movies page.

It’s easy to dismiss The Phone Call as a) a complete rip-off of Fatal Attraction, and b) just another movie that paints gays as sex perverts out to destroy perfect heterosexual life, tear apart families, and target children.

Overlooking the fact that the gay guy just got out of jail, takes a job at a gay phone sex line, and then stalks a white collar straight man, I think this film is actually a metaphor for being a gay, closeted, married man.

The entire focus is on a dirty secret the main straight man is keeping. He calls a sex line (obviously his straight life isn’t so perfect), and when he discovers the major mo mistake he made, he ends the call by hurling anti-gay slurs. The crazy gay guy just trying to do his job tracks the straight guy down and makes a big gay dramatic scene that causes the straight man’s career to spin into turmoil.

And that’s when the audience gets a heterosexual safe zone break, with the straight man running home to his wife to embrace her and reassert his orientation.

Then the gay man paints a revelatory message on the straight guy’s fence, so the straight guy hunts him down, beats him, chokes him on a bed…and then apologizes to him. Right after that, the straight man cleans off the gay again by making love to his wife.

When the gay guy shows up as a painter to fix the fence issue, the straight man still doesn’t confess to his wife, totally leaving their daughter in harm’s way as a result. At this point it would be a lot less shameful for a straight man to just admit he slipped up and called a gay sex line, yet straight pride prevents him from coming clean with the wife. 

When things get really bad, the straight man finally tells the wife everything and they call the police, who are like, “you accidentally called this gay sex line, the guy stalked you, so you hired him to paint your fence???” It’s a classic example of how the police don’t take seriously any crime committed against someone they so much as presume is gay.

The movie is literally figuratively about how being gay could ruin a man’s life back then.

During the inevitable battle between gay and straight, the gay guy takes a verbal jab at the straight guy’s masculinity, and it all ends with a good old symbolic, phallic horror movie impalement and a close, intimate embrace between the two men.

MIND GAMES (1989)

After The Boys Next Door, Maxwell Caulfield once again played psycho in this typical thriller of the late 80s/early 90s era.

Predominantly predictable, this is about a family—husband, wife, son—that goes on a road trip in an RV. When the son meets young, handsome Caulfield in a park, he takes a shine to him, and pretty soon Caulfield is tagging along with them family against the mother’s wishes.

Oddly, the husband thinks the wife doesn’t love the son, yet she is constantly concerned for the boy’s safety while the father is always like, “Let him just go be alone in the woods with the strange man.”

That’s the one place in which this film differs from other psycho/stalker flicks of the time. It dares to go to icky, uncomfortable places with the relationship between Caulfield and the kid. Caulfield tells the family he’s studying abnormal psychology, so he uses that to woo and manipulate the boy into doing anything he wants. While it never crosses the line into pedophelia, there is a point at which Caulfield brags that he could turn the son homosexual if he wanted. Here’s where I should argue that it’s offensive to say kids can just be turned gay, but I’d be a hypocrite considering Caulfield turned me gay when he slipped on a leather jacket in Grease 2 seven years before this film…

Mind Games is painfully slow, the couple makes ridiculously bad decisions, and a rip-off of the Bruce Hornsby and The Range 1987 pop hit “The Way It Is” plays constantly. The only thing the film has going for it is Maxwell Caulfield in a Speedo.

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Faces of gays in a novel by a mainstream horror author

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Daniel

A prolific horror/thriller author for over 30 years, John Saul at some point during his career came out of the closet, and as far as I know, Faces of Fear, one of his final fiction titles, is the only one with gay characters. Correct me if I’m wrong, because it’s the only novel of his I’ve read.

So just how integral are the gays to the plot?

I don’t know if this novel is indicative of Saul’s general style, but I found it quite enjoyable in a comfort read kind of way. With a majority of female characters and POVs, it reminded me of the horror and suspense novels I devoured as a teen in the 80s by the likes of Mary Higgins Clark and Clare McNally. I aspired to write horror novels like those authors. I don’t know where I went right, but I ended up penning sexy gay horror novels instead! Heh heh.

Of course being similar to novels of that era also means this one is ridiculously formulaic and predictable. “Whodunit” seems way too obvious right from the start, so you assume that’s just a red herring and there will be twists galore. Nope. It plays out exactly like you’d imagine.

It’s also a tried and true horror cliché plot about a psycho assembling female body parts to craft the perfect woman. It’s kind of astounding that a bestselling author with three decades of work behind him would be satisfied writing something this derivative.

A high school girl has to adjust to high society life when her mother remarries, and she is soon drawn into the temptation of making herself perfect like all her new rich, snobby friends…using plastic surgery.

Meanwhile, a reporter that works with the teen’s gay father is following and trying to break a story about a serial killer that is gathering female body parts. There are a handful of grisly murders along the way, but they’re just the backdrop to a story of about female self-worth, social standing, and objectification.

Of course there’s the welcome inclusion of not one but two gay men. While they aren’t copiously present throughout the novel, they are absolutely crucial to the events that play out in the final few chapters.

Also of note is that if I read right, one character is trans, but the references are surprisingly cryptic and used as an attack on the character (think deadnaming).

And finally, the funny thing about the novel is that so much of the story revolves around the killer using MySpace to find victims. Wow. That sure does date a book fast.

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PRIME TIME: don’t go in the woods

Posted on February 25, 2021 by Daniel

There’s no telling what lurks behind the trees in this foursome that includes a variety of subgenres.

CREATURE CABIN (2017)

This goofy film is the only one in this bunch that I purchased on DVD as soon as I was finished streaming it. Why?

Because it’s a wacky combination of Evil Dead and Dead Alive with bizarro creatures and shirtless studs turned demon!

When our main girl is dumped by her boyfriend and kicked out of her band, she goes to a cabin in the woods with some friends.

Within minutes there are some sex scenes that go icky bad, including a wiener scene that is not for the squeamish. Just thinking about it gives me the willies.

The main girl soon finds herself battling possessed friends, a flying unicorn humanoid, a head that looks like Belial from Basket Case, and a boxing kangaroo demon.

Neon lighting and fog machines deliver good old 80s horror atmosphere, and there’s even an Evil Dead poster in the cabin.

High on humor, this one moves at a quick pace, but it does go off the rails in the final act, even featuring a rap battle in the woods. But I’ll gladly subject myself to that for this….

 

ARE WE THE WAITING (2017)

The director of Night Howl brings us a low budget slasher that didn’t quite satisfy my cabin in the woods craving. Even so, I appreciate the homebrewed look of his indie films, which seem like personal endeavors by someone that loves the genre.

After a dude learns he’s being drafted, he decides to skip town (aka: country) with a bunch of friends to party at an isolated house.

The gang just hangs around playing an online video game, and then someone in a black mask with glowing neon accents stars killing them off.

There’s a hint of a home invasion feel here, but there isn’t anything in the way of scares or suspense. And the killer reveal and motivation are quite underwhelming, a little out of left field, and little cringy.

THE NIGHT THEY KNOCKED (2019)

If you love home invasion flicks and don’t care that they’re all the same as long they are well made and have some intense scenes, you’ll find The Night They Knocked pretty darn satisfying. The only really glaring issue is how long it takes before anything of significance truly happens.

A guy brings his friends to his family’s house in the woods…where his hot brother, recently released from jail, has already set up shop.

There’s tension between them, and all the friends have their own drama to contend with for the first 45 minutes.

And then the shit hits the fan. Guys dressed as clowns start terrorizing them. The lead clown gives a devilishly good performance, and there are some satisfying suspense scenes and a handful of brutal kills.

SLEEPAWAY SLASHER (2020)

Big Hollywood studios can rarely pull off horror films longer than 90 minutes, so indie filmmakers really need to start reviewing their 90-minute plus movies and take note of the pacing before releasing them to the public. Better yet, gather a small test audience and ask for honest reactions.

So, this 100-minute slasher has a lot going on and a lot of characters, both of which work against it.

A dude whose father made a horror film in the 80s but never completed it is holding a film-making competition at the location of the original shoot…which is believed to be haunted.

We’re bombarded by clips of various groups in the competition filming their movies (I’d advise them all to keep them under 90 minutes long). There’s lots of running around in the woods. History starts repeating itself. Some scenes get the found footage treatment. Bodies turn up. Everyone starts losing it. They don’t trust each other. They turn on each other. There’s even word of a ghost.

There’s also no “slasher” killer here, making the title a little confusing, and by the end it becomes a boys vs. girls battle, the part of the film I appreciated most. There are some good ideas presented, they just don’t quite work together to form a clear narrative.

 

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Creatures and crazies of the early 1970s

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Daniel

Ah. The early 1970s, when I was just a wee toddler and a few short years away from my first dose of horror movies. I wish I could remember what the first genuine horror movie was that I actually watched. I imagine it was something made for television. Anyway, let’s look at these four, which it took me fifty years to get to…

OCTAMAN (1971)

I’m all about lots of creature action in my horror and loads of rubber monster fun, but Octaman has little else to offer.

The writer of the original The Creature from the Black Lagoon directs this film and seems to be making up for not having the creature on the screen at every moment of that film. We never get a fricking break from Octaman. Octadude, if you hang around our camp all the time, you’re just the nasty douche bag in our group, not a scary sea monster.

Researchers in Mexico find a bunch of little squealing octopus creatures, and within minutes the full grown Octaman is infiltrating their camp.

And that’s it. 78 minutes of Octaman attacking the research team. There’s plenty of dark lighting to capture the horror spirit, plus multi-eye Octaman POV, as well as numerous attacks with some nice gore and the obligatory damsel in distress, but there’s no suspense to be had because there are no highs and lows in this film. There’s also little in the way of plot.

THE CORPSE GRINDERS (1971)

When a film starts on a stormy night with a meowing kitty—that attacks a woman viciously when she opens the door for it—I’m so in.

And then the rest of this gritty little flick happened.

The epitome of low budget early 70s sleaze, this hot mess is about a cat food company that has run out of resources. So they start paying a dude to supply them with bodies from the cemetery to use as their meat.

There are several nice and nasty kitty cat attacks over the course of the film, loads of weird characters that seem like they just escaped from an insane asylum, and a skanky doctor/nurse couple looking into why cats are suddenly craving human flesh.

However, this goofy movie is more about the battle between the guy at the cat food company and the guy at the cemetery as their business deal goes sour. Hell, it even ends with a gun fight instead of a cat fight.

THE CREEPING FLESH (1973)

This movie follows the same formula as Hammer films from the tail end of the Cushing/Lee period piece horror era. It would have been better than most Hammer films if it had been edited down to 30 minutes and used as a short in an anthology film.

Cushing is a scientist who finds a large skeleton during an expedition and discovers its skin grows back when it gets wet. Research convinces him it is evil manifested in physical form, so he uses it to create a serum to cure evil.

A whole lot of extraneous shit happens involving his deceased wife, his daughter, and a mental institution run by his brother, played by Christopher Lee. None of it adds anything to the main plot, which eventually cuts to the chase in the final act.

The skeleton eventually gets wet, transforms into a hideous creature, and goes to reclaim something Cushing took from it (only genuine horror scene of the film). This is followed by the kind of zinger ending that would have been perfect for a short in an anthology, but is not worth an extra hour of nonsense to get to.

MALATESTA’S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1973)

It’s odd when a film can have a generally simple setup yet little continuity. This freaky little low budget movie is loaded with creepy, trippy scenes and settings, but nothing ever seems to really come together.

A husband, wife, and daughter take jobs at a dilapidated amusement park that seems to lack any crowds whatsoever, but they’re secretly there for a different reason anyway—the son went missing at the park and never came home.

What could possibly have happened to him? Did the weird janitor with the gray face get him? Did he lose his head on the guillotine roller coaster? Did the cannibalistic ghouls that live under the park watching black and white movies get him? Did he get lost in the room full of eerie hanging dolls? Did the drag queen fortune teller get him? Or was he shot by Tattoo from Fantasy Island, who runs around the park waving a shotgun?

Visually it’s a nightmarish experience, just don’t look for any logic.

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Digging around for some fresh slashers

Posted on February 22, 2021 by Daniel

I bought the biggie in this bunch on Blu, and the other three I watched on Amazon Prime. Surprise, surprise–the one I bought is the best of the bunch. Let’s get into them.

FAT TUESDAY (2018)

Filmed during the actual days of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Fat Tuesday definitely has the realistic feel that it’s going for, right down to the most terrifying moment of all–footage of a Make America Great Again Trump float. Like who the fuck would want their creation permanently branded with that shit?

The film itself starts off intriguing. A seemingly nice young woman comes to Mardi Gras alone and starts to see the sites.

But then she beats in the head of the first person she meets with a hammer!

After that she hooks up with a group of friends that lives in New Orleans. She then proceeds to get each of them into an isolated spot one by one and kills them.

That’s it. That’s the whole movie. Nothing suspenseful or scary at all.

FREAKY (2021)


Obviously due to copyright infringement issues, this recent slasher hit couldn’t be titled Freaky Friday the 13th, but that’s exactly what it is. And it comes to us from the director of the Happy Death Day movies, so it’s no surprise it’s a lot of fun.

The plot is simple. A high school girl is attacked by an infamous masked killer with a supernatural knife that causes them to switch bodies. It’s up to her (in his body) to convince her friends she’s really her, and then do what needs to be done before midnight to switch their bodies back.

Plenty of humor and some gory kills are the icing on the cake of…the cake being Vince Vaughn. Just as Jamie Lee Curtis did in the remake of Freaky Friday, Vince absolutely steals the show here as the female teen trapped in a killer’s body. Sure, the supporting cast holds their own, but he definitely elevates the film.

The good news is there’s a gay character, and he does get one of the funniest scenes later in the film.

As for how he’ll be embraced by gay horror fans, I can guaranteed there will be at least two sides: a) the “Yay! A gay lives to see another day!” crowd, and b) the “why does he have to be so stereotypically gay?” crowd. You can’t please everyone, but you can please me when you deliver a movie to add to the does the gay guy die? horror movie list.

REDWOOD MASSACRE: ANNIHILATION (2020)

Coming six years after The Redwood Massacre, this sequel doesn’t require a viewing of the first film unless you’re anal about stuff like that like I am. I think the first one is overall a better traditional slasher, especially since this one opts to go in a different direction rather than continue with the classic slasher formula.

A hunk with some information about the Redwood killer connects with a man that lost one of his daughters to the killer and wrote a book about it.

The author’s other daughter is Danielle Harris, so they gather together a small group of friends to head into the woods to investigate their new lead.

They end up in an old facility. The horror atmosphere is strong because of the dark setting, but things just plod along for about 54 minutes as the group explores, finding some gruesome signs of it being the killer’s lair along the way. Some edits could have shortened the running time and fixed the pacing.

The next 40 minutes offer up cat and mouse games and some gory death scenes as the masked killer finally appears and hunts down members of the group, but it feels very low energy. Plus, it kind of goes the “manufactured killer” route, changing the mystique of the killer entirely.

ALPINE LAKE (2020)

This isn’t really a movie to turn to if you’re looking for a slasher fix. A lot of heart is put into checking off all the cabin in the woods expectations, but the film simply doesn’t deliver on any juicy slasher action.

It is clear how unsatisfying this is going to be right from the super generic opening scene of a woman running and being killed in the woods at night.

Next, a group of friends heads to a cabin in the woods. Naturally they have a run-in with a crazy person along the way.

I was psyched that one of the guys is nice and thick and doesn’t hide it, wearing snug jeans and a T-shirt to show off his cuddle bod.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t get a sex scene. I need to see that big booty in the buff.

There is an old caretaker lurking around, and there’s a great intro shot of the killer that’s like a classic VHS cover, complete with a backlit silhouette of a crazed killer carrying a machete.

Sadly, there’s no payoff on that promise. We never really get any good look at the killer, there’s no gore, there are clumsily choreographed kills that show nothing, and it ends up being just a bunch of girls running around screaming.

And I honestly can’t even comprehend what the ending in a classroom was all about.

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Four horror flicks of the late 1970s

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Daniel

A killer puppet, occult orgies, a big walking fish, and even a gay guy in a backwoods horror. Let’s get into these four from the end of the 1970s.

RITUALS (1977)

Whether intended or not, Rituals comes across as a rip-off of Deliverance (it so totally intended to be). However, it gets credited as being more of a backwoods slasher these days (it’s really not).

Sure, there is eventually a crazy deformed hillbilly revealed, and several dead bodies pop up, but there’s no slashing at all. Any kills happen off-screen and the film is disappointingly tame in its execution.

Doctor friends hike into the woods for a vacation. They bicker about their specific specialties, which is only the beginning of the bickering that plagues the film, reminding us that toxic masculinity is not a new thing and has been glorified in film for decades. I guess it’s just one of those male rituals…

The “horror” begins when they wake up to find someone has stolen their shoes from their camp. A journey to safety triggers a series of events that gets one guy after another hurt or killed.

Almost like giving Deliverance the finger for its sodomy scene, Rituals features a gay dude who is just part of the gang. On the flip side, he’s also an alcoholic, gets called a faggot, and suffers some injuries then has to be carried around by the other men. Gays will do anything to be queen of the backwoods.

Hal Holbrook is the leading man that must finally face the backwoods psycho, in one of the only scenes that feels like a horror movie.

SATAN’S BLOOD (1978)

Look. I know swinging was big in the seventies, but I feel no sympathy for the dumb couple in this movie after they hook up with a pair that is obviously freaky in all the wrong ways from the start.

Driving around town with their dog, the good couple is drawn into conversation with the bad couple at a stoplight. The bad couple says “we know you,” and the good couple says “we have no idea who you are.”

Sooooo, the good couple goes home with the bad couple. Within minutes the dog goes missing, there’s a creepy doll and a suspiciously inaccurate photo, the bad woman ravages something bloody in the kitchen, and they delve into a Ouija board session.

Sooooo…the good couple stays overnight and has an orgy with the other couple. What’s refreshing here is how unabashedly soft core porn the sex scenes are.

Things just get worse and worse, sooooo…the good couple STAYS. With fourteen minutes left, the husband is finally like, “This is madness! What are we doing here?”

Dumbest movie ever. But damn is the ending a load of fucked up fun.

MAGIC (1978)

Magic director Richard Attenborough would go on to play John Hammond, the man who creates Jurassic Park, but he sure could have had a major influence on the horror genre if he had continued to direct films. Magic is an iconic killer puppet movie that impacted a generation of kids before killer dolls and killer puppets became a commercial cash cow. Rather than a body count film, it’s a slow burn psychological horror film.

Anthony Hopkins is fantastic as a man who clearly has issues from the start. A failed magician, he suddenly sees things turn around when he makes a puppet his sidekick. But when his agent, played by Burgess Meredith, offers him the opportunity of a lifetime, he chickens out and runs away to a house by a lake, where he reconnects with his high school crush, played by Ann-Margret.

Hopkins brings all the paranoid weirdness necessary to make it believable that he would become addicted to using his puppet as his crutch—a condition that is played out stunningly in a scene between him and Burgess.

Yet the creepiest parts are when Hopkins is alone having arguments with the puppet as it slowly takes control of his every thought and action. The detailed facial expressions of the puppet are the stuff of nightmares, which only intensify as the puppet and Hopkins begin to resemble each other. Eek!

BOG (1979)

Typical of low budget 1970s creature features, this film waits until the bitter end to show us the full monster Monty.

Two couples come to hang out near a lake, and before long both women disappear. The local authorities aren’t initially much help to the husbands, so they consult with a creepy witch in the woods.

Eventually we get to see a claw a few times as more people are attacked, and the cops become more involved. Meanwhile, a whole lot of science is presented concerning what the creature could be, for the female scientist on the case and the sheriff have a thing together.

Beware the scariest scene in the film, which is an icky, all-kissing love scene between the pair. Blech. Here’s just a taste of this “romantic” scene…

There are a couple of battles with the creature near the end, and we barely get to see the big, goofy rubber fish monster costume as it is sprayed with a chemical. I guess they camouflaged it as quickly as possible because it’s right out of a 1950s beach party horror movie. Personally, I think they should have embraced it and exploited it.

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Was a trip to Boggy Creek fun enough to go back for seconds?

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Daniel

Born in 1969, I was a wee child when my mother and older brothers subjected me to the horrors of UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, and the occult, which were all the rage during the 1970s. So it’s time to stroll down memory lane with a movie that cashed in on the Bigfoot craze, along with its official sequel from over a decade later.

THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK (1972)

A classic of the 1970s, The Legend of a Boggy Creek has recently been remastered on Blu-ray for the first time. It scared the heck out of me when I was a single-digit age back then, especially considering I spent my childhood being dragged into the woods for dirt bike races by my motorcycle riding father. Viewing the movie again 5 decades later, I see it as mostly a few highly effective moments surrounded by a whole lot of filler.

In the opening scene, a little kid runs to a bunch of old men in some godforsaken hillbilly state to tell them he saw a hairy beast. They laugh at him.

That kid serves as the adult narrator describing his sleepy town and the cloud of darkness the legend casts over it (it felt like I was watching Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow). About an hour of the film consists of mostly hunters out alone spotting a dark Bigfoot figure standing off in the distance in the woods. The first time it’s creepy as hell and perfectly captures that infamous footage of Bigfoot running through the woods, but then the movie becomes just one sighting after another with no actual physical encounters. And very often the scenes are set to a cute hillbilly theme song about the creature that sounds like it could be from a Rankin/Bass holiday special. WTF?

Finally, there are some cool Bigfoot POV shots around a derelict cabin…I mean, some hillbilly’s home…at night, and I would swear it’s the kind shot that inspired Raimi’s Evil Dead style. Very effective.

The climactic Bigfoot battle takes place at the house at night when Bigfoot reaches its arm in through a window while a guy is taking a shit. There’s a lot of shooting and a quick physical altercation between man and Bigfoot, but the HD resolution doesn’t help camouflage the fleeting glimpse of the gorilla mask that serves as the creature costume. Personally, I wasn’t very scared because I was too distracted wondering if the guy actually started dropping shit bombs when he was interrupted…and the fact that he ran from the bathroom without even wiping.

BOGGY CREEK II: AND THE LEGEND CONTINUES (1984)

Over a decade after the original was released, the director returns and stars in a sequel. He plays a teacher that takes a handful of students to hunt for the Bigfoot.

He also rocks the 80s shorts.

He even narrates the film, so it has that same sleepy feel as the original, and he tells one tale after the other of people that encountered the Bigfoot. I thought it was going to be the same cycle of scenes of hunters staring at a Bigfoot in the woods, but there’s actually variety here, including a goofy scene, an attack scene, and a baby Bigfoot attack scene! Awesome.

The other difference is that we see plenty of Bigfoot face. I think it may just be a doctored gorilla mask, but it looks much better than in the first film and gives this a good, cheesy 80s creature feature feel.

In actuality, the scariest scene in the film involves a wild dog that chases the group, but it does not end in a way that animal lovers will like. Not. At. All.

The group eventually shacks up (literally stays in a shack) with a hairy hillbilly, setting the stage for a final scene similar to that of the first film. Damn. This hillbilly was a trendsetter. I bought fashions like this from the International Male catalog to wear to New York City clubs in the 1990s.

The little surprise twist isn’t so much of a twist these days, but it does distinguish this one from its predecessor. I’m hoping this sequel also gets remastered onto Blu-ray.

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Will these scary creatures make you scream?

Posted on February 16, 2021 by Daniel

Aliens, a tentacle, a giant croc, and a demon. So which ones deliver on the chills and thrills?

ATTACK OF THE UNKNOWN (2020)

If SyFy bothered to show anything other than Harry Potter movies these days, this film would be in heavy rotation on alien invasion movie marathon days. Oh how I miss those days.

The thing about this movie is that there’s an hour of mostly pointless nonsense before getting to the good stuff.

First a mob hiding out in a warehouse has a shootout with law enforcement. The whole mob aspect adds nothing to the plot other than a lot of gunfire.

Richard Grieco, who looks too exhausted to even act these days, is a member of  a SWAT team. After a gratuitous strip club scene, he finds out tragic news about himself. Then his team has to transport a criminal to prison.

Meanwhile, a ship crashes to earth, a mother ship hovers over the city, and an eclectic group of people trying to escape in a car is introduced. They are more entertaining than the entire SWAT plot. Too bad they are incinerated within minutes.

The awesome aliens first walk around in spacesuits and kill people with their black appendages. Then the prisoner randomly tells a story about his family’s history with “vampires from the sky”. This out of place flashback to western days features an odd cameo by Tara Reid.

Things finally get good an hour in when the aliens remove the helmets and wreak havoc in the prison. It should not have taken an hour to get to this. The aliens are cool, plus there’s some gore, plenty of action, and even some humor that never quite lets the otherwise serious movie find its tone.

INTO THE DARK: TENTACLES (2021)

Hulu’s Into the Dark series returns and once again manages to ruin the holiday of the month by not actually being about the holiday of the month. If you consider “Valentine horror” to be any horror movie in which there’s a love relationship, then I guess this qualifies. It doesn’t for me.

It’s also not scary or suspenseful. A girl and guy meet at an open house and, I kid not, immediately get sexy together and decide to live together.

Their relationship is just unnaturally weird from the start, which I guess is kind of the point. The movie is all about their relationship. The female is also keeping secrets about an ex, while the guy keeps bleeding from his ear.

At the end, there’s a tentacle that really gets in the middle of their relationship for a brief moment. The end.

ROGUE (2007)

This killer croc movie is plenty suspenseful all along, but only sets itself apart by delivering  a fricking fantastic final scene.

Just as a warning, the first scene plays out like a clip from a National Geographic show, with a croc dragging a bull into the water. And the animal insensitivity comes back for more later when ***SPOILER*** a dog is shown being gobbled down by the croc after the incident was already implied from off screen with one of those whimpering dog sound effects. ***END SPOILER***

Michael Vartan plays an American journalist in Australia. He goes on a boat tour of gorgeous Australian landscapes with horror queen Radha Mitchell as the tour guide. We get to see some boy booty when two locals come by in a boat and moon the tourists.

The tour boat eventually springs a leak and is grounded on a tiny piece of land, and a good chunk of the movie focuses on the group of tourists trying to get to higher land across the way because the water is starting to rise.

Plenty of suspenseful scenes abound, but there’s a surprisingly low body count for a killer croc movie.

But that final scene is one of the best croc horror sequences ever!

THEY REACH (2020)

This little indie is getting compared to Stranger Things because it’s about a group of tweens experiencing the supernatural in a small town in another decade. The film really feels like it takes place in a small town because there’s an oddly low energy vibe that even affects the pacing.

It’s 1979, but the people look like they haven’t left 1972, missed out on the disco era, and have no idea the early 80s new wave movement is breathing down their necks. I guess that’s why to this day women in small towns still have butch 1982 hairstyles. It was a relief when the main kids busted out a chord of “I Wanna Be Sedated” to show that at least they’re moving forward even if the adults aren’t.

The story is about a girl that scores an old tape recorder at a thrift shop. While trying to get it to work with her dad, she is cut and bleeds on it. Uh-oh.

A demon is released and the kids have to figure out how to send it back. It takes a while, but the film finally finds a light, humorous vibe…just as the demon comes out to play. It’s actually just demon hands. That’s all we ever see until one brief shot of the face near the end, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when and how the demon appears. It just seems to reach out of dark spaces wherever and whenever it wants to. Supposedly it jumps from body to body, but that aspect doesn’t play out quite clearly.

The likable characters, funny moments, and lack of intense creature action make this more of a family horror film. It even ends light…with a cover of the band Bread’s soft rock classic “Everything I Own”.

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For the love of holiday horror: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Eve

Posted on February 13, 2021 by Daniel

Will this smorgasbord of horror movies covering a variety of holidays make the off-season bright? Let’s get a taste of each one as I add them to the holiday horror page.

TRICK OR TREAT (2019)

The big trick here is that this is not a horror film and has mostly nothing to do with Halloween short of two trick or treaters and some pumpkins.

It’s mostly a movie about two less than straight and narrow brothers getting entangled with a handful of mobsters.

One brother shows up at his other brother’s house on Halloween and tells him he accidentally hit a guy on the road and has the body in the trunk of his car. Turns out that guy was the son of a lady mobster, and the two brothers spend the night trying to avoid them while getting rid of the body.

While it could be considered a thriller, there’s not much here that is actually suspenseful, but there are plenty of questions that need answering as the movie unfolds.

Near the end it looks like there’s going to be a twist that indeed steers this into horror territory, but it turns out to be a false alarm.

I’d have to say this is kind of like a Roseanne Halloween episode gone horribly wrong…

ARCHAON: THE HALLOWEEN SUMMONING (2020)

I appreciate the effort put into building a horror movie around Halloween legend, but this film was apparently low on resources, so it’s mostly about a bunch of people hanging out in a house and occasionally putting on a cursed mask.

A guy buys a mask steeped in the history of Samhain, and immediately gets ragged out by a peer as a geek and a gay (he’s not a gay).

Soon he’s becoming drawn to the mask, which is mostly just a sack that the movie rarely shows in full because there’s nothing scary about it. When he gives into temptation and puts it on, horror lighting and some vines in the hall of the house signify he’s crossed into another reality.

Same thing happens to anyone that puts the mask on…but then they all simply just take it off and come back to reality. The movie just doesn’t offer much. There’s a Halloween house party with little in the way of Halloween spirit beyond guests in costumes. A white dude that looks like Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs performs a rap as part of an in-house band.

Later a Black guy raps to a rock song played by a white band. This movie confused me.

Eventually the group figures out a demon has escaped from another dimension and needs to be sent back. They perform a ritual with candles in one of the most uninteresting, uninspired climaxes ever.

DERELICTS (2017)

Beyond House of 1000 Corpses (one of my many favorite horror movies), I have no use for Rob Zombie’s brand of white trash horror. If only he’d put some thought and focus into his murderous family movies like simple little Thanksgiving horror flick Derelicts does, I could say what I’m about to say about this one. This isn’t my type of horror film at all, I would never watch it again, but this film is totally awesome.

It’s like a dysfunctional middle class white family invites the Texas Chainsaw family to their house for Thanksgiving dinner, and it’s a perfect juxtaposition.

After carjacking guests heading to the family’s house, the crazies follow the GPS and crash Thanksgiving dinner. They terrorize and torture the family, naturally, all while managing to out each family member’s dirty little secret.

The main family consists of a creepy father, a jaded mother, an asshole son with no social graces, a daughter that had a mental breakdown, a horny grandfather, and his horny girlfriend.

The crazies include an old former military man and what almost seems like his Black “life companion”, a hillbilly girl, a hillbilly guy, and a freak that wears a Teddy bear as a mask.

Stylized camerawork shows that director Brett Glassberg carefully orchestrated the visual presentation of the story he is telling, and despite the crazy white trash family subgenre not being my thing, I would watch another horror film by him in a second. The creative use of a dick pump alone is reason enough to expect big things from him…

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD (2020)

 

This New Year’s Eve dark killer party comedy gets huge props for being one of few moves that has Christmas décor everywhere, recognizing that for many people, New Year’s Eve decorations are Christmas decorations. I hate when I see neighbors’ Christmas trees at the curb on December 26th.

Playing out mostly like a teen sex comedy, the film focuses predominantly on loads of privileged pretty people of various persuasions having conversations about dating or trying to score.

Personally, I didn’t find the humor funny enough to carry the movie, and the pacing was slooooooow.

Not even the sex humor held my interest, although some gay stuff was funny circa 1997, and does land this one on the does the gay guy die? page.

The highlight for me was the use of songs like Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”.

Eventually an accidental death ignites a comedy of errors that leads to a whole lot of kills. The money shot is in the last twenty minutes when the clock strikes twelve.

It might be a tedious New Year’s Eve party to sit through, but damn the payoff is worth it. Choreographed to a rockin’ metal track, the massacre scene is one of the best mass killing sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie.

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PRIME TIME: infected vs. ghosts

Posted on February 12, 2021 by Daniel

Ravers get infected and robbers get ghosted. So which one of these two indie films showed me a better time?

RAVERS (2018)

 

Now this is how you do a tight little indie infected film. Ravers is smartly written and directed and deserves recognition for featuring a lesbian and a bearish guy as the heroes. On the flip side, at a rave full of white people, a Black guy is portrayed as the immoral drug dealer to the bitter end. Bummer.

Things start strong and sexy, with a 7′ 2″ tall muscle hunk going insane at a soda factory and attacking everyone with gory results. This scene literally made me want a Dr. Pepper and a man.

Then we meet our main girl, a germaphobic lesbian reporter forced to go on site to do a story about the factory murders. Her stocky buddy takes her to an illegal rave being thrown at the now defunct warehouse.

The drugs come out…and so do cases of old soda still tucked away in storage. Pretty soon the dance floor is filled with ravers with raging eyes.

The movie smartly uses techno that matches the moment as the pace picks up. The vibe starts off chill, becomes hypnotic as the ravers begin to feel the effect of the drug, and then intensifies in beats-per-minute as the drug takes hold and the infected become aggressive.

The concept is also cool. The infected don’t really attack as long as they’re getting some sort of stimulation: drugs, dancing, sex, etc. And the longer the infection inhabits their bodies, the more gnarly their eyes begin to look. Not to mention, there’s most definitely an understated commentary on toxic masculinity running throughout the film.

One of my favorite visual moments has the doped up club kids focusing on the allure of a catwalk above them, and deciding to climb up there to dance. The infected action ramps up as the crazies get even more fucked up in the face for the final act.

ARE WE DEAD YET (aka: The Living Dead) (2019)

In this horror comedy, a group of bumbling robbers screws up and then has to hide out in an old mansion.

Right away it feels like the actors are trying their best to deliver laughs, but they don’t often have the material to support their skills, so they overcompensate through their delivery and actions. Sometimes it works, other times it falls flat.

At first the robbers experience sightings of various ghosts, but before a genuine haunting plot can get off the ground, we are introduced to the ghosts, and things get silly.

There are at least a dozen ghosts from colonial times living in the mansion, all of them in the bloody state they were in when they died. They spend their time chatting and lamenting that they will be stuck in the mansion until someone finally buys it.

The dialogue of the dead and the conversations they have feel more like a play performance than a movie, but they do inject a little more humor that works.

In no way a scary film, this turns into a ghost adventure, with the robbers trying to help the ghosts escape the hold the mansion has on them. It’s…cute…but it didn’t work enough as a ghost comedy for me to truly hold my interest. On the bright side, there’s a zombie segment at the end that showed me a good time!

If you’re looking for the film, just know that it is under the title The Living Dead on Prime. Who the hell decided on that awful, generic name change?

 

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