80's American Horror Part Twenty-Three

NIGHTDREAMS
(1981)
Dir - Francis Delia
Overall: MEH

In the early 80s, some pornographic films were still being shown in theaters, had production values, had scripts, and occasionally were considered "real" movies at least compared to what the industry's output would become in the VHS days that were lurking shortly around the corner.  Not to make this an adult film history lesson, but Nightdreams along with the follow year's Café Flesh, (both produced by Stephen Sayadian aka Rinse Dream), were rather pioneering pornos that incorporated avant-garde elements with sci-fi and horror.  Discussing the former here, its got enough bizzaro-world qualities to make Forbidden Zone blush, generally unnerving sound design, and atmospheric cinematography.  It also has laughably awful acting and dialog plus the sex scenes are exceptionally boring.  They are also way too weird to actually be stimulating, so that does not help much.  The predicament with watching more ambitiously artistic pornography is in nailing down what type or types of emotions you are supposed to be feeling anyway, which is a confusing exercise.  When it really goes off the rails and indulges in its wackadoo imagination, Nightdreams is as amusing as any piece of surreal work is.  When its not, it is just kind of awkwardly unerotic and unintentionally goofy.  With its powers combined though, it is at least memorable.

THE KEEP
(1983)
Dir - Michael Mann
Overall: MEH

The third full-length from Michael Mann was his only such to be a deliberate horror film, the adaptation of the F. Paul Wilson novel The Keep.  A troubled production that went over budget with an additional nine weeks of re-shoots and had its visual effects supervisor die shortly into post-production, Mann finished a two-hundred and ten minute cut that was drastically shortened down to a mere ninety.  Because of all of this, the film's plot has very little coherency.  Even without knowing the problematic back story, it is impossible not to notice that enormous sections had to have been left out due to how impossibly befuddled it is.  With so many detrimental elements out of his control, Mann makes the most of what he has.  In lesser hands, the material could have been far more ham-fisted, but the director is at least skilled enough to keep the tone under control and the movie comes off less ridiculous than it deserves.  Committed and often overdone performances from familiar faces like Scott Glenn, Gabriel Byrne, Jürgen Prochnow, and Ian McKellen notwithstanding.  The choppy script and shoddy special effects do take quite a tole though and ultimately the respectable elements can hardly overcome them.

CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIETOWN
(1989)
Dir - Dan Hoskins
Overall: MEH

With a title like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, there really is very little room for speculation.  There are chicks on choppers, there is a town, and there are zombies.  Truth in advertising.  Only being distributed by Troma Entertainment, it is filmed competently enough, but it is just as over the top and trying-way-too-hard-to-be-schlocky as any other film made by the company.  Spending practically zero time establishing any kind of plot, the movie cruises through groan-worthy dialog, women acting like testosterone-ridden pigs, bizarre set pieces, and minimal character development if any at all.  For the most part, the effects and actual zombies are pretty pathetic, but that is neither surprising nor detrimental really.  It is best to just sit back and try to laugh at how little the movie cares about doing anything except making you, well, laugh at how moronic it is.  Of course it would not be a Troma movie without an embarrassing moment or twelve and one such scene early on where the head of the biker gang plays an instrumental song on a jukebox and starts singing over it ranks incredibly high on the random as hell, cringe-worthy scale.  Partake of at your own risk, but you may find it intellectually numbing enough to pass an evening with.

80's American Horror Part Twenty-Two

CHRISTMAS EVIL
(1980)
Dir - Lewis Jackson
Overall: MEH

With a title like Christmas Evil, (or You Better Watch Out and Terror in Toyland), one would possibly expect the worst.  As a bit of holiday horror though, it forgoes being a numbingy unoriginal slasher entry and is instead sort of a psychological character study.  There are too many production issues to make it an actual good movie, such as its noticeably almost non-existent budget, cheap soundtrack, lackadaisical pacing, and awkward humor, (awkward because it is difficult to tell how humorous it all is supposed to be in the first place).  Still, it has a subversive charm that often carries enough weight to get by on.  The cast is rather schlubby, but that is kind of the point at least where its main protagonist is considered.  A disturbed, forty-something toy factory worker suffering from a strange, Santa Clause-fueled psychosis that makes him increasingly unhinged around the holidays makes for a premise that would seem absurd under different, more schlocky circumstances.  It comes off more curiously engaging than it perhaps otherwise deserves here though, occasional stiff presentation aside.

THE PROWLER
(1981)
Dir - Joseph Zito
Overall: WOOF

The early 80s was slasher movie ground zero and Joseph Zito's The Prowler, (Rosemary's Killer, The Pitchfork of Death), came out the same year as Bloody Birthday, The Burning, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Deadly Blessing, Don't Go in the Woods, Eyes of a Stranger, Final Exam, Friday the 13th Part 2, Frightmare, Graduation Day, Halloween II, Happy Birthday to Me, Hell Night, Home Sweet Home, Just Before Dawn, Madhouse, My Bloody Valentine, Night School, Nightmare, Scream, (no not that Scream), Strange Behavior, and Student Bodies.  So here we are again with another goddamn one.  Far more boring than even the most tripe and predictable of such films, enormous stretches of time drag on where no killings are happening, no naked boobs are even shown, and characters are just walking around, looking around, and talking around.  So in other words, doing anything they can to stop even some rudimentary tension from building up around such uninspired material.  It is as if Zito studied every other slasher movie that came out that year while forgetting to include, well, ANY other component to boilerplate, compelling filmmaking.  There is even a moment where a police officer is put on hold for several minutes and with no music on the soundtrack, we are just watching and waiting and waiting and waiting and zzzzzzz.......  If anyone can make it through even half of this one not only awake but actually engaged, then they must have watched a different movie also called The Prowler instead.

PRISON
(1987)
Dir - Renny Harlin
Overall: GOOD

This sophomore effort from Finnish filmmaker Renny Harlin, (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Exorcist: The Beginning), was his first horror film and it is a moderately ambitious and successful one.  Shot on location at a soon to be demolished penitentiary in Rawlins, Wyoming, Prison is a big, loud, dumb, explody, and gory schlock-fest where the spirit of a wrongly put to death former inmate makes big, loud, dumb, explody, and gory things happen.  One has to be forgiving with the plot threads that go nowhere and laughable logical gaps, but Harlin stages the violent, evil set pieces very well and the testosterone-ridden, ham-fisted performances are enjoyable instead of obnoxious as could easily have been the case.  A young Viggo Mortensen makes for the typical cool, minding his own business, convict badass while My Cousin Vinnie's Lane Smith does the hardass, hillbilly warden thing to a tee as well.  There are a couple of other familiar faces such as Chelsea Field, (Teela in Masters of the Universe), and Tommy Lister who plays a more benevolent and comparatively less brutish muscleman than usual.  The film is certainly formulaic, but its premise is fool-proof enough and the tone consistently B-movie-esque that it makes for an adequate wasting of a hundred and two minutes if one has the time and the popcorn on hand.

80's American Horror Part Twenty-One

MADHOUSE
(1981)
Dir - Ovidio G. Assonitis
Overall: MEH

Egyptian-born, Italian filmmaker Ovidio G. Assonitis only directed six films in his career and the first of three of them to come out in 1981 was the rather stock slasher Madhouse, (There Was a Little Girl, And When She Was Bad).  Though it is shot well with no signs of budgetary problems undermining anything, it still offers absolutely nothing interesting or unique to the remarkably over-saturated sub-genre.  Every death is completely foreseeable and follows the usual structure of someone walking around quietly and alone before something comes out of nowhere to do them in.  Also, hundreds of doors are locked from the outside, a woman is made to believe that she is imagining things, and the twist reveals that it is someone who likes to act playful with their victims and sing nursery rhymes.  Groan.  Dennis Robertson is as derivative as a psychopath as he is obnoxious and Trish Everly's acting chops as the main heroine leave a bit to be desired.  There are a couple of individual moments that are fairly creepy, (a birthday party reveal and a "what in the hell was that" sound effect coming before a brutal killing), but these are rather rare.  Even if they were not though, they still would not make up for the movie's overall unremarkable nature.

THE HUNGER
(1983)
Dir - Tony Scott
Overall: GOOD

Technically serving as Tony Scott's feature length debut, (since his previous two films chocked in at under an hour each), The Hunger is a loose adaptation of Whitley Strieber's novel of the same name.  It plays like an 80s goth culture wet dream in some parts and a deliberately paced meditation on addiction, loneliness, and the fear of growing old in others.  The erotic elements of vampirism in general are played up as the undead Catherine Deneuve gets a handful of scenes to be naked in slow motion in, with David Bowie and Susan Sarandon no less.  The screenplay is not particularly tight and this seems to be intentional as Tony Scott is far more interested in making the film as stylish as possible.  Generously using non-linear edits and framing literally every shot in only the faintest, greyest of lighting at best, The Hunger is both beautiful and occasionally frustrating to look at.  This is not so much of a problem though as it certainly creates the desperate mood that it should, but one could argue that it may hurt the story and keep it from connecting as well as it could have.  The ending is also a bit clunky, (with a final, forced tag added on by producers which is hardly ever a good idea), but the style over substance approach for the most part works.  If anything else, it is one of the most unique vampire films in a decade that had many excellent ones.

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2
(1986)
Dir - Tobe Hooper
Overall: WOOF

As truly awful of a sequel to an original, seminal horror film as has ever been made, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 makes so many bonehead moves that it is almost impressive.  Tobe Hooper originally was set to merely produce and co-write the script, but he ended up being behind the lens as well.  While this would seem promising, Hooper's decisions here are atrocious.  He apparently was upset that more people did not find any humor in the first TCM, maybe because there wasn't any and that was precisely what made it so suffocatingly disturbing.  So with George Lucas-worthy cluelessness as to what made his own property so great to begin with, he makes this one a comedy.  Well, on paper at least.  In actuality it is almost unwatchably annoying.  Within the first three minutes we are introduced to two cackling college jack-asses more unpleasant than anyone in the Sawyer family and once we are about halfway in, it is just incessant screaming, laughing and headscratchingly "huh?" set pieces one after the next.  Worse still, Hooper chooses to recreate some scenes from the first movie in this more deliberately "funny" tone.  Instead of all of the over the top elements being viscerally frightening due to their cinéma vérité presentation then, here it becomes even worse than any of the hootin' and hollerin' redneck gore garbage that came in the wake of Hooper's landmark initial entry.

80's Animated Czech Horror

KRVAVÁ PANI
(1980)
Dir - Viktor Kubal
Overall: MEH

The last of three films directed by animator/cartoonist Viktor Kubal, Krvavá pani, (Bloody Lady), is a more fairytale-esque retelling of the legend of Lady of Čachtice/Erzsébet Báthory as opposed to a particularly horrific one.  Besides some brief narration at the very beginning to set the scene, there is no dialog present and this makes some of the details going on a bit difficult to decipher.  At only seventy-one minutes, it is more of a problem how painstakingly slow the film is though.  There is very little bloodshed and no standard, vampiric components usually common with other cinematic interpretations of the same source material.  While that is all fine, the elemental animation frequently pauses and with nothing besides sound effects and clashing music to help further guide the story, it struggles regularly to be engaging.  The deliberately simple, largely unemotional style does benefit the material at times, but it still mostly makes it rather impenetrable. 

THE PIED PIPER
(1986)
Dir - Jiří Barta
Overall: GOOD

A largely superb work of stop-motion animation, Jiří Barta's The Pied Piper, (Krysař), is a heavily German Expressionist-inspired adaptation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin folktale.  Produced by Kratky Films, it took six months to research and a year to shoot.  The handmade puppets by Barta are intricately designed to appear almost monstrous, mirroring their gluttonous, unflattering nature.  It is no mistake then that the two characters who appear to have normal, more elegant features are a woman who ultimately suffers at the hands of the townsfolk and a small infant left behind which signifies their innocence.  The music by Michael Kocáb plays a major role as the "dialog" is an intentional jumble of indistinguishable sounds spoken only by the grotesque inhabitants to further paint them as unnaturally villainous.  It is mostly the visual design that steals the show though.  Utilizing real life rats and some lovely two-dimensional paintings with the highly stylized stop-motion animation, the film plays off this juxtaposition while presenting a foreign world that is as fantastical as it is dark.

ALICE
(1988)
Dir - Jan Švankmajer
Overall: GOOD

Possibly the most inventive of any Alice in Wonderland adaptation was by animator Jan Švankmajer, simply titled  Alice, (or Něco z Alenky in its native Czech).  Having made a hefty amount of shorts beforehand, Švankmajer chose the Lewis Carroll novel to interpret as his full-length debut.  The surreal landscape of the famous source material makes for an ideal backdrop for strange stop-motion creations to rather ingeniously come to life.  These are not limited to a gang of skeleton animals with sawdust for guts, possessed dollhouses, thick, fleshy frog tongues, and a comically repetitive tea party including a wooden puppet Mad Hatter getting buttered stopwatches attached to him.  The film is structured not at all like a fairytale, but instead as an avant-garde series of vignettes, none of which follow any particular logic or narrative.  It is further stylistically bizarre that there is no musical score and that all of the dialog, (no matter who authored it), is spoken by Alice who is systematically experiencing the story and reading it all at once.  While Kristýna Kohoutová is the only human actor on screen, puppets, meat, clay, drawings, and live animals all intermingle and Švankmajer's design work overall gives it an earthy, oddly-lived in look that is frequently unnerving.

70's American Horror Part Fifteen

EQUINOX
(1970)
Dir - Jack Woods/Dennis Muren
Overall: MEH

This bizarre, quasi-precursor to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead was the only full-length film from special effects artist and producer Dennis Muren.  Equinox was originally funded as a short titled The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural before independent distribution company Tonylyn Productions came on board and extra footage was shot by Jack Woods to flush it out.  The result is four teenagers, (who look like they are pushing thirty-seven at times due to the several years between shooting schedules), venturing into the woods and finding a book about demons that ends up summoning stop-motion monsters and possessing random people to grow eye-shadow and start growling until someone shows them a holy symbol.  The movie never has a chance of creating an unsettling, moody atmosphere as its budgetary issues and borderline incompetent direction incessantly undermine it.  All of the dialog is not only dubbed, but in the most wordy lead, Edward Connell sounds like he is narrating an education film about sandpaper.  In one scene, he is literally just reading from the unholy tome for what seems like four-hundred and fifty years, filling up screen time in the most sleep-inducing way possible.  The cel animation and stop motion effects by Dave Allen and Jim Danforth are fun though as are the laughably bad, Z-grade schlocky qualities.

WESTWORLD
(1973)
Dir - Michael Crichton
Overall: GOOD

The first theatrically released film by author/filmmaker Michael Crichton features his patented, conceptual trademark of man's hampering with nature, (or in this case technology), backfiring in dangerous ways.  While Jurassic Park may be the comparatively more well known property that used such a backdrop of an amusement park overrun by its exhibits, the initial Westworld spawned a successful franchise of its own, culminating in the HBO series of the same name that debuted in 2016.  The film is an impressive production, combining period costumes and sets with slightly futuristic though contemporary ones.  As the cold, villainous gunslinger android with silver-gleaming pupils decked out in his Magnificent Seven outfit, Yul Brynner makes for a creepy antagonist and also one that sums up the movie's central merging of eras and the unrelenting nature of artificially sentient machinery.  While the film is fun in how it lovingly and narratively showcases its cliches, its dark turn is random and unexplained, though more in a half-baked way than a successfully chilling one.  Whether this is at the fault of Crichton and his relative inexperience behind the lens or not, it is still an enjoyable be it uneven affair with some unrealized potential.

EATEN ALIVE
(1976)
Dir - Tobe Hooper
Overall: MEH

As a follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive, (Death Trap, Starlight Slaughter, Horror Hotel), is a technically slicker production, but a relentlessly annoying and unpleasant one as well.  Two different men attempt to rape the same woman within the first eleven minutes, we see a dog get chomped on by a live alligator, an incessantly rambling-to-himself Nazi hillbilly licks cocaine out of his palm, another woman is beaten and hogtied while her daughter screams in horror watching, and that is all before it even hits the halfway point.  More odd is how eccentric behavior carries over beyond the film's psychotic, reptilian enthusiast motel owner who is clearly meant to be the crazy, horror movie bad guy.  A redneck bar patron does a weird slapping ritual before picking a fight and after that family dog becomes alligator breakfast, its dad starts pointing, screaming, and raving about fuck knows what to his wife before busting out a shotgun in a rage.  The rest of it becomes monotonous as it is mostly foaming at the mouth, yee-haw perverts everywhere and incoherent, Nazi cocaine man wielding a sickle and yelling at people.  Whereas Chainsaw went for the jugular and eventually off the rails with its unforgiving disturbingness and crude production values, the results here are straight exploitative, B-movie schlock.  The film is not scary, it is just loud, messy, and stupid.

70's American Horror Part Fourteen

SCHLOCK
(1973)
Dir - John Landis
Overall: MEH

John Landis' ultra-cheap, $60,000 budgeted Schlock is unsurprisingly an ultra-cheap, well, schlocky filmmaking debut.  Besides being the first movie a then twenty-three year old Landis ever made, it is also noteworthy as one of the very first that legendary monster maker Rick Baker ever worked on.  Both of these historical tidbits aside, the movie itself is a rough watch.  Working within the confines of pure Loony Tunes logic, it rarely achieves the hysterics it sets out for.  People are either running away screaming from the title character, (Landis in an ape costume), staring blindly at him in disbelief, or nonchalantly carrying on as if there is absolutely nothing abnormal about his presence in the first place.  Like many first time, inexperienced directors with a barely adequate budget at their disposal for a feature length product, the pacing is arduous. The experience then is waiting for something actually funny to happen and sadly, nothing ever really does.  Coming from a filmmaker who would later achieve iconic results in horror and comedy, (not to mention parody, specifically which this movie qualifies as), this primarily chalks up to "Well, gotta start somewhere".  For completists only.

GOD TOLD ME TO
(1976)
Dir - Larry Cohen
Overall: GOOD

The follow-up to It's Alive, God Told Me To, (Demon), is probably the most compelling if not altogether best horror movie in Larry Cohen's odd, often frustrating filmography.  The bizarre story which fuses theology, alien abduction, and police procedurals together is only matched in its weirdness by the cinematic presentation.  The director's eccentric leanings, (or those of his cast), were usually too annoying to bare, but the results are successfully nerve-wracking here.  Feeling both hugely ambitious and underwritten all at once, the film moves so fast with an unrelentingly dramatic soundtrack that it never has a second to create any kind of at least conventionally eerie mood.  This would seem the work of a total amateur then if not for the fact that its disorienting nature seems to intentionally mirror the chaotic story where confusion seems to be bursting from the seams everywhere you look in Manhattan.  Giving Cohen the benefit of the doubt then, we are left to take the unorthodox approach at face value and it is sort of commendable how uniquely disturbing the film becomes at various intervals. 

THE MANITOU
(1978)
Dir - William Girdler
Overall: GOOD

Directing nine movies in a mere six year period, Kentucky-born William Girdler died in a helicopter accident while scouting locations for his next film before The Manitou, (which would therefor end up being his last), was released.  This was an adaptation of Graham Masterson's novel of the same name and is one of several occult-themed devil baby-adjacent horror movies from the 1970s.  The origin of such malevolent forces and the means to combat them does end up being a bit interesting, but it also grows comically ridiculous in the process.  This is not necessarily a bad thing though as the random, Native American-tinged supernatural occurrences completely fail to be creepy, yet are also so quirky and random that they provide the film with a hokey, frivolous charm.  Tony Curtis as a sleazy, faux-mystic with a fake mustache and wizard robe who occasionally stumbles his lines is a pure highlight, though as the main protagonist who quickly becomes seriously concerned with the plot, he does not get to camp it up too much beyond the first act.  The movie has camp elsewhere in spades though, particularly once the cosmic, medicine mad showdown gets underway and the weirdness gloves come flying off.  Whether its absurdness is accidental or intended, it is anything but boring.

70's American Horror Part Thirteen

LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH
(1971)
Dir - John D. Hancock
Overall: GOOD

The debut from American filmmaker John D. Hancock with the misleadingly near-schlocky title of Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a patchy yet interesting psychological horror work.  The project was originally offered to Hancock as a satirical B-movie called It Drinks Hippie Blood, but the director insisted on making it a legit, solemn affair and retained very little from that initial script.  Using a small cast on a tight budget and filmed in central Connecticut, the end product has some amateurish shortcomings such as unconvincing improvisational dialog, jumpy editing, and a bit of a flimsily unfocused story.  It overcomes most of these issues with an excellent, committed performance from Zohra Lampert as the mentally ill title character fighting for her sanity in an isolated farmhouse, a consistently eerie tone, and some memorably hair-raising set pieces.  Taking all of the components as a whole, it is definitely messy, but there is an understated, imaginative quality to it that increases as it goes on.  The film may get more frustratingly confusing as it goes on as well, but there is enough here to interest fans of more unorthodox, subdued, though-provoking horror all the same.

JAWS
(1975)
Dir - Steven Spielberg
Overall: GOOD

One of the most wildly profitable and influential horror-esque films ever made, Steven Spielberg's seminal Jaws may not have the same visceral impact it did decades ago, but it is still as enjoyable as anything from arguably the medium's most famous director.  Decades after its commercial and artistic influence has long become the stuff of Hollywood legend, watching it now is more like either a celebration in nostalgia or a film history lesson.  Neither of these things are unfortunate, but a couple jump scares notwithstanding, John William's iconic music accompanying doomed tourists on a beach, the quintessential idiot mayor, Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss arguing shark theories, and the inevitable shots of Bruce the Great White are less heart-racing and more sentimentally pleasing.  As a horror film, it has some of the necessary goods, but a relatively young Spielberg would mount even more successfully tense scenes in Jurassic Park eighteen years later and that one qualifies as even less as a horror film in most movie-goers eyes.  Genre labels aside, Jaws is still as entertaining as they come and practically essential viewing for fully appreciating the very first recognized financial blockbuster as well as probably the best nature horror film ever made.

AUDREY ROSE
(1977)
Dir - Robert Wise
Overall: MEH

Written by author and occasional director Frank De Felitta, (and based off of his novel of the same name), Audrey Rose also doubles as the last proper horror movie that Robert Wise ever directed.  While there may be an interesting idea lurking here about reincarnation veiled through an Exorcist-esque set up of an eleven year old girl "possessed", there are some major issues at play.  Most prominently of all, De Felitta's wordy script asks way too much of the viewer.  How Anthony Hopkins' character is even given the time of day by the family whose daughter he is obsessing over is illogical enough.  Yet when the concept of reincarnation becomes the subject of a high profile criminal trial, it is just preposterous from there and any attempts to take the movie seriously anymore are utterly vanquished.  Focusing on a number of sequences where a girl has waking nightmares while screaming over and over and over again, it grows incredibly monotonous and throughout the whole thing, Wise conducts everything in a very weighty matter.  The performances are rather melodramatic, from Marsha Mason in the lead down to bit parts, though Hopkins keeps his wits about him more or less considering the material.  It is a shame that the movie ultimately ends up being a pile of ridiculous and ultimately tedious hoopla though.

70's American Horror Part Twelve

SEASON OF THE WITCH
(1973)
Dir - George A. Romero
Overall: GOOD

Released a month before The Crazies, Season of the Witch, (initially put out as Hungry Wives by the insistence of producer Jack H. Harris who promoted it incorrectly as a soft-core porn film), acts in part as George Romero's second be it quasi-horror film after Night of the Living Dead.  Romero's ambitions here clearly go beyond making a standard, genre-pandering supernatural yarn.  In typical fashion for the independent filmmaker, it was shot locally on an ultra-modest budget with mostly low-caliber actors.  Romero's story of an anxiety-ridden middle-class housewife slowly unraveling and turning to witchcraft is less about Rosemary's Baby-inspired, occult freakiness though and more a cinematic essay on feminism and female conformity in the wake of late 60s counterculture.  It uses spooky music and nightmare sequences liberally yet effectively, but the macabre, unnatural tone is more meant to enhance the frustration, boredom, and confusion of its main protagonist than cause chills for the viewer.  Moments of dated, improvisational, drunk John Cassavetes dialog, some clunky editing, and a lifeless flow makes it a less rewarding watch than it was probably intended to be, but its aspirations still keep it afloat for the most part.

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
(1976)
Dir - Charles B. Pierce
Overall: MEH

Charles B. Pierce's follow-up to the atrociously Z-rent abomination snooze-fest that is The Legend of Boggy Creek was this dramatic re-telling of the infamous Texarkana Moonlight Murders of 1946.  The Town That Dreaded Sundown has a catchy title, a fetching horror movie slasher villain in the white-hooded The Phantom, and a handful of nasty scenes where victims scream and beg as they are dragged out of cars, beaten to a pulp, and brutally done away with.  Pierce stages these killings in an effectively disturbing way, usually with minimal to no music.  That and the Phantom's heavy breathing, weird grunts, and bugged-out eyes peaking through tiny slits in his crudely makeshift mask make it pretty horrific indeed.  Elsewhere it is the usual slag though with county sheriffs and Texas Rangers talking about how they are going to catch the guy in drawn out, emotionally unengaging and talky scenes.  Pierce's attempts at comic relief are more head-scratching than funny, like some Dukes of Hazzard getaway scenes and several officers dressed in drag, pulling a stakeout in cars to try and bait the killer.  The combination of legit actors and town locals is jarring and overall, it is an uneven affair that regularly looses momentum or becomes unnecessarily goofy when it otherwise should keep its non-murder sequences properly compelling.

ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES
(1978)
Dir - John DeBello
Overall: WOOF

When a movie's entire purpose is to be "so bad it's good", it can be a misconception that achieving such a thing is like shooting fish in a barrel.  As Attack of the Killer Tomatoes clearly demonstrates, this task is in fact far more difficult.  One or two chuckles aside, (a smiling guy in a library calmly over-enunciating the word "tomato" to insinuate a small riot is legitimately laugh out loud funny), almost the entirety of this deliberately lousy B-monster invasion parody is actually just that; lousy.  All of the technical blunders are there knowingly, (bad acting, bad miking, bad special effects, bad script), but the fact that so very little of it is actually amusing rather completely sinks the entire thing.  The humor or lack thereof is way too on the nose.  When trying to hit the same beats as schlocky drive-in genre films that are accidentally a hoot, those same beats here are exaggerated to such an extreme as to try and be intentionally funny instead.  This ultimately makes them too juvenile, obvious, and groan-worthy to work and the movie's knowing stupidity becomes overwhelming in the worst way.  Three more sequels followed, (all directed and co-written by John DeBello), but one is enough thank you.

70's American Horror Part Eleven

COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE
(1970)
Dir - Bob Kelljan
Overall: MEH

One of the seemingly untold number of horror films to be distributed by American International Pictures, Count Yorga, Vampire, (The Loves Of Count Iorga, Vampire), is an adequately entertaining though ultimately run-of-the-mill, modern day vampire yarn.  It primarily takes its cue from most film adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  A dashingly handsome, polite, Eastern-European foreigner with hypnotism powers, a cape, and some undead "brides" at his disposal is inevitably confronted by a doctor and some other people, though not during the day when he is napping in his coffin but instead after the sun goes down.  There is also a deformed, brutish man-servant and the police fill the skeptic quota as they will not even entertain the idea that vampires exist.  Horror mainstay Robert Quarry makes for a solid, bloodsucking Count, but just as the movie itself, he is no better or worse than any of the other generic aspects at play.  The title character only appeared in two films, (this and the following year's The Return of Count Yorga), after an idea to have him square off against Dr. Phibes was abandoned.  Quarry still ended up playing an immortal in Dr. Phibes Rises Again anyway, so one does not have to use too much of their imagination to fathom how that would have played out.

THE NIGHT STRANGLER
(1973)
Dir - Dan Curtis
Overall: GOOD

The one/two punch of the successful The Night Stalker and its follow-up The Night Strangler, (broadcast in 1972 and 1973, respectfully), garnished the launching of the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV series, one of the best horror-tinged program that 7's television ever produced.  Returning screenwriter Richard Matheson is joined by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis, (in the same year that the duo collaborated on the Jack Palance-starred Dracula adaptation), and if The Night Stalker laid the blueprint of Carl Kolchak endlessly annoying newspaper editors and police officials as he is assuredly convinced that supernatural shenanigans are afoot, then its sequel here solidified that blueprint.  The same stuff/different story approach would be for naught if said story was not compelling and the strangler of the title is a formidable, otherworldly foible indeed.  The comedic sparing between Darren McGavin and Simon Oakland as Tony Vicenzo was always the highlight to this unwavering formula and such is still the case here.  Minor roles from John Carradine, Margaret Hamilton, and Al Lewis are also appreciated.

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR
(1979)
Dir - Stuart Rosenberg
Overall: GOOD

Calling the first of to date about four-hundred and twelve in the Amityville Horror franchise "good" may be a bit misleading.  Though wildly over the top, messy, and centered around a fraudulent, sensationalized "true story", it is at the same time largely a hoot and makes for one of the most interestingly flawed films in the entire genre.  An adaptation of Jay Anson's novel of the same name, (itself a fictionalized account of the "hoax" haunting experiences by the Lutz family which was also visited by con-artist paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren of The Conjuring fame), it comes tailor made with haunted house cliches up the wazoo, many of which were further borrowed to death by countless horror films of varying quality since.  For almost all of the cast, it seems to have been written into their contract to overact, with an aging Rod Steiger in particular going for the jugular, at least when he is not staring off into space emotionless or just sweating profusely.  The supernatural occurrences are of course completely arbitrary, yet they are also so frequent in number and delivered so oddly dead-pan that they are anything but lame.  It is precisely this bizarre, tonal balancing act that's consistently maintained which makes it such a fascinating work.  Like it or not, it is too historically important alone to leave out of any "family moves into an underpriced house that people died in and evil stuff starts happening" film conversation.

70's Spanish Horror Part Six

THE GLASS CEILING
(1971)
Dir - Eloy de la Iglesia
Overall: WOOF

The first thriller from Spanish filmmaker Eloy de la Iglesia, The Glass Ceiling, (El techo de cristal), could be described as criminally insipid.  When almost every scene of the movie is two people talking yet almost none of them advance the plot, you have a serious problem.  The results are so boring that forty-minutes in, it is too bothersome to even care about or have any idea of what is even happening.  There are two women living in a rural apartment building, each of whom have a husband who is out of town.  There is a sculpture, another lady, some other guy, and a pervert around and they all have various conversations about things that vaguely allude to maybe one of the woman's husbands being missing or murdered.  The film is such a tedious drag though that you pretty much have to use your imagination to even surmise that much.  Sadly the dubbing, cinematography, and performances are as flat as the pacing and story.  Even a would-be trippy nightmare sequence seems uninspired.  The last fifteen minutes almost give the movie some signs of life, but if you have to wait that damn long, it is hardly worth the trouble.

THE LORELEY'S GRASP
(1973)
Dir - Amando de Ossorio
Overall: MEH

This creature feature from Amando de Ossorio came right smack in between the four entries in his more famous, Blind Dead series.  While The Loreley's Grasp, (Las Garras de Lorelei, When the Screaming Stops), is exquisitely violent with body parts being clawed up, chests getting ripped open, and vital organs getting pulled out, its title monster also has an embarrassingly silly costume that pushes the whole thing into schlock terrain.  This may have been simply a budgetary matter, (after all, the Knights Templar had a simple visual design yet came off creepy enough), but no matter how sudden and brutal the killings are or how quickly Ossorio tries to cut away from it, a reptilian Halloween costume in a black hood still provides nothing but hysterics.  Elsewhere the plotting is typically lazy and primarily seems concerned with having scantily clad women present for as many shots as the monster is not in.  Though it does manage to shoehorn an angry mob in there for what it is worth.  With its unintended humor creating a clashing atmosphere and, (naturally being an Ossorio movie), having too leisurely of a pace, it is kind of a failure, but an occasionally fun one.

DEVIL'S KISS
(1975)
Dir - Jordi Gigó
Overall: WOOF

Jordi Gigó only directed three movies, (one of which was called Porno Girls), and it is not too surprising that his career was not more lucrative after enduring his debut here.  Devil's Kiss, (La perversa caricia de Satán), is an unrelenting drag of a movie, even by 70s Euro-horror standards.  A professor of something and a medium move into an old boring guy's chateau after an equally uninteresting seance and fashion show takes place there, (do not ask), and then it is mostly people talking, some boobs, and a shirtless Frankenstein monster stamping around killing a few folks while the choppy, stock organ music drops some minor key bombs on the soundtrack.  When the organ bursts are not reminding you that you are watching a horror movie, the rest of it plays to silence or crickets chirping which understandably enhances the lameness tenfold.  If you are unfortunate enough to sit through the dubbed version, the voice-over actors sound like they were trying to cram the whole recording session in before lunch and could not be bothered to do any second, more enthusiastic takes.  It is not so much standard as just random and above all else, dull, dull, dull.  For certain viewers, its overwhelming vapid qualities may make it a hilarious trainwreck of uninspired nonsense.  For the rest, it will just be an aggravating waste of time.