Category Archives: Slasher/Gore

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Posted on October 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

nightmare on elm street 3

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Can’t get enough Freddy.

The last of the Elm Street children find themselves plagued by the same terrible nightmares and are now put into an institution where a grown-up Nancy (Heather Langen kamp) works as a dream therapist. It is found that Kristen (Patricia Arquette) has the ability to invite other people into her dreams, so the entire group goes into her nightmare and takes on Freddy (Robert Englund) as a team.

This third entry into the series proves to be one of the best. It makes the most creative use of the dream idea and shows a nice mix between horror and comedy. I enjoyed the camaraderie between the characters and how they seem to genuinely care and look out for each other. Freddy gets more screen time and has some  great lines. I wasn’t so sure how someone can invite others into her dreams, but for the most part it’s fun.

The special effects are imaginative. I liked the scene where Freddy lifts his shirt and exposes the crying faces of all the spirits of the dead children pushing out of his stomach. I also liked the shot showing the needle marks on the arm of a former heroin addict suddenly coming to life and going through the sucking motion like they are little mouths.

The best moment though is when Dick Cavett is seen on TV interviewing Zsa Zsa Gabor only to suddenly turn into Krueger while making the statement “Who gives a fuck what you think”.  The only negative is that the camera cuts away before we see Freddy slash her with his glove, which would have been icing on the cake.

I stated in my review of the first film in this series that Langenkamp is the best victim in a horror movie, which I think is still true, but Arquette, who makes her film debut here, has to come in as a close second. She has an appealing face and seems very much like a real teenager and you really got to admire her feistiness.  Jennifer Rubin as Taryn also makes her film debut and has one of the prettiest pair of blue eyes you will ever see.

Langenkamp for whatever reason seems a little stiff and awkward in her role although she improves as the film progresses and gets more into the dream sequences. I also didn’t like the streak of white hair that seems to hang down on the right side of her face. I wasn’t sure if this was added in to make her appear ‘more mature’, but it seemed out-of-place, unnecessary and even a bit distracting.

Craig Wasson who is a terrible actor and whose presence seriously hurt Body Double is cast as Neil one of the doctors in the clinic. Here I found him to be a little more tolerable simply for his perpetual looks of either confusion or concern that I think are the only two expressions that he is able to show.

I remember back in 1987 this was THE movie to see and be seen at amongst the teen crowd and how on opening night there was a line of teenagers going around the block to get in and me being the self-proclaimed film connoisseur was right at the front of it. I enjoyed the film very much at the time, but found upon second viewing that it didn’t grab me quite as much.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: February 27, 1987

Runtime: 1Hour 36Minutes

Rated R

Director: Chuck Russell

Studio: New Line Cinema

Available: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant Video

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Horror, Movies with a Hospital setting, Movies with Nudity, Sequels, Slasher/Gore

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Dear Dead Delilah (1972)

Posted on October 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

dear dead delilah

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Greedy family gets hacked.

Delilah (Agnes Moorehead) is the matriarch of a large southern family who brings together the other members to tell them that her deceased husband’s gambling earnings of $600,000 is hidden somewhere on the premises. Desperate and greedy everyone goes on the hunt for it, but find they are being slaughtered one-by-one by an ax-wielding maniac.

As low budget horror movies go this one is about as poorly produced as you can get. This was John Farris’s first and so far last foray behind the camera. He is most famous for authoring ‘The Fury’, which was later made into a hit movie, but as a director he shows no visual ability. The scenes are poorly staged and the sets are illuminated by a bright unfiltered light that makes the center of every room in every scene look like it is under a spotlight. The scenes drone on with over-the-top characterizations of greedy family members and one-dimensional monotonous talk about money. The southern setting seems hooky almost like an amateurish attempt at Tennessee Williams. The scares and tension are non-existent and the film is an embarrassment to anyone having anything to do with it, which includes Bill Justis and his terrible music score.

It doesn’t help matters that the 1986 Embassy VHS issue of this film, which is as of this date the only source where this film can be seen, is terrible. The negative has a lot of scratches and the color is dark and faded making it look almost like someone’s forgotten home movie.

Moorehead, whose last film this was, is the one gem. She wears a brown wig and the only cast member who speaks in a Southern accent that sounds genuine. Her constant frowning facial expression is entertaining and helps enliven this otherwise poor excuse of a film with every scene that she is in.  She shares several scenes with Will Geer who plays her estate attorney. The two co-starred earlier that same year in an episode of ‘Bewitched’ where Geer played George Washington brought back to life by Esmerelda.

The film does boast some graphic murders that seem well ahead of its time in the grisly department. One of the best ones is when a female sitting in a wheelchair gets decapitated and the viewer sees her head lying on the ground next to her still quivering, blood spurting body. The opening sequence has a daughter speaking with her mother while the old lady has an ax sticking out of her head and her severed arm lying on the floor, which the daughter nonchalantly steps over like it is no big deal. The part near the end where a man gets shot through the back of his head and the bullet come out through his right eye socket is impressive as well.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: June 16, 1972

Runtime: 1Hour 37Minutes

Rated R

Director: John Farris

Studio: Southern Star Entertainment

Available: VHS

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Low Budget, Movies that take place in the South, Obscure Movies, Slasher/Gore

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My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Posted on October 17, 2013 | 1 comment

my bloody valentine

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: A Killer with heart.

After 20 years a small Canadian mining town of Valentine Bluffs has decided to hold another Valentine’s Day Dance. The previous ones were canceled due to one ending in bloodshed by a psychotic mine worker named Harold Warden. Now he is locked away so they think it is safe except the killings start happening again and this time the killer tears the hearts out of the victims and delivers them in heart shaped boxes to their relatives.

This movie has a cool looking poster and a deliciously macabre concept and has also attained a strong cult following including Quinton Tarantino, but I unfortunately was not impressed with it. I found it to be excruciatingly boring and a major strain just to sit through. The direction and writing are uninspired creating predictable scenarios and delivering all the expected teen slasher movie clichés with a monotonous regularity.  Nothing is distinctive or scary and it fails to deliver any suspense or tension. It can’t even make effective use of its unique mine shaft setting. The final sequence takes place there, but it is nothing spectacular. The constant delivering of human hearts in candy style boxes soon loses its effect and eventually becomes stupid especially with the corny poems written on the attached note cards.

The young victims are dull and stereotypical. They look like caricatures from all the other slasher horror films except here they speak with thick Canadian accents. One of them looks like an overweight version of Meathead from ‘All in the Family’. There is also a ‘class clown’ type of character that resembles very closely the ‘class clown’ character from Friday the 13th . Here he does nothing but crack dumb jokes and watching him eventually get decapitated is the film’s single most gratifying moment.

The sheriff character is a real loser. He wears a big belt buckle and dopey haircut that makes him appear to be some middle-aged buffoon who has just stepped out of the 60’s. His logic is also flawed. He decides not to warn the town that a killer is on the loose even after he has killed a couple of people as he is afraid it will create too much of a panic, so instead he waits until seven more people die and the citizens all go into a panic anyways.

Usually in even the poorest of horror films the killings and gore can at least keep things entertaining on a tacky level and yet here they are as dull as everything else. Also, since when has going into a dark and dingy cave been considered a great place to have sex? To me it seems absurd and yet several of the teen couples go into the mine for distinctly that purpose.

Remade in 2009.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released:  February 11, 1981

Runtime: 1Hour 30Minutes

Rated R

Director: George Mihalka

Studio: Paramount

Available: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant Video

 

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Cult, Foreign Films, Horror, Low Budget, Movies from Canada, Movies with a rural setting, Slasher/Gore

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Mausoleum (1983)

Posted on October 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

mausoleum 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Beautiful lady is possessed.

At her mother’s gravesite a young Susan feels compelled to go inside a Mausoleum and there she comes into contact with evil spirits who possess her and allow her the ability to destroy those around her that she does not like. She becomes an adult and marries, but her husband Oliver (Marjoe Gortner) begins to suspect that something isn’t right with her and tells Simon her psychiatrist (Norman Burton) who reads up on a book of ancient rituals to rid her of the spirits before it is too late.

This film is a tired rip-off of not only The Exorcist, but all the rip-offs that came after it. The special effects are cheesy and the mechanical direction fails to add anything new to the genre. The brief bursts of horror are intercut with long, drawn out dramatic segments that go nowhere. The heavy-handed musical score is annoying and the budget is well on the cheap side. Susan’s transformations and murders quickly become mundane and redundant.

The acting is especially bad and in some ways the worst part about the movie. All the performers deliver their lines in a hollow sounding, robotic way. Gortner makes for a weak ‘good-guy’. I might be able to handle him as a psycho, but as a lead he is terrible. I was glad to see his character get killed and just wished it had been sooner. LaWanda Page best known as Aunt Esther from ‘Sanford and Son’ TV-Show adds some levity as the couple’s maid and even says a few very choice four-letter words.

This would be a good candidate for Mystery Science Theater 3000, but hard to take seriously on its own. Even lovers of tacky cinema will be challenged to get through it. This is the type of bad movie that gives other bad movies a bad name.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: May 3, 1983

Runtime: 1Hour 36Minutes

Rated R

Director: Michael Dugan

Studio: MPM

Available: VHS, DVD (Region 1 & 2)

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Posted in 80's Movies, Horror, Low Budget, Slasher/Gore

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Chopping Mall (1986)

Posted on October 15, 2013 | 1 comment

chopping mall

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Killer robots on prowl.

A new high-tech shopping mall installs robots as their night security team. They are programmed to apprehend and subdue any intruders, or anyone not showing them their security badge. A bunch of teenagers who work at the mall during the day decide to hang out and party there at night, but find that the robots have run amuck and are now trying to kill them. Locked into the place for the whole night the teens try fighting them off while desperately looking for a way out.

This was writer/director Jim Wynorski’s second feature and the beginning of an almost assembly line string of direct-to-video/B-movie features that of this writing now equals 94 and many of them done under a pseudonym. Wynorski shows some flair by injecting comedy into the proceedings including an engaging opening sequence done over the credits that includes a lot of sight gags and a good up-tempo synthesized score that fits the mood and action. There are also some fun cameos including Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov who appear at the beginning and recreate their roles from the hilarious cult hit Eating Raoul. You can also spot Mel Welles from Little Shop of Horrors fame as well as perennial B-movie favorites Dick Miller as a janitor and Gerrit Graham as a technician.

It was filmed at an actual mall in Sherman Oaks, California, which makes for an interesting backdrop and good authenticity. I also liked how the teens, both the men and women, are very resourceful and come up with different and elaborate ways to combat the robots. The female cast is attractive with a decent amount of nudity. The special effects aren’t bad either. I was impressed with the exploding head sequence as well as the burning body moment. My only quibble in this area is that they were able to break the glass of the storefront windows, which happens several times during the course of the film, much, much too easily.

The biggest problem with the film is that it just isn’t scary or suspenseful enough. The only time there was any real tension is towards the end when the Kelli Maroney character hides underneath some shelves at a pet store and is forced to keep quiet from the lurking robot while a  snake and spiders crawl all over her. Despite some interesting directorial touches it still comes off as mechanical and formulaic and even though the running time is short I still found myself getting quite bored with it. There is also never any explanation for why the robots go haywire, which I felt was a major oversight.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: March 21, 1986

Runtime: 1Hour 17Minutes

Rated R

Director: Jim Wynorski

Studio: Concorde Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Dry Humor, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Slasher/Gore

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

Posted on October 14, 2013 | 1 comment

nightmare on elm street 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: More dreams more Freddy.

A new family has moved into the house on Elm Street where Nancy from the first film once lived and who is now locked away in a mental institution. The family’s son Jesse (Mark Patton) starts to have the same reoccurring nightmares dealing with child murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), but this time Freddy wants to overtake Mark’s entire body and use it as a killing machine to the other youths in the area.

As sequels go this one is okay. I liked the idea that it is a continuation from the first one and not just a reworking of it. Trying to evolve the idea to the next level by having Krueger actually possessing the kid is interesting and the scene where Kruger’s head pushes out of Jesse’s stomach is good. However, it also gets away from the whole dream element that made the first one unique and turns the thing into just another slasher formula. Freddy only appears for 13 minutes during the 84 minute runtime, which isn’t enough as the pace and tension starts to ebb towards the middle. A little too much focus is put on Jesse and his emotional quandary at knowing what this evil spirit is trying to do, which turns it into more of a drama than a horror film. The climatic sequence that takes place in the boiler room where Freddy used to work when he was still alive becomes a bit too melodramatic and not that scary.

I would have liked some flashbacks showing what Freddy was like when he was alive and before he got burned and some history showing what might have lead him into becoming a child murderer in the first place. I also couldn’t help but wonder why Freddy only seems to torment the dreams of the teen characters. Why not Jesse’s parents as well? One could argue that as a child murderer Freddy was only interested in terrorizing young people, but then why not get into the dreams of Jesse’s younger sister Christie (Angela Walsh), which he never does.

Spoiler Alert!

This film also has one of the biggest plot holes I have ever seen and far more glaring than the ones you usually see in most other films of this genre. It all has to do with a party sequence in which Jesse turns into Freddy and starts killing off the other teen attendees. This was not dream, but reality, which was witnessed by many other people including Lisa’s parents. Yet at the end when Jesse somehow returns to ‘normal’ he boards the school bus where his friends make statements to the effect that he should just ‘forget about’ the party incident and everyone is ready to move on, but how does that happen? With the amount of carnage seen by the viewer the police and media would certainly have to investigate and the parents of the victims would want answers. Just ‘forgetting about’ something like that would not be a realistic option and the filmmakers attempts to gloss over what ends up being the movie’s biggest event is patently ridiculous.

End of Spoiler Alert!

Director Jack Sholder spends a lot of time focusing in on Krueger’s glove with its finger-like blades, but the more I saw them the less scary they became. The blades look awfully thin and flimsy and have no ridges or teeth on them. They look so dull that they would barely be able to cut through butter let alone human skin.

I did like that the lead victim was a male this time and it was nice seeing a teen character with sophisticated tastes as I spotted Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ novel laying on his bedside table. The scenes inside the high school and some of his conversations with his friends seemed less cardboard than usual. I also liked that Jesse manages to make friends with Grady (Robert Rusler) who initially comes-off as a stereotypical bully, but the scene where Grady speaks with his mouth full of food during a cafeteria sequence is a bit gross.

Jesse’s dealings with his harsh baseball coach (Marshall Bell) gets a bit over-the-top and forcing the boys to do pushups for hours underneath the hot sun would most likely get him fired especially these days. However, watching him get tied up and stripped naked and then whipped by towels in a sort of S & M death sequence is a highlight.

The story and special effects is still creative enough to raise this above the average 80’s slasher film although not all of them are effective. David Chaskin’s screenplay has some intriguing elements, but ends up biting-off-more-than-it-can-chew and creates too many loopholes to be satisfying.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: November 1, 1985

Runtime: 1Hour 24Minutes

Rated R

Director: Jack Sholder

Studio: New Line Cinema

Available: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant Video

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Cult, Horror, Movies with Nudity, Sequels, Slasher/Gore

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Don’t Go in the Woods (1981)

Posted on October 10, 2013 | 2 comments

don't go in the woods

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Don’t watch this movie.

Excruciatingly bad on all levels this film could very well rank as the worst horror movie/slasher film of all time and given how many bad ones there are that is really saying something. The story, or what little there is of it, features four college-aged hikers, two men and two women, spending an idyllic weekend in the woods of a state park. Little do they know that a madman is on the loose and killing people at a frantic pace. When he catches up with them they run, scream, and then get sliced up.

The acting itself is the real horror. Usually even a real low budget film will at least have a few B-names in the cast whether they were famous at one time and now slumming, or an up-and-coming star, but this has neither. Most of the cast never appeared in another film and watching them perform here will tell you why. Of course having them straddled with stale, stilted dialogue that has no conversational quality doesn’t help and the proceedings would have been better off had director James Bryan allowed them to ad-lib.

The gory special effects are unimaginative and pathetic. It is edited in such a way that it is very hard to follow what exactly is happening to the victims and the majority of it basically entails gobs of red blood splattering everywhere and little else.

The killer is laughable and dressed in a Neanderthal getup that makes him look like a cross between a caveman and what a Minnesota Vikings fan wears to a football game. His cartoonish laugh is annoying and the isolated, decrepit cabin that he resides in seems too reminiscent to Jason’s hangout in Friday the 13th Part 2. There is also never any explanation, even at the very end, as to who the hell this guy is, how he got there, or where he is from.

This film also has one of the ugliest female casts of any horror film I have seen. Usually films of this genre cast a couple of Playboy Playmates or Penthouse Pets in the mix as eye candy to help liven things up during the slow parts, but this one instead has the two female leads with such short haircuts that they almost look like boys. There is also no nudity, which in this instance is probably a good thing.

Outside of a cheesy song played over the closing credits the film lacks any type of music score. In some ways like in I Spit on Your Grave this can help accentuate the cinema-vertite grittiness, but here it makes an already cheap production seem even cheaper. Some music could have helped cover-up the constant sound of birds cooing in the background, which eventually got annoying. The dialogue was also dubbed in during post production, which gives it even more of an amateurish quality.

The director of this one has absolutely no talent or ability. Your average fifth-grader could pump out something better than this.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: September 1, 1981

Runtime: 1Hour 22Minutes

Rated R

Director: James Bryan

Studio: Seymour Borde and Associates

Available: DVD, YouTube

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

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Posted on October 7, 2013 | 7 comments

nightmare on elm street

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Freddy’s in their dreams.

Teenager Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) starts having nightmares about a strange man (Robert Englund) with burned skin, a green and red sweater and wearing a glove with sharp finger-like blades. She finds out that her friends are having the same type of dream and that this man is a former child murderer named Fred Krueger who is reaching out from his grave to attack them.

This movie has been parodied and imitated so much over the years that one forgets what an original idea this was. Writer/director Wes Craven uses stark, shadowy lighting and a distinctive music score to build a great horror atmosphere. The name Freddy Krueger, which he named after a childhood bully of his, is inspired. The scene where he appears in a dark alley as a midget with extremely long arms is a creepy image and possibly the scariest moment in the film. The pace is good and the scenarios imaginative making this well above average when compared to a typical 80’s slasher film and a definite classic.

The special effects are also quite creative and although not completely successful still a lot of fun to watch.  I loved the whole bathtub scene as well as the segment where Glen (Johnny Depp) gets sucked inside his bed, which creates a big hole in his mattress where a giant flow of blood comes gushing out of it and covers the entire ceiling and walls of his room. It may not make complete sense, but cool to look at nonetheless. The part where Tina (Amanda Wyss) gets pushed up the wall and ceiling of her room by an invisible force while being slashed is quite scary to watch despite the fact that when a close-up is shown of her skin getting cut it looks more like it is made a of clay and her bloodied body on the floor appears like it where drenched with a bucket of red paint.

heather 2

Langenkamp is fantastic in the lead and I would nominate her as the all-time best heroine of a slasher film. Her face is beautiful, but also quite expressive and she seems to show genuine emotion and far exceeds the typical cardboard scream queen. Her presence and not that of the villainous Freddy, whose screen time here is more limited than you think, is what carries the film. There is also a fun in-joke when she looks in a mirror and states “God, I look like I am 20”, which is funny since despite playing a teen character she really was 20 at the time of the shooting.  (I realize on the DVD commentary she states that she was 18 or 19, but the truth is she was born July 17, 1964 and this was filmed between June and July of 1984, so she was either 20 or very, very close.)

It’s great seeing Johnny Depp in his film debut. He still looks boyish at 50, but here looks like he is barely 10 years old. It is amusing seeing him play a sort-of doofus and he also gets a good line when after hearing Tina and her boyfriend having sex in the other room states “Reality sucks”.

amanda wyss

I also enjoyed Wyss for her amazing piercing blue eyes, but having her willingly go to bed with Rod (Jsu Garcia) an obnoxious, crass, Fonzi wannabe makes her character seem kind of stupid.

John Saxon is competent as Nancy’s father who also works as the town’s police chief, but I couldn’t say the same for Ronee Blakley as the mother. She was unforgettable with her brilliant performance in Nashville, but seemed to be miscast in every film that she did afterwards and it should probably be no surprise that she hasn’t been in any film since 1990. I also didn’t care for her sprayed-on tan look either.

Despite being an enjoyable film there are a few logical inconsistencies that I feel should be addressed. One is that I would argue it is virtually impossible for someone to know that they are in a dream when they are dreaming even though the characters here do. It should also have been better explained how the Freddy character is able to come out of the dream and into real-life, which gets confusing.  The part where Nancy states that she hasn’t slept in seven nights, but doesn’t show any physical or psychological signs of it are too much of a stretch.  Also, I had to chuckle at the part where Nancy comes home to find that her mother has had bars placed on all the windows of the home for added security, but then doesn’t bother to lock the front door as Nancy is able to walk inside without having to use a key.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: November 16, 1984

Runtime: 1Hour 31Minutes

Rated R

Director: Wes Craven

Studio: New Line Cinema

Available: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant Video

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Cult, Horror, Low Budget, Slasher/Gore

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Graduation Day (1981)

Posted on October 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

graduation day

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Killer slashes track team.

When the high school’s top track star Laura (Ruth Ann Llorens) collapses mysteriously after winning a race strange things start happening to her teammates. One-by-one they get knocked-off by a killer who has a way with swords, but who could it be? Her brash, driven coach (Christopher George) who pushes his players past their breaking point or maybe it’s her strange sister Anne (Patch Mackenzie) who comes back home from the military. The clues and suspects keep piling up, but can the police find the culprit before the entire team gets killed?

Writer Anne Marisse and director Herb Freed teamed up four years earlier to make the very original one-of-a-kind horror film Haunts where they created an excellent atmosphere on a nickel-and-dime budget that is completely lacking here. The scares and suspense even on a cheap level is non-existent. What is even worse is that there is no central character just a mishmash of uninteresting people and scenes that does not help to create any empathy from the viewer nor story momentum.

Freed’s direction is lively to some extent as he does inject some humor and a couple moments were he uses quick flash editing, but his other camera work is off-putting. I particularly got annoyed with a tracking shot showing a person running alongside a moving camera that seemed to make them look like they were on a treadmill, or going unnaturally slow in order to not outrun the camera. This is done several times throughout the film with different characters and the result is very artificial looking. He also features a band named Felony that sings a long seven minute song called ‘Gangster Rock’ that almost turns this thing into a music video. A scene showing a woman being chased by the killer is intercut between the band playing and this takes the viewer out of the film completely and kills what little suspense there already is.

The killings themselves are unimpressive. The scene showing a victim getting beheaded looks too much like it is a mannequin and it is highly doubtful that any sword could make that type of precise and quick cut. Another death features a pole- vaulter  being impaled by a mat full of sharp spikes, which is pretty much ruined when we can clearly seeing that the victim is still breathing even as he lays there with the spikes having gone right through him.

There is logic loopholes as well including having the killer store the Laura’s dead body inside his bedroom and pretend she is still alive, which is too reminiscent to Psycho to be effective or interesting. I also didn’t know how somebody could dig up a dead body from a cemetery and not have the victim’s family, or the cemetery workers not notice. The make-up used to try to make her appear decomposed instead made her look more like she was a member of the KISS rock group.

Michael Pataki hams it up nicely as the school’s beleaguered principal and becomes a scene stealer in the process. Christopher George is so irritable and belligerent with anyone who makes contact with him that he becomes fun as well. Linnea Quigley has a nice topless scene as the horny Delores and Virgil Frye who is the father of Soleil Moor Frye of Punky Brewster fame has a few goofy moments as the school’s incompetent security guard. The funniest though is Patrick Wright as a grungy, overweight truck driver who feels that he is entitled to take liberties with Ann who is returning home from the service simply because he is a ‘taxpayer’.

Sources list Vanna White as the character of Doris, but I didn’t spot her and I don’t feel like going all the back through this cardboard thing again just to see if I can.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: May 1, 1981

Runtime: 1Hour 36Minutes

Rated R

Director: Herb Freed

Studio: IFI

Available: DVD, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube 

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

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The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

Posted on September 3, 2013 | 1 comment

the witch who came from the sea 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: She doesn’t like men.

Molly (Millie Perkins) is a middle-aged woman suffering from dormant, haunting memories of sexual abuse that she suffered at the hands of her father. To compensate she goes through periods of black outs where she murders and mutilates men that she picks up and brings home for kinky sex games.

If this movie was half as provocative and artsy as its movie poster this might have been something. Unfortunately it takes a potentially interesting idea and slams it into the ground with a talky script that goes nowhere. Matt Cimber’s direction is unfocused creating a movie that is slow and filled with endless and redundant conversations. It hardly seems like a horror movie at all and more like a drama and a rather stale one at that. The emphasis is more on the psychological workings of the character, but it is too broad and generalized to be interesting, or intriguing. The brightly lighted sets do not create any type of atmosphere and this was one film where I was looking more at the clock waiting for it to be over than at the screen.

The only time there is any action is during the killing sequences, but like everything else this gets botched. For one thing there are endless conversations during these as well. Cimber adds in an echo effect, which initially has a little pizazz, but then gets over-used and monotonous. The victims are stupid and allow themselves to be put into vulnerable positions that the average person wouldn’t so it is hard to relate to them, or care about their gruesome fates. The liquid used for blood is skimpy and resembles chocolate syrup.

It is interesting initially to see Perkins in the title role as she is most famous for playing Anne Frank in the classic 1950’s movie version. She took this part mainly because her then husband Robert Thom wrote the script and she seems game for it. She even does a few nude scenes and looks pretty good in them particularly the scene where she gets a tattoo along her stomach and chest.

The second half deals with the investigation of the murders and the slow realization by Molly’s friends that she may have a dark and dangerous side to her, which is too contrived and offers no suspense or intrigue. The scenes recreating the Molly’s sexual abuse by her father are hooky and it would have been better had it not been done at all and only implied. The worst part though is that Verkina Flowers who plays Molly as a child has brown eyes while Molly’s eyes as an adult are blue.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: January 2, 1976

Runtime: 1Hour 23Minutes

Rated R

Director: Matt Cimber

Studio: Cinema Release Corp.

Available: VHS, DVD

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Sex, Slasher/Gore

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