Category Archives: Slasher/Gore

Sisters (1972)

Posted on October 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

sisters

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Model has evil twin.

Danielle (Margot Kidder) is a young French-Canadian women from Quebec who aspires to be a fashion model and actress. She takes part in a TV-show styled after ‘Candid Camera’ where unsuspecting people find themselves caught up in a prank, which is where she meets Phillip (Lisle Wilson). The two go out on a date, but while at the restaurant she gets harassed by Emil (William Finley) her ex-husband. Then when they get back to her apartment Phillip overhears her arguing with another woman, which Danielle says is her twin sister Dominque. Since it is both of their birthdays Phillip decides to go out to get them a cake, but when he returns he gets viciously stabbed by the psychotic Dominque, but just before he dies he’s able to scribble the word ‘help’ onto the window with his own blood that Grace (Jennifer Salt), a journalist that resides across the street, sees. She immediately calls the police, but when they arrive into Danielle’s apartment there’s no sign of a body, or a struggle and Grace gets written-off as being a kook whose been imagining things, but she refuses to relent and begins her own investigation where she uncovers some dark details about Danielle and her sister who were once conjoined.

This was writer/director Brian De Palma’s first attempt at horror after completing many successful comedies that had gained a cult following. The story was inspired by real-life conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova who’s sad upbringing where they were taken away from their mother and had abusive medical experiments done on them at a secret hospital in the Soviet Union, and which was chronicled, much like in the movie, in a story in Life Magazine in 1966, which after reading it De Palma couldn’t get out of his head. Visually it’s excellent with great use of editing and superior score by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, who was semi-retired at the time, but enjoyed the script so much that he agreed to be the composer.

Many of De Palma’s famous directorial touches are apparent including his use of the split-screen. While it’s been used, and some may say overused, in many films from that era, it gets worked to perfection as we get to see Danielle and her ex busily cleaning-up the crime scene while Grace gets held up by the detectives and they’re not able to go into the apartment right away. My only complaint here is that with the blood splatter all over I’m just not sure they would’ve been able to wipe it all away in such a short time frame, basically about 8 to 10 minutes, which should’ve more likely taken them several hours. Not showing the clean-up and having Grace and detectives arrive to find the place spotless with no body would’ve actually added more intrigue and thus in this case the use of the split-screen, while done adequately, I don’t think was needed.

Spoiler Alert!

The script leaves open a fair amount of loopholes, for instance we see Danielle walk into a bedroom and the shadow of her head on the wall along with another one, which is supposed to represent Dominque’s, but we learn later that Dominque died years early during the surgery to separate them, so we’ve should’ve only seen one head shadow and not two. Also, Danielle is told point-blank by Grace that she’s been spying on them from across the street, so you’d think later that she and Emil would make damn sure to close the blinds on their windows when they try to remove the sofa, which has the dead body inside, but instead they continue to leave the shades wide open and allow Grace, now back in her own apartment, to continue to peer in while the couple show no awareness to the possibility and don’t even bother to look out the window to see if they can catch Grace looking in. Another head-scratcher is why there was no blood splatter on Danielle’s clothing, since she ultimately is the one that killed Phillip, when Emil walks into the apartment.

The most confusing thing though is the ending in which Grace becomes hypnotized while inside a mental hospital and begins to see herself, through a long dream sequence, as being Dominque and attached to Danielle. When I first saw this, back in the 90’s, I thought it meant that Grace was the long lost twin and that they had been separated years earlier. While Grace doesn’t look exactly like Danielle most twins don’t, and she was still around the same age, hair color, and body type, so it seemed like a legitimate explanation and I wouldn’t blame anyone else who came to this same conclusion. Apparently though that’s not the case as Grace comes back out of it only convinced, through the hypnotism, that she didn’t see the murder of Phillip, but I felt they should’ve taken it one step further by convincing her that she was Dominque, whether it was true, or not, and then brain washed to take credit for all the murders while Danielle could then get off scot-free and this would’ve then been the ultimate twist.

Granted Grace’s character is shown as having a mother (Mary Davenport), but the script could’ve been rewritten to have her taken out and Grace could’ve instead been portrayed as being an orphan, or adopted, which could’ve left open the possibility. In either case the dream segment, which is creepy and stylish done, would’ve had more of a payoff then it does had it taken this route.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: November 18, 1972

Runtime: 1 Hour 33 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Brian De Palma

Studio: American International Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray (Criterion Collection), Amazon Video

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Cult, Horror, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with a Hospital setting, Slasher/Gore

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Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989)

Posted on October 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

sleepaway3

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Angela commits more murders.

When Maria (Kashina Kessler), who has the words ‘milk’ and ‘shake’ tattooed to her breasts, goes off to camp, she is impeded by a truck driven by Angela (Pamela Springsteen) that runs her over and allows Angela to take on her identity. Angela then returns to the same campsite where she committed her atrocities from the last film, but which is now run by husband and wife Herman (Michael J. Pollard) and Lilly (Sandra Dorsey), who have turned it into a place to help reform teens with a criminal record and renamed Camp New Horizons. It doesn’t take long though for Angela to revert to her old ways and soon both campers and counselors begin disappearing with a frightening regularity.

While Part II was filming producer Jerry Silva was so impressed with what he was seeing that he immediately authorized another sequel with a script for this one being written while that one was still being shot and then only one weekend for pre-production. This also pushed the filming date back into October where not only were the leaves already changing, but in one segment you can see the breaths of the actors when they speak, which certainly does not give the viewer a summery feel.

The second installment had an okay balance between the black comedy and horror, but this one goes overboard into silly season. The initial killing is especially problematic as it has the victim chased down by a big truck in broad daylight. Yes, she eventually gets run over when she runs into a back alley, but the semi starts barreling down on her when she’s walking on an busy road with other cars, so other people would’ve witnessed what was happening and reported it making the odds of Angela getting away with it quite slim. Also, where does a woman, who was 13 when she got locked up into a mental hospital and been there most of the time until her recent release, find the time and money to learn how to drive a big rig and how was she able to steal one?

While Springsteen’s performance was slightly tolerable in the second installment I felt it got plain annoying here. She isn’t scary and even though this is meant as a dark comedy the villain should still have some frightening presence and she has none making for no suspense at all. She also has her hair dyed blonde, in order to resemble Maria, which has her looking even less like Felissa Rose who played the character in the first one and further way from the original concept making this seem like its own little movie with name-only connections to the other two.

The murders though are an improvement and the only thing that saves it. Part II put no creativity or imagination into the killings, but here we get a couple of memorable ones including Angela roasting marshmallows on a fire that’s burning two of her victims. Killing one of the campers via tying them up to a flagpole and then allowing them to drop many feet to the hard cement below was my favorite though the death by lawnmower, which apparently made some of the women members on the MPAA board, who were hired to give the movie its rating, physically sick, deserves honorable mention. Even here though there’s problems like when Angela stands over the body of a man and swings an ax on him, but then returns to the campsite wearing the same clothes she had, which would’ve been highly doubtful as they would’ve most assuredly been covered with blood splatter.

The only element I found interesting was the appearance of Michael J. Pollard who was at one time starring in Hollywood classics like Bonnie and Clyde and was even given a couple of leading man roles in  studio produced films, but here relegated to low budget direct-to-video fare. He isn’t even in it all that much as his character is one of the first to be killed though he does at least get to make-out with a hot young chick (Stacie Lambert), which may have made it worth it.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: August 4, 1989

Runtime: 1 Hour 20 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Michael A. Simpson

Studio: Double Helix Films

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Freevee, Pluto TV, Tubi, Amazon Video

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Cult, Horror, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with Nudity, Sequels, Slasher/Gore

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Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)

Posted on October 21, 2023 | Leave a comment

sleepaway2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Angela returns to camp.

Angela (Pamela Springsteen), the teen killer in the first film, has now been ‘reformed’ after going through years of shock therapy and sexual reassignment surgery. She gets a job as a counselor at a camp named Rolling Hills, which is 60 miles away from Camp Arawak, the site where she had previously killed all those people. The campers and other counselors have no idea about her past and have a hard time getting along with her and she’s quite strict with no tolerance for anyone who breaks the rules. If someone does draw her ire she quickly dispenses with them by reverting to her old habits and after they’re offed she goes and tells the camp leader, Uncle John (Walter Gotell), that she ‘sent them home’, but when she starts doing this to too many kids everyone’s suspicions begin to rise.

While on the technical end the production is decent the storyline is ridiculous even when taken into context of a black comedy, which is what the filmmakers were hoping for, it doesn’t work. The idea that Angela would be let out of a mental hospital in such a short period of time, just 5 years, after killing so many people is absolutely absurd and would create a national, media uproar. Since the murders were all deliberate and plotted out she most likely would be considered sane and stood trial and sent to a regular prison anyways. Why would any campsite hire her? Don’t these people do background checks? A way to have resolved this would’ve been to shown her at the beginning escaping from the mental hospital, and possibly killing a few orderlies along the way, which would’ve helped the story make more sense and also been an excuse to show blood and guts, which is what audiences for these types of films pretty just want anyways.

While Pamela Springsteen, who’s the younger sister of Bruce Springsteen, may be a quality actress in her other films she does not play the role here in a convincing way. What made Angela so memorable in the first was her penetrating stare, which we don’t see any of. Angela’s inner angst came from her gender issue and not that she was some old-fashioned prude, like in this one, that kills people who don’t live up to her high moral standard. It’s like a completely different person who’s connection to the other one is in name only. Apparently Felissa Rose, who played the role in the original, auditioned for the part, but because she couldn’t convey the one-liners in a humorous way that they wanted they decided to go with Pamela. Personally I feel they shouldn’t have even bothered to make it if Felissa couldn’t have recreated the role, which I felt she had earned the right to.

The killings are not as creative either and in fact look downright pathetic. I’ll give some credit to the death in the outhouse where a victim is shoved into the hole were people relieve themselves and then she struggles several times to come up, with more and more waste appearing on her as she does, but otherwise it’s tacky fare especially the end where they come into an abandoned home featuring all the dead victims that looks too obvious as being mannequins with red paint.  I also didn’t care for the nightmare segment, apparently done to help pad the runtime, that rehashes the killing scenes we’ve already seen and is highly redundant.

Fans of the film say it’s the humor that sells it. Yes, some of it is kind of funny like when the male counselor (Brian Patrick Clarke) smells underneath his arm pits after Angela walks away thinking that the reason she was so cold to him wasn’t because she’s a psycho, but more because of his possibly bad body odor. My favorite though is when Ally (Valerie Hartman) has sex with a man and then only after it’s over does she bother to ask him if he has ‘AIDS’. Yet outside of this it’s a letdown. As sequels go it’s not the worst of its kind, but I would’ve preferred more of a straight horror approach that tried to stay faithful to the first one, both in tone and with the cast.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: February 28, 1988

Runtime: 1 Hour 20 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Michael A. Simpson

Studio: Double Helix Films

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

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Horror, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with Nudity, Sequels, Slasher/Gore

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Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Posted on October 19, 2023 | Leave a comment

sleepaway

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Somebody’s killing the campers.

In 1975 two children are out on a lake with their father when the boat they’re in capsizes. As they are swimming in the water another boat that is being recklessly driven rams into them killing both the father and one of the children. Fast forward to 1982 one of the surviving children, Angela (Felissa Rose), is now living with her eccentric Aunt Martha (Desiree Gold) and Martha’s son Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). Because Angela is very shy Martha has decided to send her off with Ricky to summer camp so that she can learn to socialize better. Once there Angela’s quiet nature causes her to be bullied by the other kids, which soon leads to all sorts of violent deaths amongst both the campers and counselors. The camp owner, Mel (Mike Kellin), wants to keep the deaths out of the press and insists they’re all just been accidents, but while he does this he becomes convinced that it’s Ricky who’s behind it and resolves to teach the kid a very brutal and violent lesson.

Initially this was a low budget film made near the end of the golden age of slasher flicks that was not intended to do all that well as most studios had considered this type of horror film to have gone out of style. The critics at the time savaged it, but since then it has gained a strong cult following and considered even ground breaking for its gay subtext and gender identity roles. Writer/director Robert Hiltzik shot it at a camp in upstate New York that he used to attend when he was growing up. The camp atmosphere is very authentic and I was impressed with how many kids they were able to bring on to make it seem like a genuine camp day with tons of kids running around everywhere and all of them age appropriate to the role versus having older kids over the age of 18 trying to look younger than they are, which is what you get in most other teen flicks. The only caveat is that it was filmed in September/October of ’82 and seeing some of the trees in the background changing colors does not help give off much of a summer time feel.

The film is noted amongst slasher aficionados for its grisly deaths. When I first saw this movie back in the 90’s I hadn’t seen as many slasher movie so I wasn’t aware of how the killings here are much different  than what you usually see. In most other films of this nature the victim dies usually by a quick slash of a knife, or strangulation, which isn’t either creative or memorable, but here you get all sorts of novel deaths. Two of the best is when an overweight man (Owen Hughes) has his entire body doused with scalding water and the throbbing blisters on his skin look realistic. He also doesn’t die, which is unusual because usually the victim passes away without that much of a struggle. The death by bee hive in which the victim has his face covered by hundreds of stinging bees is equally vivid and well played-out.

The acting is impressive too as not only do you get to see Christopher Collet in his film debut, and witness his bare behind in a brief bit, but also Felissa Rose, whose quiet stare is quite penetrating and becomes the film’s most lasting impression. She apparently got the part because during the audition they were asked not to convey any lines, but to simply stare off in space while pretending to eat some candy. Prolific character actor Mike Kellin, this was his last film and he was already dying of lung cancer when he did this, is fun particularly his incredibly unfashionable choice of clothes that bring out the worst styles of the 70’s and are reminiscent of a what a middle aged suburban dad of that era might wear when attending a neighborhood backyard BBQ.

Spoiler Alert!

On the negative end I didn’t find Angela, who we learn at the very end is really a boy, to be able to realistically pull-off the murders that she does. I don’t believe she (he) would’ve had the strength to pull out the chair from underneath a heavy-set man, nor dunk the head of a bigger boy under the water, or be able to force a knife through a metal wall of a shower stall. The argument that she’s really a boy doesn’t work as her (his) body type is quite small no matter the sex and the arms are scrawny. The film does well in coming up with novel deaths, but they should’ve worked harder at thinking up killings that a small fame teen could accomplish and still be in the realm of reality, which I don’t feel these are.

With that said it’s still a cool ending. I enjoyed the weird facial expression that Angela gives off once she’s caught and the camera freezes on it while morphing into a green backdrop. The final song that gets played is creepy too, so all in all the film succeeds though it will require some suspension of belief in order to be fully enjoyable.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: November 18, 1983

Runtime: 1 Hour 24 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Robert Hiltzik

Studio: United Film Distributors

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Freeve, Pluto, Tubi, Amazon Video, 

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Horror, Movies with Nudity, Slasher/Gore

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Blood Lake (1987)

Posted on October 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

blood1

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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Night Game (1989)

Posted on July 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

nightgame1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Baseball score and murder.

Mike Seaver (Roy Scheider), a police detective, is put in charge of investigating a series of bizarre murders where women, some of them prostitutes, are murdered along the beaches of Galveston, Texas after each Houston Astros home game where pitcher Silvio Baretto achieves a victory. There are initially no suspects and it all seems to be a coincidence until Seaver ties the clues together and hones in on the killer while quarreling with Witty (Lane Smith) a state investigator brought in to help him with the case, but who has opposing ideas as to how to approach it.

The story is a strange mixture wanting to feed-off of the slasher films of the 80’s while also tying it to a sports themed flick, that was also popular during that decade, but manages to fail on both ends. The killings aren’t imaginative enough to attract a horror audience while the gore is much too graphic for those just looking for a slick thriller and thus both types of viewers will get put-off with this pretty quickly. Fans of sports movies won’t like it either as the baseballs scenes are brief and fleeting. While it’s kind of fun to see the Astros old color bar uniforms as well as watching actual game footage shot inside the old Astrodome, which at one time was coined ‘the 8th wonder of the world’ it hardly seems necessary especially since a TV-movie ‘Murder at the World Series’, which came out in 1977, had a very similar storyline that also included the Astros and Astrodome making this seem like a cheap, uninspired rip-off of that one.

The plot at least, while still dated especially on the technology end, takes a realistic approach to being a detective and how hard it is to find clues that can help piece the case together and lead to an actual suspect. Scheider, who was 57 at the time and looking it, manages to give it some energy and this was helped no less than by casting Richard Bradford as his nervous and pensive superior whose white hair and old school ways helps to offset Scheider’s wrinkles despite the fact that Scheider was in real-life 2 years older. The side stories though dealing with Smith coming in to butt heads with Roy doesn’t get played-up enough to be interesting and Scheider squabbling with his mother-in-law over a color TV that he got her drags the pacing down and hurts the tension of the mystery, which is where the sole focus of the script should’ve stayed.

Spoiler Alert!

What really ruins it though is the stupid ending. For one thing people in big cities, and Houston is the 4th largest one in the US, get murdered all the time, so having a cop able to somehow tie it to when a pitcher wins a game was too much of a stretch as technically there’s likely to be a murder happening somewhere whenever ANY pitcher wins a game and there needed to be more direct clues, like the killer sending cryptic notes to the police, or media, stating what his intentions were for it to realistically come together for the investigators.

The man playing the murderer, Rex Linn, who is supposedly a former pitcher who got cut from the team and then ultimately loses his hand in an accident and has it replaced with a hook, looks more like an disheveled, beer bellied truck driver who never played a sports game in his life. His motivations, to kill someone whenever the pitcher, who replaced him on the rotation, wins a game, in order to steal media attention away from the new pitcher’s success, is poorly thought out. It would’ve made more sense had the disgruntled man gone after the pitcher directly by either threatening his life, or those of his family, or maybe even attempting to kill the general manager, or owner, since they were the ones directly responsible for cutting him instead of no-name hookers who usually don’t get a lot of news attention anyways when they’re killed and thus making the whole premise pretty vapid.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: September 15, 1989

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Peter Masterson

Studio: Epic Productions

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

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies that take place in Texas, Movies with Nudity, Mystery, Police Drama, Slasher/Gore, Thrillers/Suspense

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Horror High (1973)

Posted on October 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

horror1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Bullied teen gets revenge.

Vernon Potts (Pat Cardi) is a geeky teen tormented by the jocks and teachers and who’s only solace is his pet guinea pig that he keeps in a cage at his school’s science lab. However, the cat owned by the school’s janitor Mr. Griggs (Jeff Alexander) keeps trying to get its paws on the rodent and Vernon is forced to constantly have to scare it away, which annoys Griggs as he sees this as harassing his pet. One night Vernon comes to the lab to find that the cat has gotten into the cage and injured the guinea pig while also toppling over a bottle of lab formula. While Vernon is removing the cat Griggs enters and attacks Vernon for what he thinks was intentionally injuring his pet. He also forces Vernon to ingest the spilled liquid, which turns him into a homicidal monster where he then proceeds to kill all those that have wronged him.

Up front this should’ve been a movie that got a bad rating. The film stock, even after blu-ray restoration, is quite grainy and faded with the technical aspects being not much better than a home movie. The script by J.D. Fiegelson, whose best known work is the creepy TV-movie ‘Dark Night of the Scarecrow’, is awkward mix of Willard and ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ that has all the predictable cliches and adds nothing new to the mix. However, I still found myself strangely captivated and never bored even during the slow spots.

Part of why it works is that it’s reenactment of student life is quite accurate. Many movies have attempted to show the high school experience, but many either underplay, or overplay it and rarely get it just right, but this is one hits-the-bullseye. Virtually the entire thing gets filmed inside the school with only a few short scenes done outside of it. Normally I’d consider this problematic as it makes the characters one-dimensional since we only see them in one type of setting, but here it clicks. I’m not sure if the lack of variety for the settings was intentional, or because of economic restraints as this was clearly done on a shoestring, but like with Heathers, it symbolizes how with teens the high school is their entire world and what happens outside of is ignored and not considered important.

The special effects are surprisingly gory and this film initially suffered an X-rating because of it. While there are a few jump cuts particularly with Vernon’s attack on Griggs, the killings look overall realistic and quite bloody though it seemed strange to have classes continue with students attending them like everything is normal even as the murders of the faculty mount and become more grizzly. Today classes would be halted, grief counselors sent in, as students immediately removed by their panicked parents. The only thing on the effects end that isn’t impressive is when Vernon turns into the monster where we never see his face, which remains shadowy and may seem like a cop-out to some, but in some way makes it scarier because the viewer is required to use their imagination to fill-in how he may look when in the monster form.

The type of victims are unique too as it isn’t just spoiled, good-looking teens that get offed like in so many other slashers. Here, it’s older teachers as in the case of Mrs. Grindstaff, which is played by Joye Hash, who was apparently only in her early 40’s at the time, but looks much more like she was in her 60’s and even pushing 70. Muscular Dallas Cowboys great John Niland, who plays the gym coach and also another of the victims, also goes against type, as very rarely are big, tough guys a part of the body count and he gets just as frightened and just as severely hacked-up, as if he were a blonde, bikini-clad young women.

Pat Cardi, who was a famous child actor on TV-shows during the 60’s including in the classic episode of The Fugitive’ series entitled ‘In a Plain Brown Wrapper’ which was one of the first shows ever in TV history to advocate for gun safety, is excellent and looking effectively scrawny. This marked his very last acting performance to date as he left the business and went on to create MovieFone an app that lists movie information and showtimes. Austin Stoker also gives an energetic performance as the police investigator and it’s great seeing an African American playing a prominent role in what was otherwise an all white cast. The men who made-up his police staff were players from the Dallas Cowboys squad including future hall of famer Craig Morton.

While the film doesn’t offer anything new it does successfully deliver-the-goods on a horror level, which will most likely be enjoyed by gorehounds into B-slashers.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: September 20, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 25 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Larry N. Stouffer

Studio: Crown International Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray

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Posted in 70's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Horror, Low Budget, Movies that take place in Texas, Slasher/Gore

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The Grapes of Death (1978)

Posted on October 26, 2022 | Leave a comment

grapes

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Zombies created by pesticide.

The film opens with a shot of immigrants spraying grapes with a pesticide in a vineyard owned and run by Michel (Michel Herval). One of the men (Francois Pasal) complains of a pain on the side of his neck, but Michel insists he keep working and quit complaining. The film then cuts to two women riding inside a train car, one of them is Elisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) who’s the fiancee to Michel and coming to visit him. Once the train stops the man from the vineyards complaining of the pain walks onboard and proceeds to kill Brigitte (Evelyne Thomas) who was inside the train bathroom. He then takes a seat in the train car that Elisabeth is in, but once she notices the growing tumor on the side of his neck and then the dead body of her friend she runs screaming off the train. She then finds herself all alone in deserted town where everyone has the same type of tumors growing on their faces and all seem intent on trying to kill her.

This was the first mainstream horror film directed by Jean Rollin and credited as being the first gore film ever to be made in France. Rollin had made several experimental vampire flicks in the early part of the decade, but they had failed to catch-on and lost him a lot of money, which forced him into directing porn movies under the pseudonym of Michel Gentil. By the late 70’s he had made enough money with those that he was ready to jump back into doing another feature film, which for a zombie story is unique as the zombie’s here are fully conscious and well aware of what’s happening to them and kill out of a sense of rage. The film is also, for a horror movie, very quiet lacking the traditional pounding music score and instead has extended moments of near silence especially during the town scenes, which helps accentuate the creepiness.

Rollin hired an Italian production company to do the special effects, which are quite impressive. Normally I’m on here complaining how fake the effects look in most other low budget horrors, but here I was amazed with how realistic they were. The scene where a woman gets stabbed with a pitchfork while lying on a table and then continues to breath with it still in her really looks like the blades went right through her body. Another scene dealing with the decapitation of a nude woman (Mirella Rancelot) and then having one of the zombies carry the head around is one of the most graphic of its type. I did have some issues with the tumor make-up. On the train car where Elisabeth watches it grow on the side of the man’s head was cool, but on the people in the town it starts to look like smeared pizza and I wanted to see a shot of someone that had it all over their face instead just on a little part of it.

While Rollin stated that he admired the acting of his leading lady I felt she was the weakest link. Her fearful expressions and screams are great, but her performance otherwise is one-note. Part of what made Night of the Living Dead so great was the contrasting personalities of the main characters and I felt there needed to be that here. Having the two men (Felix Marten, Serge Marquand) enter near the end of the second act to help Elisabeth fight of the zombies is a great addition, but I had wished they came in sooner. I also didn’t like the way Elisabeth conveniently finds a gun inside the car she has just stolen, which she is able to use in the nick-of-time to shoot the zombies, but what are the odds? The gun should’ve been introduced earlier, perhaps as something she brought along with her at the beginning for her trip, and not just thrown-in haphazardly.

The twist at the end is not satisfying leaving the viewer feeling down and depressed when it’s over when a robust showdown was needed. I felt too that the reason for why the people were turning into zombies, which was the pesticide, should’ve been kept a mystery until the very end. Instead of opening it with the men spraying we should’ve seen the townsfolk going about their day in a normal fashion, which would’ve made a striking contrast to when Elisabeth gets there and they’re all crazy. Maybe a shot of a man spraying in the background behind the people talking could’ve been done as a little hint, or clue, but as it gets done here it’s too obvious when a subtle approach was needed.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: July 5, 1978

Runtime: 1 Hour 25 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Jean Rollin

Studio: Rush Productions

Available: DVD, Blu-ray

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Foreign Films, French Films, Horror, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Slasher/Gore, Zombie Movies

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Torso (1973)

Posted on October 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

torso2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Strangler stalks college students.

Jane (Suzy Kendall) is a British student attending college in Italy where a rash of grisly murders amongst the female coeds is keeping everybody on edge. The killer’s modus operandi is a red and black scarf that he uses to strangle his victims. Jane’s friend Dani (Tina Aumont) fears that the maniac may be Stefano (Roberto Bisacco) a young man who’s been harassing her for a date and won’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer. To get away from the terror Jane and her girlfriends decide to go to a villa in the countryside, but find that the killer strikes again, in their home, and with Jane hobbled with a sprained ankle, she’s unable to get away and must use her creative wits to escape.

Horror director Eli Roth has hailed this as being his favorite giallo and a major influence to his Hostel movies, but in retrospect it doesn’t have all that much to distinguish it. Despite its lurid title the emphasis is more on the mystery featuring a cast of lonely men who seem to lack quality social skills to go out with women and instead long for them from afar while also harboring dark violent sexual fantasies of what they’d like to do to them if they could, making this more than anything a forerunner to what’s become known as incels (involuntary celibate) today.

Director Sergio Martino captures Perugia, Italy and its many old and scary looking buildings nicely. The build-up to the murders where the victims find themselves alone in a dark,desolate area of the city, or in one instance an isolated forest, are some of the film’s best moments and could’ve been played-up more.

The deaths themselves though are uninteresting. The average time for a person to die from strangulation is 3 minutes and up to 7 to 14 seconds before they’ll pass-out, but the victim here falls over dead after the flimsy scarf is put around her neck for only 3-seconds, which all looks quite fake. The female victims never, ever fight back and just stand, or lie still and scream loudly, but do nothing else. Police will usually look for scratches on suspects as a sign that the victim fought for their life and there will be defensive wounds on the victim’s arms and hands too, so for the victims here not to attempt any physical defense looks rather pathetic. Some may say that back in this era it was considered more ‘tasteful’ to have the killing get over with quickly and watching someone try to fight-off the attacker would be prolonging it too much, but I wondered if this was also an attempt to feed-in to the male fantasy where once a man decides to make his move the females are virtually ‘helpless’ and must just passively accept their fate.

The special effects are threadbare as well. The close-ups of the knife cutting into the victim’s body has a lighter tone of skin color than the full-shots of the victim making it quite obvious that the close-ups are that of a mannequin. The scene where a car’s bumper crushes a man’s skull against a wall looks realistic enough, but then a few seconds later it cuts back to a shot of the victim and his skull is perfectly intact with only some blood running out of his nose even though the previous shot made it look like his head had been busted in half.

Spoiler Alert!

The third act in which Suzy Kendall sleeps through the murders of her friends downstairs and then awakens to find herself alone in the house with the killer still present is the only time it actually gets intense. Having her quietly observe him cutting-up her friend’s limbs is genuinely horrifying and watching her try to come-up with creative ways to escape is intriguing, but then having a male doctor swoop-in and fight-off the killer for her was disappointing as this was her story and she needed to be the one to find a way to take down the killer herself.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: January 4, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 32 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Sergio Martino

Studio: Interfilm

Available: DVD, Fandor, Tubi

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Posted in 70's Movies, College Life, Cult, Foreign Films, Gay/Lesbian, Horror, Italian Films, Movies with Nudity, Mystery, Slasher/Gore

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Grotesque (1988)

Posted on October 12, 2022 | Leave a comment

grotesque

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Punks versus deformed boy.

Lisa (Linda Blair) invites her friend Kathy (Donna Wilkes) over to her remote parent’s cabin for the weekend to help her get over a recent painful break-up. Lisa’s father Orville (Guy Stockwell) is a famous special effects artist for horror movies and the home is filled with all sorts of spooky masks and props. Unfortunately a gang of punks lead by Scratch (Brad Wilson) invade the home looking for money. Lisa’s parents are brutally murdered as well as Kathy. Lisa manages to get away, but eventually chased down outside in the snow. Yet the punks do not realize that another person is in the home, Patrick (Robert Apisa), who resides in a hidden room. He’s a boy with massive facial deformities that the parents kept in a secret room, but who is able to escape after the massacre. He then chases the punks down and begins offing them one-by-one while the police and Orville’s brother Rod (Tab Hunter) also go after the punks.

Filmed on-location in Big Bear Lake the film has a similar storyline to the Canadian cult classic Death Weekend and while that one had its share of faults it’s still far better than this, which has so many issues it’s had to know where to begin. The overly exaggerated performances of the punks, particularly by their leader who acts like he’s consumed way too much caffeine, is one of the bigger problems. There’s also no explanation for how they manage to find Orville’s very remote house especially since their van breaks down on the way. They try to ask Lisa for help, but she drives on, so who eventually came to their rescue to get them back on the road, or did they walk there and if so that should’ve been shown. It’s also irritating how they’re shown outside the home one second and then magically inside the place the next, but with no explanation for how they get in.

Linda Blair is certainly a fine actress, but she gets partially to blame for this monstrosity since she also co-produced. Donna Wilkes is quite appealing as usual and had she stayed in it the whole way and became the heroine I would’ve given it more points, but once she goes down it really gets bad. I felt the idea of having her sleep in the same bed with Lisa in Lisa’s bedroom looked a bit odd. If they were 8-year-olds on a sleepover that might be fine, but adult women, who were not in an intimate relationship, would most likely want more privacy and the home from the outside looked to have three stories, so you’d think there would be an extra spare bedroom, or two.

I didn’t like the addition of the Patrick character at all. Patrick gets mentioned briefly by Lisa and her mother, but I felt the viewer needed to be more fully aware that there was a secret room and someone in it long before the punks arrive. I didn’t understand why this deformed individual had such amazing strength either. If he had been cooped-up in a tiny room his whole life then I’d think the reverse would be true. His muscles would atrophy due to under use and he’d be weaker than normal instead of stronger.

Spoiler Alert!

The addition of the Tab Hunter character I actually liked. He plays a rugged, macho guy who tries to single-handily hunt down the punks and plays it with a fun style. I could’ve even tolerated the one twist ending that revealed Patrick to be his son and that Hunter himself was deformed and only able to hide it by wearing a plastic, form-fitting mask created by his brother. What I couldn’t stand was the double-twist, which has the whole thing being a movie created by Orville and as everyone is sitting in the theater watching it the film reel inside the projection booth gets messed with by a wolf man and Frankenstein, who then proceed to scare everyone out of the cinema when they walk in.

There’s no way anyone would get scared by two idiots that look to be wearing a tacky Halloween get-up and to give the whole thing a comical ending when the rest of it had been played-up as being serious is quite jarring. Normally after watching a bad movie and I feel disappointed, but in his case I was angry. It’s a genuine insult to have to sit through this and I honestly felt the writer-director should’ve been punished for having the audacity to make it and think anyone would be stupid enough to enjoy it.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: September 9, 1988

Runtime: 1 Hour 29 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Joe Tornatore

Studio: Empire Pictures

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

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Horror, Movies with a rural setting, Offbeat, Slasher/Gore

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