(1980)
Dir - William Malone
Overall: WOOF
A mind-numbingly boring horror film from front to back, William Malone's debut Scared to Death, (The Aberdeen Experiment, Scared to Death: Syngenor), is as forgettable as they get. It is unfortunate that the burgeoning filmmaker sold off personal belongings as well as mortgaged his house in order to secure enough finances to finish the project, taking three years alone to design the Alien-inspired monster that barely shows up on screen anyway. The cast of less-than-photogenic unknowns do their best with what they got, but what they got is almost impressively uninteresting. Completely unremarkable characters with lackluster lives say things in rooms, (and the camera lingers on them for an unnecessary amount of time in every single instance), but nothing moves the plot in any direction whatsoever. Malone does not even have the good sense to kill anyone in elaborately stupid means as was the slasher style at the time. Minutes that seem like decades go by between such kill scenes where guy-in-a-rubber-suite-monster-man just pops up predictably, sometimes murdering his three or four victims off screen and sometimes protruding his slimy creature tongue at them. The credits showing up is certainly an act of mercy.
(1982)
Dir - Kevin Conner
Overall: MEH
A haunted house, international co-production set in Japan, The House Where Evil Dwells goes through the same motions as every other such film despite its unique location. An American family moves into a remote home near Kyoto where a century and some change earlier, a samurai murdered his adulterous wife, her lover, and himself. All these years later, said unrested spirits apparently have nothing better to do than join together and randomly mess with the house's new tenants, pulling off supernatural shenanigans like making scary faces in bowls of soup, turning on water faucets, or even possessing people to give them temporarily heightened fighting skills. Some of these moments are unintentionally silly like a scene where tiny puppet crabs attack the daughter while making unintelligible Japanese sounds, sounds which pop up at other instances with similarly goofy results. Despite its best efforts to try and be spooky, nothing here comes off as frightening, but at least English scream queen Susan George takes her clothes off a few times, there are two fun beheadings, and some of the set design is admirably done.
(1987)
Dir - Curtis Hanson/Larry Spiegel/Peter S. Traynor/Mardi Rustam
Overall: WOOF
Another odd, mangling of several different unfinished movies, Evil Town manages to take the most boring footage from all of them. It went into production officially in 1984, though the majority of what is on screen was scrapped from an abandoned film called God Bless Dr. Shagetz that was ten years older, with naked stuff featuring Playmate Lynda Wiesmeier being the last to get thrown in. The main, cobbled together narrative seems to focus on a bunch of backwoods folks who kidnap people so that doctors can perform experiments or something on them. As one could guess, the tone is all over the place as most of the movie revolves around people trading niceties with each other while naked boobs, rape, murder, campfire hoedowns, and eventually Dean Jagger's hilariously baffling, drunken, mumbled, stuttering performance awkwardly interject. It certainly has a bizarre, unnatural feel and the concept of polite, country bumpkins engaging in dubious, unwholesome activity while largely behaving in a non-villainous fashion would work a lot better if was not taking place in such a mangled finished product. Far too lame and far too nonsensical to be amusing as a trainwreck, (save for Jagger's WTF presence), all of its components deserve to have remained forgotten.
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