Monthly Archives: October 2023

Terror at Red Wolf Inn (1972)

Posted on October 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: An appetite for humans.

Regina (Linda Gillen) is a shy college student living in a dorm by herself who doesn’t have enough money to go to Spring break with the rest of her friends, so she’s forced to stay on the campus all alone while the others go. Then she receives a letter telling her that she’s won a free trip to a bed and breakfast resort called the Red Wolf Inn. She’s offered a private plane ride to get there and once she arrives she’s greeted by a kindly elderly couple (Arthur Space, Mary Jackson) who own the place and two other women, Pamela (Janet Wood) and Edwina (Margaret Avery), who are also staying there, as well as the couple’s adult grandson Baby John (John Neilson). While things start out well Regina soon grows uncomfortable and convinced that the couple has ulterior motives. When both Pamela and Edwina disappear Regina fears she’ll be next, but her efforts to escape are thwarted trapping her in the home to become the next meal item unless she can convince Baby John, who has fallen for her, to help her find a way out.

This very odd piece of 70’s horror that seems to want to combine a grisly theme with offbeat humor definitely has a few keen moments. My favorite was the way Regina finds out that she’s ‘won something’ and excitedly shouts it out to her otherwise empty dorm building. Some may consider this exaggerated as most people today would be highly cynical of such a letter, but back in the 70’s, (and I was around then), the teens were more trusting and had a propensity to be experimental and act as if life was just one big adventure, so in that respect the movie gets it right and this became for me one of the funnier moments The only caveat is how did the couple find out about Regina to send her the letter? Why was she chosen and how often and how many of these letters did they mail and how many of them got answered, which never gets addressed, but should’ve.

On the horror end its not very scarry and only borderline creepy. There is a dream sequence that had the potential of being cool, but doesn’t go on long enough. Regina’s attempt at escape I did like, but it does leave open plenty of loopholes like why was a motorboat, that wasn’t tied to any dock, conveniently left out in the bay for her to swim to? Initially I though it was an intended trap and she’d get into it and see dead bodies lying there, but that’s not the case as she uses it to get over to a neighbor’s house, but no ones inside and all the other buildings in the area are eerily empty, but why? The dinner scene in which everyone chomps at their food like pigs could’ve been considered revolting and upsetting had it been confirmed that it was people they were eating, but this wasn’t yet established, so the shock effect is lost.

Some have labeled this as a comedy-horror and one of the first films to use this sub-genre, but outside of the opening bit there really isn’t anything all that amusing. There are some moments of extreme awkwardness like when Baby John smashes the head of a baby shark repeatedly against a rock while a shocked Regina looks on in horror before he turns to her and confesses how much he loves her, which is darkly humorous in a distorted type of way, but outside of that the chuckles are as infrequent as the scares.

Spoiler Alert!

I did enjoy Mary Jackson’s performance who goes from nice old lady to threatening matron effectively, but the wrap-up leaves much to be desired. Initially it’s sort-of exciting as Regina and Baby John make a daring run for it only to be chased down by the older couple’s dog and then viciously attacked by both the pet and the old man. The film then cuts to show Regina and Baby John back inside the kitchen of the grandparent’s home having supposedly gotten the upper hand, but this is a struggle that needed to be played-out, the film lacks action anyways and this would’ve offered much needed excitement and tension. Showing the old couple’s decapitated heads inside the freezer had a gory appeal, but then having the old guy look up and wink ruins it and turns the whole movie into one big stupid joke.

Some viewers insist that the 77 minute version, which is what’s available on DVD despite the cover saying it’s 90 minutes, is the edited version with certain scenes of ‘horror’, or other ‘dark’ moments left out and this is based mainly on the fact that IMDb lists the original runtime as 90 minutes and Leonard Maltin’s review book says it’s 98 minutes, but I’m not so sure. As short as the 77 minute runtime is it still came off as draggy. This was also made in an era where implying the violence and gore was considered shocking enough making me believe that the DVD cut is pretty much the whole thing. Even if a longer version may exist it’s doubtful that it would be filled with more carnage as it’s clear that the filmmakers were going for a soft tongue-and-cheek approach making me believe the supposed lost scenes would’ve amounted to being talky bits that wouldn’t have added much.

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Alternate Title: Terror House

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: September 27, 1972

Runtime: 1 Hour 17 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Bud Townsend

Studio: Red Wolf Productions

Available: DVD

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, College Life, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with a Hotel setting, Offbeat

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Ghost Story (1981)

Posted on October 13, 2023 | 1 comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Four men carry secret.

Four elderly men, Ricky (Fred Astaire), John (Melvyn Douglas), Edward (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), and Sears (John Houseman), who all live in the same small Vermont town and are lifelong friends who call themselves the Chowder Society, get together each week to tell each other ghosts stories. Then Edward’s son Don (Craig Wasson) dies after falling out his apartment window. The men begin having reoccurring nightmares focusing on Eva Galli (Alice Krige) a woman they once knew 50 years earlier. Has she come back from the dead to haunt them and their family members? And just exactly what happened to her as she seemed to have left town without a trace? Only the four men seem to know the answer to this and all of them guard this secret quite closely, but once David (Craig Wasson) comes to town, who is Edward’s other son, he becomes determined to break their silence.

The film is based on Peter Straub’s epic novel, which was released in 1978 and was 483 pages long. Many fans of the book complained that the movie overly simplified the plot, but there is just no way you can condense a long book into a two hour screenplay and for what it’s worth I think both director John Irvin and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen did the best they could and if anything this might’ve worked better as a TV-miniseries where many of the story’s dramatic angles could’ve been played out more. My main complaint is that in the novel Eve Galli character was portrayed as being a manitou who could change shape being a small child at one point and a wasp at another and the film would’ve been scarier had it taken that approach.

I also didn’t like Wasson, who’s great for giving a deer-in-headlights-look, but not much else, playing both the brothers. I can’t remember if they were twins in the book, or not, but having them be twins here wasn’t integral to the plot and makes it a bit confusing. For instance when the brother falls out the window, where he is naked and full frontal nudity showing, which was bit daring at the time for males, the next shot shows Wasson, as the twin, waking out of deep sleep making it seem incorrectly that it had all just been a dream.

The film’s main selling point is seeing four legendary actors, who were all either in their 80’s, or nearing it, still able to carry a film, which they do quite well and if anything it would’ve been nice seeing them in more of it. Astaire’s presence is especially interesting, he apparently threaten to quit the movie several times during the shooting, as he had mostly done musicals and light fare before this one. The females are strong here too particularly Krige in her film debut, who gets shown nude from both the back and the front, who has a very creepy presence. Jacqueline Brookes as Melvyn Douglas’ wife has a few key moments, but Patricia Neal, as Astaire’s wife, gets barely any speaking parts at all and is entirely wasted.

The recreation of the 1930’s was my favorite part and quite well done with the characters behaving in believable ways and making it seem like they weren’t just caricatures of their era, but real people that could exist today. Finding actors to play the roles of the older men in their younger years and come off closely resembling them is amazing and much credit should go to the casting director Mike Fenton for hiring young men with just the right characteristics of their older counterparts. The only caveat is that it has the incident occurring 50 years earlier, just like in the book, but with all the actors clearly looking like they’re in their 80’s a more accurate time period would’ve been 60 years when these guys would’ve realistically been college aged.

Spoiler Alert!

The effects are good though much of the scares hinges off of sporadic close-ups of ghostly Eva’s decomposed face, which gets a bit redundant. The story leaves open a lot of questions like why does Eva’s ghost wait 50 years to haunt the men; why not begin terrorizing them 10  years later or even 20? Also, why does Eva go after the son’s of one of the culprits who wasn’t even born yet when the incident happened instead of going directly after the old guys who were responsible? Also, how does a ghost take humor form enough so that the Wasson character is able to make love to her, he complains that she’s ‘cold to the touch’, but a spirit should be trapped into being just that, or at best possessing someone else’s body, but here we have Eva literally recreated to modern day and am not sure in ghostly logic terms how that gets done though despite these issues it’s still a fun ride.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: December 15, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 51 Minutes

Rated R

Director: John Irvin

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Ghost Story, Horror, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity

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Tales that Witness Madness (1973)

Posted on October 11, 2023 | 1 comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Four tales of terror.

Directed by legendary cinematographer Freddie Francis, the film revolves around four stories where the protagonist is perceived as having gone mad, but in actuality it’s evil from another dimension that gets them to see or do odd things and in reality they’re the sane ones. The connecting element is Donald Pleasance who acts as their psychiatrist who keeps them at his clinic in an effort to improve their mental state. In the first story we have a boy named Paul (Russell Lewis) who boasts about having a live tiger in his room even though his parents (Donald Houston, Georgia Brown) don’t believe him. The second story deals with Timothy (Peter McEnery) an antique collector who’s able to ride an old Penny Farthing bicycle that allows him to go back into time and inhabit another man’s body. The third tale deals with a man (Michael Jayston) who brings home a dead tree and mounts it in his living room much to the annoyance of his wife (Joan Collins). The final story is about a rich socialite (Kim Novak) who courts a younger man only for him to have show more interest in her beautiful daughter (Mary Tamm).

This Review Contains Spoilers!

The first story is pretty weak mainly because you presume going in that there’s probably, despite the long odds, some sort of tiger present because after all this is a horror movie dealing with the supernatural, so seeing the parents getting attacked at the end isn’t surprising, or even shocking and you’re pretty much just waiting for it to happen from the get-go. Director Francis makes the mistake of attempting to film the attack as it happens by editing in stock footage of a tiger and mannequin parts with red paint standing in for the parent’s bodies, but it all looks quite fake. Since the tiger figures in again at the very end of the movie a better idea would’ve been to keep it a mystery whether he existed, or it was just a homicidal child that had killed his mom and dad. When the parents walked into the son’s room the camera should’ve remained outside in the hall and the viewer hearing their screams, which would’ve been scarier than anemic special effects that we ultimately do see.

The second story is limp as well as it features a picture of ‘Uncle Albert’ whose facial expressions and eyes are constantly moving and changing, which has been parodied in many other films making this one seem more campy than scarry. The third tale is dumb too as anyone who brings a dead tree into their living room and wants to keep it there is mentally ill and the wife would’ve been smart to have left him versus fight for his affections. The twist here is no surprise either as I saw it coming right from the start though Collins does give a good performance and the viewer gets treated to a shot of her breasts although I suspect it was done by a body double.

The fourth segment is the only one that merits any type of mention as it features the bad guys not only killing the daughter, but slicing her up and then serving her to the mother as a piece of ham during a Hawaiian-style luau. The audacious idea deserves some points and Novak’s performance is fun as is Tamm’s in her film debut, who you also get to see nude from the backside, but it fails to make up for the rest of it, which isn’t up to par with the other British Anthology horror films from that period.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: October 31, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Freddie Francis

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, British Movies, Foreign Films, Horror, Movies with Nudity

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Blood Lake (1987)

Posted on October 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Killer stalks 6 teens.

Filmed on-location in Cedar Lake, Oklahoma by a bunch of young amateurs convinced they could make a horror movie just as good as the studios. Mike Berry, who stars as Mike, wrote the screenplay and then shopped around his script, but could find no takers until he bumped into Tim Boggs at a local retail store who agreed to take on the task of directing and even quit both of his jobs to do it. The shooting took place over a course of 10 days with the storyline revolving around 6 teens who go to the house of Becky (Angela Darter) whose parents are away, which will allow them to party for the whole weekend only to have it interrupted by a deranged killer (Tiny Frazier) upset because the house they’re in used to be owned by him.

When I hear about films like this I harken back to Harold P. Warren, who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Manos: The Hands of Fate, which has become quite infamous as one of the worst movies ever made, but also started as a bet where Warren, being a local salesmen, bet famous screenwriter Stirling Stilliphant, who was in the El Paso, Texas area scouting for locations for an upcoming film, that he could direct a horror movie that could be just as good as anything Hollywood could churn out. Of course the results where abysmal, but you can’t help but feel that the cast and crew here were equally in over their heads.

On the positive side it starts out a heck of a lot better than the Warren film, which had extended shots focusing on the passing Texas countryside for no apparent reason and got visually boring quite fast. The excuse for this was that Warren had expected to shoot the opening credits over this, but for whatever reason it got botched leaving a lot extraneous and pointless footage. Here though they get it right with a nicely edited bit showing the kids driving in a car while the credits and music play over it. In fact the editing is quite good and helps equalize the cheap video look that was done via a VCR camera. The dialogue is also well done as director Boggs was smart enough to allow the teens to paraphrase their own lines to make it sound natural and thus the characters come-off as more believable than in most other bigger budgeted horror flicks, so we’ll score one for the Okies on that.

Unfortunately everything else is pretty bad. The big problem is that not enough happens. For a film with Blood in its title you end up seeing very little of it. There’s a quick killing at the beginning, which doesn’t show much gore, and then another 48 minutes before you see another one. There’s a teaser death where you see a body floating in a lake, but it turns out to being just a prank. I realize other 80’s slasher flicks would sometimes employ this, but when you’re a cheap production you can’t play with the audiences expectations like that and you got to get to the gore and violence pretty quick to hold their interest. Spending almost 20-minutes watching the kids go water skiing turns the whole thing into a snooze feast and it’s very unlikely anyone is going to want to stick with it after that.

Spoiler Alert!

The killings, once they finally get going, aren’t impressive and all done by a guy who doesn’t look frightening at all and has no distinguishing features to make him interesting. The knife he uses is quite small and having him use a sword, or ax, or something big and sharp would’ve elicited more terror. The reason for why he goes on a killing spree is that apparently he sold the house to the new owners, but they ended up ‘not paying for it’, but how does someone take possession of the home if no money transaction takes place? You can’t really ‘sell a home’ if no actual sale happens.

The ending is confusing too as the killer’s body disappears and then it gets intimated that he reappears inside the ambulance that’s taking the injured teens to the hospital though we don’t really see this as all that gets shown is the ambulance driving away with laughter in the background. The final sequence becomes almost surreal as the killer magically reappears at the home site only for him to see all the water in the lake drained out. Apparently this was, as the closing credits intimate, an ‘act of God’, but what does it have to do with the story?

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Runtime: 1 Hour 22 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Tim Boggs

Distributor: United Home Video

Available: DVD, Fandor, Plex, Tubi, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with a rural setting, Slasher/Gore

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Poltergeist III (1988)

Posted on October 8, 2023 | 2 comments

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Ghosts haunt a skyscraper.

Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) has been sent away by her parents to Chicago so that she can live with her Aunt Diane (Nancy Allen) and her husband Bruce (Tom Skerritt) along with Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) Bruce’s teen daughter from a previous marriage. Carol Ann is told that this is just a temporary set-up while she attends a school for gifted children. The school though is more of a therapy center for kids with emotional issues and run by Dr. Seaton (Richard Fire), who doesn’t believe Carol Ann’s stories about seeing ghosts and thinks she’s making it up to get attention and has some sort of ability to create mass hypnosis to get others to believe it too.  Soon after moving there the evil Reverend Kane (Nathan Davis) returns and begins terrorizing Carol Anne by appearing in mirrors as he continues his attempts to bring her back to the other side.

In another example of a sequel nobody asked for writer/director Gary Sherman, who had some success helming horror flicks early in his career that gained a cult following like Dead & Buried manages to inject an interesting vision. Moving the setting away from a suburban home and into a city skyscraper was a good idea as the story needed to progress somewhere and not just be a rehashing of things again and again in the same place, or one that looks just like it, would’ve give the whole thing a very redundant quality. Visually it looks sharp, I especially liked the scenes with frozen ice, with the special effects done live and not matted onto the film print later on like in the first two. The use of the mirrors, which are used as sort of window to the other dimension where the evil spirits reside, does offer a few jolts.

I liked that O’Rourke reprised her role and she gives an excellent performance, though she’s not seen all that much as she gets kidnapped and taken to the other side, which forces others to go after her just like in the first two installments, but it’s fun seeing her grow into a more accomplished actress who can handle broader speaking lines and able to hold her own in a wider variety of dramatic situations. The only negative is her visible swollen cheeks, the result of cortisone treatment shots that she was getting due to a misdiagnosis of Crohn’s disease, which gives her a chipmunk type look.

Zelda Rubinstein also reprises her role as Tangina, but like in the second installment, isn’t seen enough and it’s disappointing when she goes away. Davis takes on the role of the Reverend when Julian Beck, who played the role in Part II, died, but the character is only seen sporadically and doesn’t have all that much of a presence and an effective horror film needs a villain, whether it’s in human, spirit, or monster form, with adequate screen time to build tension and here that’s just not the case.

The storyline starts to become derivative of other better known horror flicks especially the use of the possession theme where we have an evil Carol Anne running around tricking everyone that she’s the real one, but isn’t. Her transformation into a devilish ghoul resembles a cheap imitation of Linda Blair from The Exorcist. I admit the first time it’s done it caught me off guard and was good enough to elicit a minor jolt, but then they go back to it too often where it becomes boring and predictable. The shots showing Carol Anne being spotted running away around corners and through doorways while wearing a red pajama suit is too reminiscent of Don’t Look Now, a Nicholas Roeg directed classic that dealt with parents searching for their missing young daughter and would occasionally spot her, or what they thought was her, running around street corners and through doorways in Venice while also wearing a bright red piece of clothing.

The biggest mistake though was that the reins weren’t fully handed over to O’Rourke as she was the only real carryover from the first two. Rubenstein too should’ve been given more of a part, but in any case the action should’ve followed Carol Anne all the way through and having it instead cut over to Skerrit and Allen’s characters and making them the main stars isn’t interesting at all. They come-off as quite bland and benign and just thrown in because Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams didn’t want to recreate their roles. O’Rourke by this stage had enough acting ability that she could’ve carried it and the audiences would’ve excitedly been there with her the whole way, but unfortunately during the second and third act she gets relegated to cameo status while Skerrit and Allen take over, which are people we care nothing about and makes it seem like a completely different type of movie entirely.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: June 10, 1988

Runtime: 1 Hour 38 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Gary Sherman

Studio: MGM/UA

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Horror, Movies that take place in Chicago, Sequels

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Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

Posted on October 7, 2023 | 1 comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Family gets terrorized again.

The Freeling family (Craig T. Nelson, Jobeth Williams, Heather O’Rourke, Oliver Robins) has abandoned their old neighborhood in Cuesta Vista where they were traumatized by ghosts and into the house of Diane’s elderly mother Jess (Geraldine Fitzgerald). They hope here their lives will return to normal, but at the site of where their old house once stood a ground crew digs up a cave filled with the skeletal remains of people that were lead by the Reverend Henry Kane (Julian Beck) an insane man who lead his followers to death many years prior because he proclaimed the world was going to end. His spirit though remains restless and he appears in human form to go after Carol Ann by calling her through her toy telephone. The Freeling parents realize they are no match for him, so Taylor (Will Sampson) an Indian shaman is brought in to protect their daughter as well as giving the father tips on how to fight-off the evil spirit.

As sequels go this one isn’t too bad. The script still has enough interesting twists to keep it intriguing and the special effects are greatly improved. I also liked here that we get to see the other world where the spirits live something that was woefully missing in the first. One of my favorite moments is when Steve swallows some Tequila that has a worm in it that is possessed by the spirit of the evil Kane. The worm then grows inside Steve’s body until he has to vomit it out where it continues to grow into large proportions, which is a genuinely freaky moment. Some other good scenes are when Diane gets swallowed up into the ground by skeletons reaching up from the dirt and pulling her in and watching Robbie, the son, get tied up by the metal of his braces is really cool too. It’s unlikely there would be enough metal from his braces to cover his whole body like it does here, but the segment still gets points for its creativity.

The characters though aren’t quite as interesting. The women had stood out in the first installment, but that all gets lost here. Jobeth Williams, who played this groovy, adult flower child who was open to new things and experimenting around, is much more of a subdued mom here behaving like a typical suburbanite mother would, which is boring. O’Rorke is still good and so is Rubenstein though her role is greatly diminished and I wasn’t sure why the Indian character needed to be brought in at all as I would’ve thought Zelda could’ve handled those duties. Sampson’s performance is good, but his role just seemed unnecessary. Domonique Dunne, who played the older daughter in the first one is nowhere to be seen due to her having died in real-life at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, but I still thought they should’ve mentioned something even if it was just in passing like she was away in college to help explain her absence.

On the male end Nelson’s part is much more colorful as in the first one he was rather transparent, but he gets some good lines and manages to completely take over the proceedings though I wished it had been a little more balanced between him and Williams. Julian Beck though who plays the evil preacher stands-out the most. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and ended up dying before the production had wrapped, but the illness did help give him a gaunt appearance, which helped accentuate his creepiness.

Logic wise there were a few holes. Having the insurance company completely unaware that Freelings house had essentially gotten eaten-up by the spirits didn’t make sense. I know the idea was that they didn’t want any publicity, but their other neighbors had witnessed the house disappearing too and there’s just no way that someone wouldn’t have leaked that to the press and it becoming a major news story as houses evaporating into thin air in front of many witnesses just doesn’t happen everyday.

Having the boy and girl continue to sleep in the same bedroom looked very off. In the first one they also shared a room, but they were much younger and here the boy already has braces making it look like he’s ready to enter adolescents and he for sure then should be in his own room. The death of the grandmother gets handled in an equally awkward way as the kid wakes up and has no idea what the parents are crying about, but the old woman died in the house he was sleeping in and therefore he should’ve been awakened by the ambulance that came to take her away. In fact we never see the body being removed making it seem that they might’ve just left her there in her bed for all we know and a scene showing the family mourning at her gravesite would’ve been a far more seamless way to have explained (shown) her passing.

Spoiler Alert!

The wrap-up is a bit too lighthearted as it shows Will Sampson driving off with the family’s beaten up car and Nelson chasing after him as they have no other way to get home. The segment though is too comedic and a good horror film should still leave the viewer with a certain bit of unsettling mystery. After all this family had gone through a lot and what’s to say that things were finally really over. The family acts too relaxed when in reality all of them should be going through some form of post traumatic stress. The fact that they act so at ease didn’t ring true as most anyone else would be in a perpetual paranoid state looking over their shoulders every second for fear that the ghosts might have remanifested. A more somber image of them quietly walking away from the sight formerly known as their home with the sound of a wind howling would’ve been more appropriate for this type of story.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: May 23, 1986

Runtime: 1 Hour 31 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Brian Gibson

Studio: MGM

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Ghost Story, Horror, Sequels

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Poltergeist (1982)

Posted on October 6, 2023 | 3 comments

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

‘4-Word Review: Ghosts terrorize a family.

A suburbanite family of five find their idyllic existence suddenly turn frightening when odd, unexplained events begin occurring inside their house. First it’s voices that can be heard coming from their television that only their 6-year-old daughter Carol Ann (Heather O’Rourke) can seem to make out. Then it’s the movement of the kitchen chairs that can glide across the floor without any help. There’s even the shaking of their entire house that they initially attribute to being an earthquake. Things though grow more serious when Carol Ann goes missing after a violent thunderstorm where her voice can only be heard coming through the television. Parapsychologist Martha (Beatrice Straight) and her team of two men (Richard Lawson, Martin Casella) get called in, but they find the conditions too extreme even for them, so instead a short statured spiritual medium named Tangina (Zelda Rubenstein) is hired. She determines that the home is being haunted by spirits who are ‘not at rest’ and may have something to do with the place being built on top of what used to be a cemetery.

The film, which was based on an idea by Steven Spielberg, who also produced, is known more for its behind-the-scenes drama, including the violent and untimely deaths of some of the cast members, which has gotten the production labeled as ‘cursed’, and for supposedly the in-fighting that occurred between Spielberg and Tobe Hooper who was brought in to direct when Steven was contractually unable to due to also directing E.T. From my perspective I can see it going both ways. It certainly has the strong atmosphere of a Hooper flick, but also done in a way so that even children could watch it and still not be too traumatized. Spielberg, who did all the casting and also storyboarded each and every scene, was known to want to make movies that the whole family could see and always wanted to keep his films, even his thrillers, at a PG rated level.

For what it’s worth I found it gripping, despite the slow start, from beginning to end and refreshing that an old fashioned ghost story was being brought back into the mainstream as too many horror movies of that period were slasher flicks, which was hurting the genre. This film emphasizes story and uses both imaginative effects and plot twists to keep it fun and surprising throughout.

Intentional or not the female characters were some of the movie’s stronger elements. O’Rourke of course, who’s become the face of the franchise, is adorable and with her bright blue eyes and blonde hair a certain angelic quality amidst the dark undertones. Rubenstein is a delight as both her height, voice and glasses, which seem to envelope her entire face, makes her presence quite memorable. Straight though is effective too as an elderly woman who at times seems ready to take on the ghostly presence and at other moments quite shaken up by them. Jobeth Williams though I found surprisingly fun as the sort of hip wife/mother who smokes pot and initially finds the weird events that go on more fun than scary. Only the presence of Dominique Dunne seemed unnecessary as she’s not in it all that much and goes off to either her friend’s house, or boyfriend’s through most of it only to conveniently reappear right at the end. Her jet black hair clashes with O’Rourke’s bright blonde, which makes for an odd gene anomaly to have sisters with such contrasting looks though this later gets explained in the book version as Dunne being the father’s daughter from his first marriage.

The special effects are a letdown. The ghostly hand reaching out of the TV-set looked too much like animation as did the very fake looking tornado, which appeared almost like it had been drawn in via black magic marker directly onto the film negative. The flying toys in the children’s room had a bit of an animated quality and the scary tree that sat outside the boy’s window looked too odd and not like any typical tree I’ve ever seen. It’s also disappointing that we never see this other dimension that Carol Ann gets trapped in we observe objects going in and out of it, returning with some sort of weird red substance that resembled raspberry jello, but the viewer really should’ve experienced this unique other world with the characters that go through it.

The TV stations signing off for the night while playing the National Anthem is something today’s audiences won’t understand as everything is 24-hours, but in the old days stations only broadcast during the day, but even here it’s a bit questionable. I was around in the early 80’s where most stations, especially in the big cities, were already running programs 24 hours a day making the sign-off angle, which is very prominently featured, dated even for then. Also, when stations did sign-off as I remember it would be a black screen that you’d see and not just static like it gets portrayed here. There was also such thing as cable back then making the prospect of static even less likely and you’d think a family that could afford a nice house like that would also have enough for a cable box.

Spoiler Alert!

The ending is a bit problematic as it has the two young kids returning to sleep in the bedroom that was once haunted. This is because Tangia states that the home has been ‘cleaned’ of the ghosts, but turns out not to be true. In either event I can’t imagine an adult let alone a kid being able to relax, or even step one foot in a room that had so many freaky things happen in it. I’d think the parents would be too nervous to even let them go in, so seeing the kids back in there like what occurred before was ‘no big deal’ proves unrealistic to say the least.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: June 4, 1982

Runtime: 1 Hour 54 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Tobe Hooper

Studio: MGM

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Cult, Ghost Story, Horror

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My Friends Need Killing (1976)

Posted on October 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

friends1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Vet. stalks war buddies.

Gene (Greg Mullavey) is a Vietnam Vet. who’s come home after the war, but finding it hard to readjust to civilian life. He’s plagued by memories of not only the war, but some of the crimes that he and his comrades did while over there including the annihilation of a village and gang rape of a woman. He decides that the only answer is to seek out dark justice by visiting with his old buddies one-by-one in their homes and then using the opportunity to kill them when the time is right. Gene’s wife Laura (Meredith McRae) is aware of her husband’s tormented dreams, but not his homicidal plans. She works with Dr. MacLaine (Greg Morris), a psychiatrist, to track Gene down in order to stop his madness and get him the mental help that he needs.

In 1969, Paul Leder, whose attempt at an acting career had stalled, decided to take a stab at directing, which initially didn’t fare any better. His first feature, where he had Mullavey also star, was the absurdist comedy Marigold Man, about a guy named Harry who dreams of planting marigolds from coast to coast, which quickly fell into obscurity. He then hit on the idea of doing a horror film, which he felt, if done right, could do well under the low budget constraints. His first feature, which also had Mullavey in a supporting part, was I Dismember Mama, that fared a bit better than the comedy and enough to gain a cult following. Leder then reverted back to doing two comedies including the notorious Ape, an attempted parody of King Kong, that became a big embarrassment before eventually returning back to horror with this film.

On the surface it’s not bad given the limitations. It’s obviously inspired by Bob Clark’s Dead of Night, that had come out 5 years earlier and had a similar theme of a war vet. unable to get the horrors of what he went through out his mind. That one won some critical acclaim and a cult audience while this one fell through the cracks. For Paul Leder standards though it’s surprisingly watchable. Mullavey gives an effective performance where you sympathize with the man and his torment even as he goes through with his killings. The flashback sequences have a haunting quality and the film is, if anything, adequately gritty.

The killings though are where things get off-kilter. A few of them are disturbing like when he ties up one of his old buddies, while also shooting him in the arm, and then forces him to watch the rape of his wife before killing them both. Some of the others though fail to have the same dark punch. In one instance all he does his hand his old war friend a bottle of pills and tells him to swallow them, which isn’t exactly tense, while another moment has him helping to deliver a woman’s baby. There’s also a scene where Mullavey ties up his victim and then has the man’s arm poked with a syringe where he slowly bleeds to death, but horror movies work better when we see the action of him attacking the other man and just cutting away to him already tied-up misses the potential for excitement.

McRae, who at the time was Mullavey’s real-life wife, gives a poor performance particularly her anemic sounding crying. The use of music is bad too. During the killings it reflects the pounding score you’d expect in a horror flick, but in-between it has a melodic quality that you’d hear in a breezy comedy. The editing, which was also done by Leder, is choppy and too many slow parts in-between the violence. The film, which has a few interesting moments, fails to hold interest all the way through. It’s too talky with a lot of extraneous dialogue that could’ve been cut out. Having the only sound being the voices that Mullavey hears inside his head would’ve worked better.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: December 10, 1976

Runtime: 1 Hour 13 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Paul Leder

Studio: Cinema Producers Center

Available: DVD-R (dvdlady.com)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Horror, Low Budget, Obscure Movies

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Horrorween Part 12 (2023)

Posted on October 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

horror

By Richard Winters

My Rating: To Be Determined.

4-Word Review: Horror movies all month.

It’s that time of year where we here at Scopophilia dive into the horror movie vault and bring out all those creepy classics (and not so classic) gems (and non-gems) from the 70’s and 80’s. Each day we’ll strive to bring you a new horror flick for review some you may have heard of and others you most likely haven’t. This year we’ll get into the ones that spawned sequels and also a lot of European horror not only from England and Italy, but also an experimental oddity from Germany. We’ll even explore Asian horror looking at 2 from Japan including a vampire one. Yes you read that right a Japanese vampire flick. If that doesn’t pique everyone’s interests then nothing else will. The fun and chills begins tomorrow and runs all the way through to the 31st where we will then return to our regularly scheduled programming.

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