The 80s SLASHER VAULTS 9: It came from 1982

By 1982, with the release of Friday the 13^th Part III in 3D and Jason getting into his hockey gear for the first time, even Michael Myers took a break and left the killing to a bunch of Halloween masks. But some killers had other ideas, so they let the horny teens party and targeted adults instead.

THE GHOST DANCE

In the tradition of killer Indian spirit films like Scalps and The Dark Power comes Ghost Dance…only, this came first.

If The Ghost Dance never gets a remastered release and you have to resort to watching an old VHS tape or an upload of a VHS rip on YouTube, don’t expect to be able to see anything for the first 15 minutes of this horribly lit film…and for much of what comes after that. But the first 15 minutes are the worst. It’s so dark I seriously couldn’t see anything until a woman suddenly got her neck slashed. Of course, isn’t that really all you need to see?

Turns out an excavation has gone bad…anthropologists unearthed not only a mummy, but the vengeful spirit of an Indian. This spirit possesses a modern day Native American man, who then goes around killing white people in a museum. Don’t expect a lot of death scenes, and don’t expect them to be anything outstanding. The film is slow and not much happens.

The “main girl,” an anthropologist, keeps getting paranormal sensations and glimpsing an Indian (always in the dark). Every time she does, the music is quite creepy. Finally, she is chased by the Indian, which is really the highlight here. As the movie comes to a close, it begins to feel oddly like the classic Zuni fetish doll story from Trilogy of Terror.

HONEYMOON HORROR

A real estate agent and her lover sort of accidentally kill her husband and go on with their lives. The woman even rents a cabin to a group of newlyweds.

But, in true slasher fashion, first a trio of their friends goes up to decorate the place as a surprise. I have no idea why a paper cutout Halloween skeleton is one of the decorations, but it does lead to a good body reveal. And one of the kills is even loaded with severed limbs.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the film after that is all pillow talk. There are some cheap scares, killer POV complete with a corpse hand, effective horror music cues, a muscle daddy character hoping to become Mr. America, and finally, a good axing in a shower, which kicks off all the—well, I wish I could say fun. I

nstead, the couples do nothing much beyond panicking until the corpse husband back from the dead finally gets in the cabin to take care of business.

The farcical ending focusing on the local sheriff makes matters worse.

BLOOD BEAT

This Christmas slasher disaster needs to be on DVD because it fucking rules.

A son and daughter come to visit their mom and her boyfriend at a cabin in the woods for the holidays. The son’s ass look great in 80s jeans. The son brings his girlfriend, who thinks the mom is weird. The mom thinks the girlfriend is weird. Truth is they’re both fucking weird.

Random people start getting murdered out in the world somewhere, and each time they do, both the mom and the girlfriend have paranormal episodes. The girlfriend appears to be having much more fun during hers because at one point she’s masturbating to the massacre, and she is seriously digging in there.

There’s some ridiculously dramatic classical music, but the actual horror score kicks ass. A slow start is interspersed with lots of killer POV and loads of heavy breathing. And then…suddenly…there’s a supernatural attack in the cabin, with shades of Evil Dead thrown in for good measure. The mom’s boyfriend is beaten down by great flying 80s products, like Nestle’s Quik (not this modern “Nesquik” rebrand bullshit) and classic “saccharin causes cancer in lab rats” diet soda Tab.

The special effects are uber 80s awesome, especially the Xanadu glow around the Samurai killer as it speaks in a robotic Battlestar Galactica voice.

Oh, yes. I said Samurai killer. Apparently, someone is possessed by a Samurai killer. Is it the mom? Is it the girlfriend? Is it someone else completely? All is revealed in the hilarious final battle of epic proportions.