80's American Horror Part Eighty-Four

DEATH SCREAMS

(1982)

Dir - David Nelson

Overall: WOOF

Opening with a clumsy and insultingly predictable kill scene involving people having sex, director David Nelson's lone horror entry Death Screams, (House of Death, Night Screams), proceeds to spend the next thirty-five minutes forgetting that it is a slasher movie in the first place so that the wretchedly boring story can continue to regularly detour at an astonishing degree.  This loathsome sub-genre is inherently problematic in such a sense where everything in between the occasional murder sequences are either far less interesting at best and horrendously dull at worst.  The latter applies here and boy does it ever, with a crop of lousy actors playing obnoxious, unnatural characters that range from hillbilly bumpkin stereotypes to loud, horny, and wretchedly unfunny youngsters.  One or two noble nitwits are thrown in to provide the film with some sort of moral compass, but nobody's personalty type has any sort of narrative payoff.  It cannot be over-stressed how laborious of a viewing experience this is, failing hard and aggressively as a piece of by-the-books slasher garbage while being more padded than even the most padded of them.

 

NEON MANIACS

(1986)

Dir - Joseph Mangine

Overall: MEH

The second and last directorial effort from cinematographer Joseph Mangine, Neon Maniacs, (Evil Dead Warriors), comes nearly two decades after his first, 1968's Smoke and Flesh.  An off-kilter monster movie to say the least, it boats a few fun set pieces and nifty makeup, but there are several awkward choices as well as pacing issues that muddle things up.  Youth-based cliches are present with a monster kid, horny teenagers, and "grown-ups never believing what these crazy kids keep saying" all on board.  While these details are innocent in and of themselves, they have also been utilized in more clever ways before.  Mark Patrick Carducci makes his screenwriting debut here and perhaps understandably, his ideas come off as half-baked with both the origin and explanation for the title/Cenobite-samurai-biker gang bad guys never being explained or logically conveyed.  Apparently existing undetected under the Golden Gate Bridge for who knows how long, they randomly just start terrorizing a single group of sexually promiscuous high-schoolers one night and then hunt down the lone survivor for the rest of the movie.  A would-be climax is staged with a battle of the bands, (which features three absolutely terrible songs no less), but then all of the tension is left dangling for another twenty minutes before the whole thing ends in one of the most abrupt fashions imaginable, as if the production simply ran out of money and called it a wrap.

 

TO DIE FOR

(1989)

Dir - Deran Sarafian

Overall: MEH

Updating Dracula into contemporary, LA yuppie culture, Deran Sarafian's To Die For, (Dracula: The Love Story), may be of mild interest to horror fans, perhaps most of all for containing the final screen performance from Duane Jones, be it in a single scene.  Though it is not completely embarrassing in its strict adherence to B-movie schlock, this still has soap opera-worthy performances, a cheap, ruining keyboard score from Cliff Eidelman, and TV-grade production values that are not likely to impress.  Wisely, Sarafian more alludes to the freaky things as opposed to actually showing them, offering up quick-cut shots of vampire faces and flashes of blood, yet he still lets the horrible music try and convey the scary tone all on its lonesome.  Things get increasingly silly as it goes on, especially when A Nightmare on Elm Street's Amanda Wyss starts behaving erratically lustrous and Bad Ronald's Scott Jacoby reads a book about Vlad Tepes and tries to convince everyone of what is of course actually going on, yet sounding like an idiot in the process with incorrect historical facts and easily-drawn conclusions.  ITtis dopey stuff that plays like an episode of Goosebumps except with more violence, slow motion/fireplace sex scenes, and "fucks".