80's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Twenty-Three

DEATH VALLEY

(1982)

Dir - Dick Richards

Overall: MEH

 

A year before his star-making turn in A Christmas Story, Peter Billingsly of all people stared in a slasher movie with Wilford Brimley of all people.  The resulting Death Valley is interesting for its personnel at least, (Canadian veteran Stephen McHattie is also here, as the bad guy), but the film itself is mediocre at best.  Billingsly goes on a trip with his mom and her new boyfriend who is less than excited about tagging along, then they end up running into a serial killer whose motives are never explained.  The murders both come at a barely noticeable rate and are lacking in flash, leaving well acted yet lifeless scenes to clog up the running time.  There is no mystery, so the only thing propelling the narrative is the fact that Billingsly is having a hard time warming up to his new potential stepdad, something that is relatable and sincerely handled yet hardly interesting enough to hold us over in between lackluster kill scenes.  Brimley's character is done away with before he has a chance to make any kind of lasting impression, but McHattie has an unsettling and freewheelin' charm, plus Billingsly is effortlessly likeable as opposed to most horror movie kids that are annoying at best.

 

TWICE DEAD

(1988)
Dir - Bert L. Dragin
Overall: WOOF

The second of only two movies from director Bert L. Dragin, Twice Dead is both a minimal effort and insulting trash heap that haphazardly combines haunted house and high school bully elements together.  Some weirdo magician kills himself in his house, years later some decedents inherit it, cartoonishly vile criminals in biker jackets and punk rock haircuts terrorize the new owners, the police do absolutely nothing about it even though they are well aware of it, and then some even more stupid stuff happens.  The fact that the film hits as many predictable, (i.e. lazy), beats is one thing, but the script hinges itself on nonsense logic that is bound to annoy viewers as much as the odious bad guys do.  Supernatural rules are never established and change course arbitrarily depending on what the plot needs to happen, plus one is hard-pressed to decide what is more asinine; the fact that the ineffective law enforcement is not notified after such continuous life-threatening harassment, the fact that the protagonist's parents up and decide to leave their teenage kids at home for over a week when the hoodlum culprits are still at large, or the fact that said teenage kids decide to stage an elaborate prank that only pisses off the villains even more, as anyone on earth would guess that it would.

 

SUNDOWN: THE VAMPIRE IN RETREAT

(1989)

Dir -  Anthony Hickox

Overall: GOOD

While its script will not blow anyone's mind with cleverness, schlock meister Anthony Hickox' sophomore effort Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat gets by on the charm of its recognizable B-movie cast and some tweaks to the undead mythos.  Set in modern day in a fictional desert two that is loaded with blood-suckers who have given up feasting on humans, a divide has arisen amongst its commune, half of whom want to return to their original fiendish roots and half who want to co-exist with the rest of the world by way of artificial nourishment.  There is also an aw-shucks family that arrives to help with the scientific angle of things, an extramarital affair that rears its ugly head, a little kid who is obsessed with horror movies, a couple who witness their douchebag friend get beheaded and are now prisoners, plus Bruce Campbell as a Van Helsing descendant who falls in love with Deborah Foreman, one of the vampire locals.  Besides Campbell and Foreman, we also have M. Emmet Walsh, John Ireland, Dana Ashbrook, George Buck Flower, and best of all, David Carradine as the town's head vamp.  Nothing laugh out loud funny transpires, but as far as goofy, 80s Western horror romps go, one can do worse.

80's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Twenty-Two

EVIL IN THE WOODS

(1986)

Dir - William J. Oats

Overall: WOOF

 

The only film of any kind from writer/director William J. Oats is a bizarre and terrible one.  Evil in the Woods is a forth wall-breaking comedy variation of The Neverending Story, meets Z-grade Bigfoot movie, meets John Waters movie, meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  It is an abysmal and confounding watch that haphazardly bounces around between a little boy reading the book of the title, the same little boy getting captured by a witch and some redneck ogres, and a film crew getting horny, getting high, getting laid, getting gay, and making some indecipherable nonsense with a Sasquatch and aliens in it.  Shot-on-video for negative dollars, these poor actors give horrendous performances, plus Oats seems to have no idea what he is doing from behind the lens or from behind the screenwriter's chair.  The tone is goofy and going for meta juvenile tomfoolery, which is to its advantage since making fun of how terrible it is at least forgives how terrible it is.  That said, as far as something that is fun to laugh at, sadly this is not the case.  It feels nine hours longer than it is and is more grating than fascinating, (the characters are all insufferable morons and there is some unnecessary yee-haw narration that will make you want to punch the screen), but at least that kid has a Live After Death poster on his wall and a Slime Pit next to his bed.

 

THE SEVENTH SIGN

(1988)

Dir - Carl Schultz

Overall: MEH

 

Some straight-faced end of days melodrama from director Carl Schultz, The Seventh Sign has a solid cast and some unwavering, dour atmosphere, but it never becomes as engaging as it pretends to be.  There is a lot of Biblical mumbo jumbo in Clifford and Ellen Green's script; some stuff about a pool of souls for newborn babies that is now empty, signs of the apocalypse, Peter Friedman playing the Wandering Jew Cartaphilus, Jürgen Prochnow playing some kind of angel demon whatever, and the second coming of Christ.  At the same time, Michael Biehn is a lawyer who is both trying to save his down-syndrome client from the electric chair and trying to save his wife Demi Moore from losing her mind due to a religious prophecy surrounding her pregnancy.  It is all related and a lot to take in, so one cannot help but to get lost in the ambitious plotting, but at least this was given a sufficient budget to work with.  The weather goes all crazy, Prochnow glows when he is stabbed, the moon turns red, we have a few nightmare flashbacks to Jesus' time, and Moore's contractions seem to usher in the final stages of God's wrath on humanity.  It is shot well, acted well, and paced well enough to keep one on board, but it gets lost in its own ambition and becomes unintentionally silly in the process.

ROCK-A-DIE BABY

(1989)

Dir - Bob Cook

Overall: MEH

An unremarkable anthology film that came and went without any fanfare, Rock-A-Die Baby is hardly worth its catchy title.  This was the debut from writer/director/producer Bob Cook who concocted something with three stories and not one but two linking segments, so that is something.  One of them concerns a terrible hard rock band who is tasked with writing a song for a horror movie and does so in a cemetery for ambiance, and the other concerns an author mother who regales her daughter with inappropriate bedtime stories.  The first tale is set in Vietnam where a tiger lady seduces and then mutilates a small platoon after they have repeated conversations about raping her, the next has college bimbos and mimbos playing strip poker before conducting a seance, and the third has Dick Sargent getting frisky with and then marrying a vampire.  Each vignette leans more towards the side of sucks than good, and there is something terribly wrong about a little girl saying things like "That was a great one Mommy!  Oo yeah, just the way I like it", after hearing such R-rated fables.  There is a groan-worthy twist at the end as well as a montage set to the the band playing some hogwash presumably called "Spooky Lady", but this is a film where one of its biggest foibles, (the unseemly tone), is actually the only thing that it has going for it.

80's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Twenty-One

MONSTROID

(1980)

Dir - Kenneth Hartford/Herbert L. Strock

Overall: WOOF

 

Shot in New Mexico and Columbia presumably several years before it was released, Monstroid, (Monster, Monstroid: It Came from the Lake, The Toxic Horror), is some dog water crud from director Kenneth Hartford.  Co-screenwriter Herbet L. Strock allegedly also did some work from behind the lens and neither he nor Hartford were unfamiliar with low-budget genre offerings.  On that note and of course, neither was John Carradine who shows up to voice his character's complaints as a priest that warns his congregation of the invading influence brought on by an American chemical plant polluting the village's waters.  Because we all know how these stories go, said pollution is the cause of the mutated monstrosity of the title which makes almost no screen appearances throughout.  There is a psyche-out moment early on where someone is wearing a monster mask at a bonfire, causing the audience to gasp not at its scariness but at how awful it looks.  Once we see the actual monster properly, it not only comes off no better than the aforementioned mask, but actually worse.  Who cares though when we have local politics, religious mumbo jumbo, and a love triangle to focus on instead?

 

SCALPS

(1983)

Dir - Fred Olen Ray

Overall: MEH

 

Opening with a shirtless guy in gnarly makeup immediately beheading another guy and then ominous keyboard music accompanying an archeologist looking at rocks while someone in an animatronic tiger mask opens their arms Christ-like in the desert, Fred Olen Ray's Scalps at least grabs your attention from the onset.  Unfortunately, the movie's lack of budget stalls the whole proceedings from there.  According to Ray, the distributors re-edited the finished product to smithereens, so maybe the wild opening and various other moments that interject gory scalpings of the title were thrown in to improve an otherwise sluggish viewing experience.  In any event, this is an inconsistent watch at best.  Ray's cast of no name white people spend nearly all of the running time in the woods, and their inevitable death scenes are awkwardly staged to the point of surrealism.  The persistent musical score throws in some foreboding ambiance and Native American chants, plus every shot we get of one of the shirtless characters who becomes possessed, rapes a girl, and then has a crude mask on are jarring, which creates a tone that is equal parts silly and freaky.  Still, awful pacing, awful acting, and awful day for night sequences undermine such a low-scale production, but at least it achieves some semblance of wacky memorability.

 

VULTURES
(1984)
Dir - Paul Leder
Overall: MEH

Cleverly utilizing the title Vultures, said movie is in fact NOT about a pack of wild birds who terrorize the countryside but is instead a bog-standard tale of family members bickering with each other and getting picked-off so that someone can inherent all of that delicious money.  Written and directed by Paul Leder whose resume is hardly exemplary, the film makes the grievous error of having a few punctuations of sensationalized violence in an attempt to lure in the era's gore hounds, but in fact this is just a long-winded melodrama that should cater much more to soap opera fans.  It fails in this respect as something that can appeal to more than just a single crowd since slasher aficionados will be turning it off within the first tortuously boring act, (and it does not get any more engaging from there), and anyone who just wants to watch a bunch of rich white people talk and talk and talk some more may be put-off by the few gruesome murder sequences.  As forgettable and drab as the whole thing is, it does have a lone quirky element in that drag performer Jim Bailey appears in a number of different roles.  Still, a movie that is all blabbing and nearly no action can only do so much with a famed Las Vegas impressionist donning disguises, but at least it gives the audience member something to look out for since Satan knows that everything else going on here is snore-inducing balderdash.

80's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Twenty - (Jim Wynorski Edition)

THE LOST EMPIRE

(1984)

Overall: MEH

 

Writer/director/producer Jim Wynorski kicked off his career behind the lens with abandon on The Lost Empire.  The proprietor of schlock was one of several Roger Corman alumni, getting the finances here as a tax write off by a theater chain owner, resulting in a movie that goes for broke with big naked boobs, ninjas, training montages, mystical legends, forth wall-breaking humor, and Angus Scrimm playing a megalomaniacal immortal with a black skull under his face.  The production is as cheap as any from Corman or Charles Band, but Wynorski gets some mileage out of the limited funds, especially once it switches gears to Scrimm's fortified training ground where he is raising an army of heaving-bosomed warriors to fight to the death and prove themselves worthy of his nefarious dong.  It is a ridiculous watch that is, (hopefully), a parody of Indiana Jones type adventure movies as much as it is a riff on Russ Meyer's output and 80s action camp.  Most of the silliness fails to land, (at least intentionally), and the set pieces, acting, and groan-worthy quips leave too much to be desired, but the absurd tone is appreciated and there is more than enough naked or half-naked babes doing naked and half-naked ass-kicking to applaud.

 

CHOPPING MALL

(1986)

Overall: MEH

 

Meant to be nothing more than a dumb, cheap, and silly horror-comedy with enough boobs and blood to keep the viewer from yawning, Chopping Mall was officially produced by Roger Corman's wife Julie, (though her famous husband was involved as well), and directed by Jim Wynorski who would go on to make about seven hundred more sleazy, straight-to-video horror movies.  Unfortunately, the results here only partially deliver.  The characters are idiots from top to bottom as most of them are just horny California bros and bimbos, we get two scenes of control technicians getting killed by robots in the same manner when only one is necessary, the dialog is routinely terrible and when it is trying to be funny, (which it does often), it is not.  The movie is not a total waste though.  The cameos from B-movie players Dick Miller, Mary Woronov, and Paul Bartel, (playing their same characters from A Bucket of Blood and Eating Raoul no less), are fun, the premise is so stupid that it is a hoot, and some of the death scenes are chuckle-worthy, including one of the genre's most superb head explosions.  Being a Corman production which always had a "Yeah, that's good enough" spirit to them, the script could have gotten a rewrite or two and some scenes would have benefited from more takes, but time is money people so hey, at least someone's head blows up.

 

NOT OF THIS EARTH
(1988)
Overall: MEH

A pointless if also harmless remake, Not of This Earth is significant for containing the first non-pornographic role for Traci Lords.  Prolific schlock peddler/director Jim Wynorski allegedly made the film under the result of a wager that he could do so for the same budget and within the same shooting schedule as cinema's most penny-pinching filmmaker Roger Corman's did with the original.  That movie's screenwriters Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna should have sued for screenwriter credit as Wynorski's treatment here lifts roughly ninety percent of the dialog verbatim as well as virtually every plot point.  The only difference of course is that there are sexual innuendos that would make Elvira proud, plus lots of naked women.  On that note, though Lords' clothes are also regularly removed and she is certainly there for eye candy purposes at least in part, she turns in a wonderfully charming and sassy performance.  Despite the heightened comedics and on-the-nose B-movie pandering, it still pales in comparison to Corman's still silly yet more genuinely menacing version, yet fans of juvenile genre fare will probably not complain.

 

TRANSYLVANIA TWIST

(1989)

Overall: MEH

While it is hard to hate such a sincere and relentless horror spoof such as Transylvania Twist, loving it is a different matter.  Director Jim Wynorski throws in so many groan-worthy puns, fourth wall breaking and hackneyed horror movie references, plus overall juvenile and bottom-barrel gags that one is bound to get exhausted at such stubborn goofiness never letting up.  Yet at the same time, Wynorski and co-screenwriter R.J. Robertson clearly going for the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker style of at least one joke per shot means that several of them are bound to land.  The movie is more stupid than hilarious, but this is part of its charm.  Roger Corman serving as producer allows for some old AIP footage to get thrown into the mix, (including the crashing House of Usher waves and Steve Altman having an interaction with Boris Karloff from The Terror), and we are not limited to just ole timey genre callbacks since Pinhead, Freddy Krueger, and Angus Scrimm sending up his Tall Man image from Phantasm are also present.  We even get a couple of terrible songs that make fun of how not seriously any of this is to be taken.  Part insufferable, part hilarious, and all ridiculous, you can do both worse and do better when it comes to your all-inclusive horror send-ups.

80's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Nineteen

THE HEARSE

(1980)

Dir - George Bowers
Overall: MEH

 

Actor Trish Van Devere and her aggressive mom hair appeared in two supernatural horror films back to back in 1980, The Changeling and The Hearse, and the latter easily ending up being the less impressive one.  The directorial debut from editor George Bowers, this is mostly just a cliche fest, be it a well-intended one.  Van Devere inherits her creepy aunt's old country house, the locals are rude to her, she falls in love with a guy who is clearly a ghost even though it takes her about an hour's worth of running time to figure that out, a priest yells Bible things at the house while trying to exorcise it, none of the supernatural events can be verified by anyone ergo Van Devere just looks crazy, etc.  Bowers goes for a Southern Gothic aesthetic, but the movie ends up with a bland presentation that is better suited for the small screen than something theatrically released, let alone something that could compete with the era's more gore-ridden slasher crud rocks.  The horror elements leave much to be desired, the plot is predictable, the ending is lackluster, and the horns on the soundtrack sound ridiculous, but at least Joseph Cotten got to play a smug and crotchety asshole.

 

FRANKENSTEIN'S GREAT AUNT TILLIE

(1984)

Dir - Myron J. Gold

Overall: WOOF

Along with slasher movies and boner comedies, the 1980s had a particular liking for horror nyuck fests, and Frankenstein's Great Aunt Tillie is a nonsensical, sterile, and obnoxious one for the books.  A British/American co-production that was shot in Mexico (which is code for "shot cheaply"), this was the last film to be directed by screenwriter/producer Myron J. Gold.  Donald Pleasence was never offered a paycheck that he would not accept and he knows the assignment well enough here, but unfortunately the assignment is a thankless one that requires him to embarrass himself in every one of his frames.  He mumbles, eats, sings, wears a dress, and wears a toupee while mugging as much as possible because all of these things equal "comedy" of course.  Minor scream queen Yvonne Furneaux and former Playmate June Wilkinson and her gigantic boobs join Pleasence in such hogwash and neither one of them comes off any better, but blaming the film's terribleness on the performers is like blaming it on the film stock.  Gold's script is asinine if not borderline incoherent and despite its consistently juvenile tone, not an inkling of humor lands.  Yes there is a Karloff-inspired Monster, but even the most dedicated of Frankenstein fans would be well-advised to flee to the hills instead of partaking.

CURFEW

(1989)

Dir - Gary Winick

Overall: MEH

Frequently embarrassing and persistently mean-spirited, Curfew is the debut from director Gary Winick and it can be boiled down to "What if Cape Fear had two Robert Mitchums and also sucked".  A pair of scumbag sociopaths who also happen to be brothers escape from prison and go on a brief vengeance spree before house-crashing a district attorney that they blame for their incarceration.  Frank Miller, (no not THAT Frank Miller), is said district attorney who keeps his teenage daughter on a tight leash, telling her to obey her early curfew when she goes out with another scumbag on the high school football team.  Everyone eventually ends up at the same abode, most of them die, all of them are stupid, and Christopher Knight also collects a paycheck as a bumbling police officer whose basis of operations seems to be a roadside dinner that he rarely leaves.  Whether it is the bad guys torturing people or hollering like obnoxious assholes, Winick stages things in a clumsy manner that gives the whole thing a schlocky tone despite its attempts at being a disturbing home invasion movie.  The musical score by Cengiz Yaltkaya is one of the worst in any genre work from the decade; loud, cheap, persistent, and distracting, it makes an already dopey bit of exploitation that much more irritating.

80's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Eighteen

THE GHOST DANCE

(1982)
Dir - Peter F. Buffa
Overall: MEH

Native American slasher films are hardly a dime a dozen, making The Ghost Dance a unique if still unremarkable piece of work.  That said, the movie takes a surprisingly subdued approach to its subject matter, at least as much as it can afford due to its minimal production means.  The only movie from director Peter F. Buffa, he keeps the scary music at bay and when it is utilized, we are treated to droney chanting instead of cheap keyboard punctuations.  Many scenes play out to an eerie stillness, enough in fact that this bypasses the cliche of only making things quiet when a boo scare is about to erupt.  Kill scenes are minimal and there is nothing frighting or revolutionary in Buffa and co-screenwriter Robert Sutton's script, (Julie Amato digs up an Indian warrior's corpse, it possess a man, people die, yawn), but the dreary atmosphere never lets up.  Because this premise has little meat on its bones though, too little happens to keep things interesting, which is shame since the care was taken to compensate for its shortcomings with an actual spooky presentation.

DOGS OF HELL

(1983)
Dir - Worth Keeter
Overall: WOOF

1983 was the year of the 3-D horror movie and Dogs of Hell, (Rottweiler 3-D, Rottweiler, Rotrweiler: The Dogs of Hell), was the first of six of them that Earl Owensby Studios produced that decade.  It is also one of several killer pooch films and a lousy one at that. Shot in North Carolina and boring as all get-out, regional director Worth Keeter has his local southern-accented cast share an endless amount of dialog exchanges with each other, all while the camera lingers on things like people driving up to a place, walking to doors, walking away from a bar, and just standing around watching other people talking.  Only occasionally do we get any moments where a crashed truck full of trained rottweilers goes after a few hapless victims, and none of these kill scenes have any suspense or inventiveness to them.  It makes the grievous mistake of forgetting to deliver on either its 3-D gimmick or any exploitative nature horror shenanigans, since doing so costs money and there is clearly little of that to go around within such a D-rent production as this.  When almost all that you have is some dogs and no-name actors playing characters that you do not care about who discuss trivial things, presenting it as anything that anyone would ever want to sit through proves to be a futile endeavor.

 

OUT OF THE DARK

(1989)

Dir - Michael Schroeder

Overall: MEH

An American giallo-styled slasher film from producer Paul Bartel and director Michael Schroeder, Out of the Dark is spearheaded by an all star cast that elevates its trash value, but it is not fully-formed from a narrative perspective.  It takes a hard boiled "only in the movies" approach to its initial phone sex hotline establishment where Karen Black works as a madame of sorts and aspiring actors do the whole hot and bothered thing for their customers.  While this introduces our likeable characters and eventual victims, things begin to deteriorate into a loose plot about a boring misogynistic asshole with a clown mask on, (cue eyeball-rolling), who starts murdering the callgirls.  The killer reveal is lame, the killer is lame, the ending is lame, and the tone is inconsistent, with some questionable character behavior like the cops staging a botched steak-out and Cameron Dye and Lynn Danielson-Rosenthal's couple being perpetually horny even as their friends keep getting murdered around them.  Still, Black, Bud Cort, Geoffrey Lewis, Tracey Walker, Starr Andreeff, and even Divine in his last screen appearance before his death, (also not in drag), add some professional charm to the proceedings, even if their characters are underwritten and/or get a limited amount of screen time.

80's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Seventeen

CATACLYSM

(1980)

Dir - Phillip Marshak/Tom McGowan/Gregg G. Tallas

Overall: MEH

 

Liberally taking some plot details from The Omen, Cataclysm, (The Nightmare Never Ends), has the Devil in the flesh who is portrayed with insufferable smirking annoyance by Robert Bristol, but at least Richard Moll plays a pretentious atheist author and Cameron Mitchell shows up and dances in a nightclub.  Three credited directors were responsible for this low-budget quasi-knock-off, (Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, and Gregg G. Tallas, respectfully), and parts of the film would be recycled in the cobbled together and awful anthology movie Night Train to Terror.  While there are numerous supernaturally-charged set pieces to laugh at due to their awkward presentation, the whole thing still ends up being a bore.  This is because Phillip Yordan's script has a repetitive structure of people warning other people about Bristol's immortal evil while being systematically picked off.  It is like a slasher movie in this respect, be it one with Nazis, Satan, cops, authors, priests, disco music, and poorly done post-dubbing.  Faith Clift comes off the worst in this regard, rendered embarrassingly wooden due to her flat-as-a-board line-readings.

 

JAWS 3-D

(1983)

Dir - Joe Alves

Overall: WOOF

With a thirty-plus minute first act that is both skippable and ultimately pointless, Jaws 3-D, (Jaws III), gets off to a tortuously dull start, yet it hardly picks up the pace from there.  Marking his only directorial effort, production designer Joe Alves took the helm here and he is plagued by a "too many cooks in the kitchen" script that was worked and reworked by several different people, Richard Matheson's initial treatment allegedly being jettisoned beyond recognition.  Of course the 3-D gimmick is wasted on any version that does not accommodate the special glasses, and for such a hefty-budgeted studio movie, the special effects leave much to be desired anyway.  By far the biggest problem though is the enormous lack of shark action and a pathetically uninteresting story, with known actors playing stock characters that are impossible to give a shit about when every last person going into such a movie will simply be asking "Hey Goober, where's the jaws?".  It suffices as a ninety-eight minute commercial for Orlando's Sea World, but sans one or two grisly moments that happen far too late and watching Dennis Quaid, (by his own admittance), jacked-up on cocaine in all of his scenes, it is a colossal nature horror failure.

 

LITTLE MONSTERS

(1989)

Dir - Richard Alan Greenberg

Overall: MEH

In the wake of Beetlejuice for which this movie can be understandably compared, Vestron Pictures did the more kid-friendly version Little Monsters.  A starring vehicle for one of the decade's favorite child actors Fred Savage, it is also notable for featuring an over-the-top performance from Howie Mandel.  Depending on one's nostalgia and/or tolerance for Mandel doing a borderline intolerable Daffy Duck via Michael Keaton impression, he is either the best or worst thing about the movie.  That said, the story concerns a likeable yet troubled boy finding connection with an underground world of monsters engaging in gleeful anarchy, so Mandel hardly had a choice but to overdo it as a chaos demon.  This is strictly geared towards youngsters even if the 1980s were a different time when masturbation jokes, a junior high kid drinking piss, and throwing darts at a restrained child all screamed "family entertainment".  The first of only two films directed by visual effects man Richard Alan Greenberg, (as well as the first movie scripted by the team of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio), all parties involved make inventive use out of a modest budget, but the ending feels rushed, some of the otherworldly rules are flimsy, the tone is inconsistent, and Mandel's incessant cackling is a bit much.