(1980)
Dir - James Polakof
Overall: WOOF
An incomprehensible, meandering mess, Satan's Mistress, (Demon Rage, Demon Seed, Fury of the Succubus, Dark Eyes), is as instantly forgettable as they come. Co-writer/director James Polakof only made a handful of movies and this was his second and last to be in the horror genre as he was primarily concerned with low-rent comedies throughout his career. While he manages to keep any and all humor out of the proceedings here as to not mangle the tone, he also forgets to put in anything that can be remotely engaging. The story concerns a sexually frustrated woman who moves into her own beach house to get away from her husband, only to start wet dreaming about/actually fornicating with a speechless man who may be the devil or a ghost or who cares. Also, her daughter gets possessed at one point, a guy's head gets decapitated, and John Carradine shows up for fifty seconds. Besides these much needed and all too brief detours, the pacing is horrendously monotonous as it endlessly repeats the same arguments and uninteresting dialog exchanges between a small handful of characters as the cheap keyboard score never shuts up and former Bond girl Britt Ekland shows off her luscious boobs during softcore sex scenes.
(1983)
Dir - John Huckert
Overall: GOOD
Belonging to no genre in an exclusive sense, independent filmmaker John Huckert's ambitious debut The Passing is a unique, no-budget work that tackles universally profound themes of aging and the possibility of giving life another chance. The fact that it does so with non-actors, zero money, and all within an arthouse framework that was shot over the course of seven years, (with one of the elderly actors dying before it was completed), is an admirable, DIY achievement to say the least. While the common, non-professional problems found in such regional films are readily apparent, (the actors awkwardly stumble through their lines, the pacing is problematically slow, and the premise is too challenging to have any business being attempted with such meager means), many of these would-be flaws work to the movie's benefit. It has an intimacy that is made surreal due to Huckert's compassionate tone that allows for zero camp while letting two seemingly unrelated stories play out patiently until their inevitable meeting point occurs over an hour into the proceedings. It even pulls-off its own version of a 2001: A Space Odyssey's "Stargate sequence", which fits right at home with something so refreshingly unique, beautiful, and thought-provoking.
(1988)
Dir - Richard McCarthy
Overall: MEH
Typical, dope schlock from Charles Band's Empire Pictures, Ghost Town gets by to a point on its genre-melding and practical effects while failing everywhere else. As the title would so properly suggest, the movie does in fact take place in a literal ghost town that springs up supernaturally in the middle of the Tucson, Arizona desert where a scenery-chewing, derivative 80s monster bad guy keeps the long-dead inhabitants there under his smirking, cliche-spewing thumb. Franc Luz has the rugged good looks of any straight-to-video/USA Network hunk and turns in an adequate performance under the circumstances, but Jimmie F. Skaggs as the aforementioned zombie gunslinger is stereotypically obnoxious, though this can be due to the movie's groan-worthy tone and lazy script as much as anything else. For such a tax-right-off-budgeted affair, the movie does nail the dusty, abandoned Western vibe of yesteryear just fine and Skaggs' grimy makeup is far better than everything else about his silly, textbook villainous character. One cannot expect the story to play by its own rules or hold the audience's attention for eighty-five minutes, but it is at least not insulting in its mediocre attempts.
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