(1982)
Dir - Don Coscarelli
Overall: GOOD
Filmmaker Don Coscarelli elevated his game with the follow-up to the insultingly idiotic Phantasm, kind of adapting Andre Norton's 1959 novel The Beast Master into a sword and sorcery movie that represents one of the best from the sub-genre's early 80s heyday. Coscarelli and co-screenwriter/producer Paul Pepperman made enough significant changes to Norton's source material that she had her name taken off the credits, but while it jettisons the initial science fiction elements, it makes up for them with sexy ogre witches, lighthearted sexism, a leather gimp chasing ferrets, flesh-eating batmen, and of course Rip Torn's cartoonishly evil high priest Maax recklessly throwing live children into a pit of fire. While Torn steals all of his scenes, Marc Singer makes a solid title hero with his never-explained superpower of communicating, controlling, and seeing through the eyes of various animals, which he uses as much to impress/get rapey with Tanya Roberts as he does to save himself and others from Torn's wrath. The movie has been rightly criticized for its excessive length and piss-pour ADRed dialog, but its production values are still of a high enough quality to save it.
(1987)
Dir - Michael S. O'Rourke
Overall: WOOF
One of countless, rightfully forgettable regional horror piles of garbage that were made and released on VHS in droves during the 1980s, Deadly Love was the first of thankfully only two such "movies" from Michael S. O'Rourke. Shot in Nevada, it goes for a bog-standard revenge from beyond the grave scenario which on paper is fine, but O'Rourke has both the production means and the filmmaking capabilities of a high school janitor that lives in his parent's basement eating paint chips. First off, these poor actors, (or more accurately, poor nobodies who are trying to act), do nothing but embarrass themselves with wretched dialog and bad wigs. Secondly, it is noticeably padded to the ninety-minute mark with numerous flashbacks and dead air moments, not to mention a plot that offers up no set pieces of any kind for the entire middle hour. Lastly and most importantly though, the movie's theme song "Forever" is played no less than eighteen-hundred times and good luck not wanting to strangle a baby kitten by the last time that it invades your eardrums. The worst kind of terrible cinema is inept without being amusing, as well as boring without being forgivable. This piece of shit falls into such a lot and even for purveyors of bad movies, it is hard to imagine that any such trash aficionado could fine one thing redeemable here.
(1989)
Dir - Sean S. Cunningham
Overall: MEH
Sean S. Cunningham's DeepStar Six, (Alien from the Deep), is a by-the-books B-movie that is a couple of notches above a Roger Corman production yet still schlocky in the most lackluster of fashions. Cunningham originally envisioned it as the first in a series of sci-fi/horror/actions films to be set in the open seas, yet this was the only one that came to fruition. While Chris Walas does his usual superb work with the practical effects monster, it is granted little screen time and takes until the third act to show itself in the first place. Even though this movie predated James Cameron's The Abyss by several months, it still serves as the more D-rent version of the two, with the same concept of an underwater crew encountering something unexplainable and terrifying, only for one of them to go rogue under the pressure and doom everyone in the process. Miguel Ferrer fulfills that role here, turning in one of his many hot-headed performances, yet it is one that is laced with some sympathetic nuance and vulnerably. Everyone else on screen is instantly forgettable, and the story follows formulaic plotting with no surprises and almost zero action for the majority of its running time. At least the giant crab creature looks great though.
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