(1972)
Dir - Bob Clark
Overall: MEH
Bob Clark's first horror movie and only second full-length one Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things is a frustrating bit of low-budget filmmaking. Made on a measly $50,000 and featuring a small cast made up of Clark's college buddies and make-up artists, its DIY aesthetic is admirable to be sure as is the fact that it goes comedic since four years after Night of the Living Dead came out, it was already a ripe time to poke fun at the concept of a bunch of people held up in a house being attacked by flesh-eating ghouls. The only problem is that Clark and company concoct some of the most unbelievably obnoxious characters ever put to celluloid. Special effects man/director/actor Alan Ormsby's raving douchebag theatre troupe leader is nearly impossible to stomach from scene one and it only gets so much worse from there. While Ormsby's character is initially made fun of by the rest of the endlessly quippy cast, he is so profoundly annoying to begin with that the tone shift during the last twenty minutes of the movie feels more like a charitable saving grace than anything else since finally at long last, everyone stops being horrible and unfunny, instead just acting scared. Everything before the final few moments are excruciating and once the movie kicks into Michael Jacksons Thriller mode and gets plenty spooky with actually intimidating zombies on the loose, it is all nothing that has not been done too many times to count.
(1976)
Dir - Alfred Sole
Overall: MEH
A well-appreciated, pre-Halloween slasher movie, Alice, Sweet Alice, (which was also screened as Communion and Holy Terror in earlier instances), is too nasty and unpleasant to really "enjoy" as a horror film. This is not to say that the subject matter is too wretched or that it is too gory since these things are requisites more or less in the genre. Yet when your film revolves around a violent, smart-ass, whining twelve-year old and uses her as a red herring, it is a little difficult to feel sympathy for her or anyone else who feels sympathy for her. So really, it is the premise of that is rather doomed to fail. The killer reveal is more shocking in how rather lame it is than anything else, which is never a good sign. Stylistically, co-writer/director Alfred Sole, (who was working as an architect at the time and had only made one movie previously, which was a porno), does competent, be it standard work. The performances balance between naturalistic and grounded, to cartoonish, (Alphonso DeNoble's obese, cat-obsessed landlord reeks of sleazy exploitation). Yet as far as your run of the mill, "killer in a mask" kind of fare, this does not stray too far from the formula. It is just difficult to watch something where several of the worst characters in it are not even the real "bad guys".
(1978)
Dir - Constantine S. Gochis
Overall: WOOF
When pretentiousness meets amateur filmmaking, you are either in for a laugh or one abysmal movie-going experience. Constantine S. Gochis' The Redeemer: Son of Satan, (The Class Reunion Massacre), is unfortunately very much the latter. While it is adequately photographed, (the only positive it deserves), the pacing is all over the place, the acting atrocious, and the story is a conglomerate of cliched afterthoughts such as another overly-zealous preacher who wants to punish rudimentary-labeled sinners, pecking off murder victims in another locked building, and another creepy demon kid or some horseshit. It could not be more sloppy in how it is all put together. The movie goes from having scenes where the director seems to have forgotten to yell "cut", to others that are spliced together so frantically that the same director supposedly forgot to put some scenes in between them. Immediately after a woman is murdered in a bathroom by the murderer dressed as a clown while her friend discovers the body, (how he got into this room or out is of course left a mystery), the same guy is in a completely different part of the building dressed as a mustached detective shown in mid conversation with his next victim while his last victim is then shown again exactly where we last saw her. There are more examples of this disregard of proper physics where the killer has all of the time in the world to immediately be everywhere as well as seven hundred steps ahead of everyone. Furthermore, the low-grade actors stuck in this dung heap can hardly do anything with the material that they are given in the first place and the self-righteous religious nonsense just makes it extra awful.
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