1980s American Horror Part Ninety-Five

BRAINSTORM

(1983)

Dir - Douglas Trumbull

Overall: GOOD

 

The second and last full-length film to be directed by visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull, Brainstorm doubles as the final movie of Natalie Wood's career who died before principal photography wrapped.  Though her death inevitably led to production being shut down, financial trouble in finishing it, a lukewarm release from MGM, and Trumbull's permanent disinterest in completing another full-length movie for Hollywood ever again, the film itself is an intriguing science fiction drama that delivers some nightmarish intensity during its later moments.  Besides Wood who is effective in a supporting role as half of an estranged married couple, Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher, and Cliff Robertson turn in solid performances in their own right.  The story tackles some heady themes of the type of humanistic turbulence that headstrong scientific determination can bring forth and Trumbull gets to experiment with aspect ratios and breathtaking widescreen photography, even reinterpret a version of his famous stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey for what turns out to be an uplifting and downright romantic finale.

 

TRAPPED ALIVE

(1988)

Dir - Leszek Burzynski

Overall: WOOF

 

One of only two theatrically released films from writer/director Lezek Burzynski, Trapped Alive has a cameo from Cameron Mitchell during his infamous washed-up period of turning up in any available B-movie for a quick day's shooting and, (presumably), some alcohol money.  Other than that though, this is an embarrassing and meandering mess.  Poorly written characters who are all unlikable find themselves trapped in a mine shaft and whether or not they are escaped criminals, hostage women, or a cop who randomly partakes of a sex scene with some broad while on the job, all of their drama comes off as both awkwardly forced and wretchedly boring.  Burzynski has the dull pacing sense of any first time regional filmmaker and even though his trashy tale here throws in a cannibal man in a bad Halloween mask, he even fails to make that part exciting let alone unintentionally funny.  Said kind-of-monster also does not properly show up until over an hour in because of course, but at least more footage of people behaving inconsistently, Sullivan Hester stripping down to her lingerie, and a ridiculous, melodramatic, expository plot twist happens to try and jolt the viewer awake.

THE TERROR WITHIN

(1989)

Dir - Thierry Notz

Overall: MEH

 

A typical low-rent sci-fi/horror hybrid from cheapie producer extraordinaire Roger Corman, The Terror Within is an Alien knock-off with the standard amount of cornball charm attached to it.  Keeping the cast down to a minimum and setting most of the proceedings in a single underground bunker location, it creates enough of a convincing post- apocalyptic atmosphere at least until the "gargoyle" monster shows up after exploding prematurely from a human woman's womb in full-on chest-burster style.  Said creature is nothing more than a tall actor in a rubber suit and that is exactly what it looks like; a fleshy monstrosity that is showcased in full lighting enough times to come off as ridiculous instead of menacing.  To be fair though, part of the fun is in watching everyone on screen take such a threat so seriously and director Thierry Notz, (in his full-length debut), keeps the pacing cruising within the slasher framework of picking off all of the characters in bloody detail.  Also amusing is George Kennedy with a laser gun and Andrew Stevens getting an "adios mother fuckers" quip in before detonating their now alien-infested base of operations with a clearly labeled remote control.

1980s American Horror Part Ninety-Four

THE SLAYER

(1982)

Dir - J.S. Cardone

Overall: WOOF

 

The debut from B-movie director J.S. Cardone, The Slayer, (Nightmare Island), is an insultingly boring video nasty that deserves to be forgotten in the plethora of unimaginative slasher rehashes that were dropped seemingly every week during the early 1980s.  Shot in Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia and independently financed, the small cast do their best with such meandering material where almost the entire movie is a couple of people wandering around looking for whoever was most recently picked-off by a supernatural force of some kind.  This is only broken up by arguing and crying and to add insult to hack-laden injury, Sarah Kendall's perpetually upset, premonition-having protagonist is gaslit by everyone around her into thinking that she is just being a bothersome crazy person.  As unoriginal as they come, Cardone's first time behind the lens exhibits a thorough lack of momentum-building as he and co-screenwriter/producer William R. Ewing's script is bare-bones enough to allow them nowhere remotely enticing to go.  One or two violent deaths, a last minute monster reveal, and a twist ending are all pathetic attempts at justifying the rest of the excruciatingly dull proceedings.

MONSTER IN THE CLOSET

(1986)

Dir - Bob Dahlin

Overall: MEH

 

If anyone ever wanted to see John Carradine in a Troma movie for a couple of seconds, then Monster in the Closet has you covered.  Also in on the fun are veterans Claude Akins, Henry Gibson, Stella Stevens, Predator himself Kevin Peter Hall as the monster of the title, plus a young Paul Walker and Stacy Ferguson, both in their full-length debuts.  Originally released on director Bob Dahlin's forty-second birthday on Halloween in 1986, (this representing the only full-length film that he was ever behind the lens on), it is a B-movie parody of sorts from the 1950s and 60s era, focusing on a small, suburban community that gets terrorized by a guy in a ridiculous rubber suit.  Military personnel want to kill it, scientists want to study it, a clergyman considers it one of god's creatures, and a mild-mannered reporter with dashing eyes who is intentionally named Clark is just trying to get a good scoop.  Said indestructible monster looks like a literal piece of shit, but its grotesque, wide-mouthed appearance works for a movie that is played for chuckles instead of scares.  Unfortunately though, there are some tonal issues as the presentation fails to take full advantage of its more absurd aspects and spends most of the middle act forgetting that it was supposed to be lampooning itself.

 

ALIEN NATION

(1988)

Dir - Graham Baker

Overall: GOOD

A formulaic buddy-cop, 80s action movie except with extraterrestrials, Alien Nation mostly delivers on its premise as In the Heat of the Night meets The Outer Limits.  Utilizing a spec script from Rockne S. O'Bannon, director Graham Baker creates a contemporary film noir atmosphere that sets up a crashed slave race of beings from another planet who have been assimilated into American culture as second class citizens.  Many of the alien race specifics are glossed over to emphasis the routine plot line where a gruff police detective teams up with a new partner that he has little in common with in order to uncover and stop a clandestine narcotic operation, but there are enough details thrown in to make it an engaging variation of the type of film that the decade was ripe with.  These include such things as the aliens getting drunk off of spoiled milk, having vulnerable, crotch-like weak spots under their arm pits, and having a battery acid reaction to sea water.  James Caan is perfectly cast as the bigoted, wise-guy cop, as is Mandy Patinkin as his noble, fish-out-of-water partner, yet unfortunately Terence Stamp is not allowed to do all that much as the villainous king pin besides briefly going full-on rage monster in the finale.  Stan Winston's company does solid work with the alien design, making them foreign enough to be unmistakable yet allowing for the actors to not be burdened by prosthetics.

1980s American Horror Part Ninety-Three

STUDENT BODIES

(1981)
Dir - Mickey Rose/Michael Ritchie
Overall: MEH

1981 was an ideal year to parody slasher movies as they were being released with both reckless abandon and without any desire to differentiate themselves from one another.  Student Bodies emerged a year before the similarly stupid Wacko and while both films go for, (and fail at), Zucker/Abrahams style buffoonery, this one briefly slows down here or there to take the piss out of the sub-genre with direct, on-screen references to "body counts", "clues" and moronic character's doing things that are "not smart".  Also similarly to Wacko, it lands one or two juvenile gags while dropping the ball with the majority of them.  Produced and possibly ghost directed by Michael Ritchie along with writer Mickey Rose who would stick with comedy throughout most of his career, it features a cast made up almost exclusively of unknowns save for Richard Belzer of all people providing the voice of The Breather; the POV Michael Myers stand-in who murders anyone caught in the act of fornication or just anyone who can provide the movie with another wacky death scene.  Most of the lampooning is satisfactory if not laugh-out-loud amusing, but it is certainly more "memorable" for being idiotic than anything else.

CURSE OF THE CANNIBAL CONFEDERATES

(1982)
Dir - Tony Malanowski
Overall: WOOF

How do you fuck up a movie with such a catchy title?  Leave it to regional filmmaker Tony Malanowski and his cast and crew of mostly people who would never do anything in cinema again to answer that question with reckless, unprofessional abandon in Curse of the Cannibal Confederates, (The Curse of the Screaming Dead).  Disturbed by Troma Entertainment because of course, even Lloyd Kaufman apparently declared it to be one of the company's five worst titles, which is nice of him to not consider it one of their one worst titles.  The most awful and obnoxious characters known to man?  Check.  Non-existent production values?  Check.  Shoddy, embarrassing, and awkard sound design?  Check.  Zombies that do not show up until almost fifty minutes in?  Check.  Unfathomably boring?  All the checks.  So yes, everything goes wrong in such an embarrassing, Z-rent production, yet it goes wrong in a way that fails to let an audience laugh at it as much as would be preferable.  Instead, most sane viewers will check out after suffering through the first thirty minutes of mind-numbing banter between a group of whiny, unlikable hippy assholes who are out on a camping trip despite the fact that they clearly all hate each other.  Then Civil War zombies finally show up, stumble around in lousy makeup and Halloween masks, library-cued music pathetically tries to create suspense, gross munchy noises happen, the end.

 

THE KISS
(1988)
Dir - Pen Densham
Overall: MEH
 
Underwritten, stagnant in its plotting, and accidentally silly, The Kiss is a lackluster and derivative hodgepodge of better horror movies.  Screenwriter Stephen Volk was hot off of Ken Russell's perverse and inventive Gothic, but he and Tom Ropelewski's script here fails to enticingly blend its occult/family curse/bewitching elements together.  Most of the insufficient details are the same in many a campy B-movie; the dated keyboard score incessantly dictates what the audience is supposed to be feeling, the dialog indulges in groany cliches, the structure is heavily padded with uninteresting character prater, and some of the special effects come off as hilarious instead of terrifying.  The latter is the case with a demonic feline that looks ridiculous as it aggressively hisses at its victims while lurching at them like a stuffed-animal that got an electric socket hairdo.  As the evil, estranged sister come back to do evil estranged sister things for no reasons that are ever explained, Joanna Pacula is exotic and sexy when it counts, but she makes a fool of herself in the finale with grandiose mannerisms that are hammy instead of intimidating.  For his second time behind the lens, Pen Densham does his best with the hokey material and pulls off a few nasty bits of violence, (including an escalator death and a swimming pool on fire for the big finish), but it is not enough to remember anything more than that damn goofy looking cat.

1980s American Horror Part Ninety-Two

BLOODBEAT

(1983)

Dir - Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos

Overall: MEH

 

One of the strangest regional horror films in existence, Bloodbeat is an amatuerish, incomprehensible, and inconsistent mess that manages to be fascinating in fits and starts.  Shot in Wisconsin exclusively with unprofessional actors and written and directed by one-time Vietnamese/French filmmaker Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos, it has the usual clueless, DIY hallmarks including piss-poor sound design, horrendous pacing issues, flat cinematography that was accidentally shot in the wrong aspect ratio, and merely passable acting.  At other times though, it is bizarrely atmospheric, best of all during an extended sequence where the samurai ghost, (yes that is the "slasher" killer in this), emerges on the main characters while their hippy painter mother has a psychic episode and the entire abode goes wacky with poltergeist activity.  The music is a combination of Zaphiratos' own electronic ambient noise and arbitrary classical cues, both of which take turns playing nearly uninterrupted.  Enticing when it goes off the rails, the majority of the running time is unwatchably dull, with a hillbilly hunter family trading inconsequential, badly recorded dialog with each other until something more head-scratching happens.

 

THE LAST STARFIGHTER

(1984)

Dir - Nick Castle

Overall: GOOD

 

For his second directorial effort post playing the OG Michael Myers, Nick Castle tackled the general audience-friendly space opera The Last Starfighter, which is historically notable as one of the first films to utilize CGI, be it in its primitive, Fortran programing language form.  A lower-quality off-shoot of the Star Wars boom as were many others, the script by Jonathan R. Betuel is formulaic in nature where the safety of both the universe and our protagonist, (played by Lance Guest in a dual role as the title character and an android clone of himself), is never in serious question.  This is hardly an issue considering the popcorn-munching tone though, which throws in enough intergalactic action sequences, colorful alien characters, and a couple of jokes for the grownups to keep everyone happy.  The aforementioned digital effects are naturally as dated as can be and worth nothing except chuckles from modern audiences, yet the practical ones, set and creature design, plus the model work are all formidable.  It may lack memorable villains and be too cutesy for its own good, but its charming simplicity is difficult to vehemently disapprove of.

 

THE WIND

(1986)

Dir - Nico Mastorakis

Overall: MEH

 

Nico Mastorakis returns to his native Greece with the direct-to-video The Wind, (The Edge of Terror, Terror's Edge); another trashy horror outing for his own production company Omega Pictures.  Filmed and set in the tied island of Monemvasia, it has genre regulars Meg Foster and Wings Hauser squaring off against each other in the remote locale after the former witnesses the latter murdering his employer/her landlord, played with eccentric charm by English character actor Robert Morley.  Things begin sluggish and allude to a possible supernatural component concerning the wind of the title which violently wails away after two different characters spout warnings about it.  From the second act onward though, it divulges into a bog-standard cat-and-mouse slasher that has Hauser doing his usual mugging shtick and Foster cut-off from help by way of a temperamentally not-working telephone line.  Due to its formulaic nature and sluggish pace, nothing interesting or suspenseful happens for upwards of ninety-minutes, but at least the ending is laugh-out-loud stupid and easily one of the laziest ever filmed in any piece of slasher garbage out there.  So yes, when your only memorable moment is also the most embarrassing one, then you clearly have a dud on your hands.

1980s American Horror Part Ninety-One

A DAY OF JUDGEMENT

(1981)

Dir - Charles Reynolds

Overall: WOOF

 

The only film from the writer/director team of Tom McIntyre and Charles Reynolds and one of several regional oddities from producer Earl Owensby, A Day of Judgement is a colossally boring Southern Gothic drama with a, (very), small handful of macabre vignettes to also classify it as a horror movie.  Done on a noticeably non-existent budget where the set decor is sparse and the acting is front-to-back pedestrian, the story concerns a hillbilly town full of morally dubious people who go about their petty squabbles for roughly ninety-three solid minutes with about three minutes left over for the Grim Reaper to show up and murder a few and/or show them some haunting nightmares of their doomed afterlife if they do not change their sinful ways.  Thankfully, the later moments are garishly striking where the cinematography actually breaks from just being completely flat and lifeless, with eerie blue and red light, hands coming out of the ground, flashes of a scythe, and the Reaper's cheap Halloween makeup creating some low-rent haunted house atmosphere that is genuinely fun.  The rest and overwhelming majority of the film is unwatchably dull though, plodding on and on in its rudimentary attempt at being a morality tale with a Christian slant.

WACKO

(1982)

Dir - Greydon Clark

Overall: MEH

 

A slasher parody via absurdist boner comedy, Wacko is as stupid as stupid movies get and with every intention of being so.  Boasting a recognizable cast and directed by genre-hopping Greydon Clark, it goes for non-stop nyuck nyucks and only hits about one out of a hundred of its attempts, which is at least better than hitting zero out of a hundred of its attempts.  There are endless shout-outs, (mostly blatant yet some subtle), to more famous movies and every character seems controlled to some extent by their genitalia, as even George Kennedy creeps on his teenage daughter, (eeewww), and Joe Don Baker gets to partake of a steamy make-out session with an Elizabeth Daily who is half her age.  Other players include Stella Stevens, Julia Duffy, Anthony James, Charles Napier, and a twenty-five year old Andrew Dice Clay doing a watered-down version of his soon-to-be-famous shtick, playing a high-school greaser with an special ed level IQ that barely registers as lower than any one else's.  The whole thing gets by to some extent on its frenzied, obnoxious charm as well as everyone on screen embarrassing themselves with such shamelessly juvenile material, plus cinema's most ridiculous chest-buster homage this side of Spaceballs is always appreciated.

RETRIBUTION

(1987)

Dir - Guy Magar

Overall: MEH

The first independently made full-length from television filmmaker Guy Magar which he apparently struggled for several years to gain financing for, Retribution has some inventively campy supernatural sequences and nasty violence yet is otherwise a bloated mess.  Though the performances are melodramatically acceptable, Dennis Lipscomb is awkwardly miscast in the lead.  Playing a schlubby painter who lives in a dingy apartment and becomes possessed by the evil spirit of a murdered gambler is all fine and good, but when he is also involved in a romantic relationship with a foxy prostitute who is head-over-heels into him and has to make sinister, bad-ass faces when in his villainous form, the movie loses several ounces of verisimilitude.  The plotting meanders and pads up the running time at least twenty-odd minutes over what it should be, plus Alan Howarth's dated synth score is hardly one of hist best and also hardly ever shuts the hell up.  Still, Magar makes it a ghastly spectacle here or there, utilizing his modest budget for some styled freakouts full of wailing wind, unnaturally vibrant colors, brutal gore, and some gnarly monster makeup.

1980s American Horror Part Ninety - (Armand Mastroianni Edition)

HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE

(1980)

Overall: MEH

 

One of countless slasher movies at the turn of the 1980s that really wanted to dress up as Halloween for Halloween, He Knows You're Alone has a slightly more notably reputation for containing the first feature film appearance from Tom Hanks, be it a minor one.  While the narrative is singular enough from John Carpenter's seminal masterpiece, a handful of other obvious nods to it are present.  These include one of the piano motifs from Alexander and Mark Peskanov's score, the suburban, autumn setting, shots of the killer being spotted outside of second floor windows in broad daylight, and the murdering of promiscuous couples.  To be fair of course, the latter example was utilized just as much if not more so in every other slasher movie of the era and beyond.  Also, some of the meta references including a slasher film-within-a-film in the beginning as well as Hanks waxing poetic about people's desire to be scared by horror movies would be recycled by Wes Craven in the Scream franchise.  The "slowly picking off victims" framework is too derivative and of course too colossally boring by nature to make this more than just a mild curiosity, but it is at least not that insulting in its lameness and hey, a severed head in a fish tank is always fun, right?

 

THE CLAIRVOYANT

(1982)

Overall: MEH

An American, giallo-styled police procedural, The Clairvoyant, (The Killing Hour), has some inventive kill sequences and a sensationalized enough premise, but still ends up being unremarkable.  Set in Manhattan, it concerns a killer that handcuffs his victims in elaborate ways as to seal their doom, a psychic art student who goes into trances while drawing said murder victims, a paranormal talk show host, and, (most inexplicably of all), a detective who is also a stand-up comedian.  Such a list of clashing ingredients seems like it would wield goofy results, but director/co-writer Armand Mastroianni plays everything straight enough outside of some cringe-worthy scenes at the New York Comic Strip which even manage to make professional Dennis Wolfberg's act seem embarrassing due to the fake laughter that was added to the soundtrack every half second.  Despite these dreadful moments, the characters are likeable and the deaths are elaborately brutal, including a guy getting handcuffed to the bottom of a pool, a woman getting handcuffed to a runaway car, and another guy getting handcuffed at the bottom of an elevator shaft to name but a few.  The killer reveal is lame though and hinged on an unnecessarily sleazy, last minute plot point, plus the presentation could do with some of the zaniness inherent in textbook giallo thrillers from their native Italy.

 

THE SUPERNATURALS

(1986)

Overall: MEH

Trekkies who are also horror fans may be pleased to know that a zombie movie exists with both Nichelle Nichols and LeVar Burton in it, but they are also likely to be disappointed by the results.  The Supernaturals is one of several such genre films that came out in the 1980s from director Armand Mastroianni and it is no better or worse than the lot of em.  Opening with a Civil War segment, things then switch to the contemporary age where a platoon is conducting routine maneuvers in the same spot where their now supernaturally-charged ancestors show up to do things when the script tells them to.  Said screenplay by Michael S. Murphey and Joel Soisson boast flimsy logic, weak and/or unlikable characters, and a severe lack of exciting set pieces, but various other issues are equally faulty.  While it is hard not to enjoy Nichols in some capacity, her brass Sargent gets grating after awhile, but this has more to due with her character than her performance.  Due to budgetary setbacks, Bart J. Mixon's make-up work was incomplete and therefor rarely utilized on screen, plus a finished score by Maurice Gibb of all people, (who cameos as a Union soldier in the prologue), was rejected and the used one by Robert O. Ragland is obnoxiously busy and plays continuously as to ruin all sense of atmospheric spookiness.

 

DISTORTIONS

(1987)

Overall: MEH

Director Armand Mastroianni continues his streak of mediocre-at-best genre offerings with Distortions; a "woman going crazy" thriller with enough twists on top of twists to either make your head spin or make you check out due to boredom.  Boasting a solid cast with Olivia Hussey in the lead, Piper Laurie continuing her typecast trek as a wackadoo bitch, and Edward Albert with a gay-friendly mustache, everyone can only do so much on screen with the lackluster script from John F. Goff to work with.  The first two acts are particularly dull, with Hussey playing the prerequisite woman who has just suffered a tragedy and is gaslit by everyone into thinking that she is imagining both a man pursuing her and her smirking Aunt being up to no good.  Rug pull number one happens when there is still almost fifteen minutes left in the running time, (including an actual Scooby-Doo styled mask reveal), and the final tag throws even more convoluted details into the mix which naturally bring about their own plot-holes as far as everything else that transpired before.  The set pieces are weak and the drama is predictable, but for those who want to see Laurie do what she always does except this time with a ridiculous mom-hair wig on, look no further than here.

 

CAMERON'S CLOSET

(1988)

Overall: MEH

One of director Armand Mastroianni's last theatrically released films before moving exclusively into television for the rest of his career, Cameron's Closet, (Cameron's Terror), still ends up having the look and feel of a TV movie anyway, despite the inclusion of some gory death sequences.  Written by The Howling author Gary Brandner, it concerns a little kid with Professor X powers who inadvertently unleashes an ancient demon that likes to remain dormant unless the script tells it to do something.  On that note, the plotting is particularly lazy, getting from point A to point B by means that are both overtly convenient and uninteresting.  At least in its cinematic form, the host of ideas in Brandner's screenplay never gel and the supernatural occurrences follow no rhyme or reason.  Besides the malevolent entity that does whatever it wants to at random intervals, the child of the title mostly keeps his powers to himself, the details concerning his father and partner who experimented on him are left unnecessarily vague, and a police detective's own nightmares serve no real purpose besides offering up more "scary on paper" set pieces.  The special effects by the usually renowned Carlo Rambaldi are hit or miss and occasionally result in unintentional goofiness, plus the movie has an atrociously incorrect musical score whose primary theme is lighthearted and romantic and only shuts up just before something once again "scary on paper" is about to happen.

1980s American Horror Part Eighty-Nine

THE ALCHEMIST

(1983)
Dir - Charles Band
Overall: WOOF

Charles Band's second directorial effort in the horror camp is a painfully dull one that is noticeably missing in the usual high-end camp value that would be a prominent staple of his future works both behind the lens and as producer.  The Alchemist was shot in 1981 yet did not see a theatrical release until two years later when it was screened in Norway of all places, finally getting put out in the US in 1985. Such apparent disinterest in the film for all of that time is understandable upon watching it or trying to watch it as only the most caffeinated of viewers will have a non-laborious time staying awake for the full eighty-six minutes.  The cast is limited to five speaking roles and the most exciting thing that Band and screenwriter Alan J. Adler could come up with throughout the first half is to simply have Lucinda Dooling stare blankly, suffering flashbacks that make the hitchhiker that she picked up grow both aggravated and of course because movies, fall in love with her.  In fact all three of the men on screen are different levels of infatuated with Dooling in both her present incarnation and as an older one that she looks exactly like, also because movies.  The final set piece involves a gateway to hell opening up so that a couple of demons in cheap Halloween masks can emerge from it and bite people, but the slog to get there is mercilessly unforgiving.

 

DARK TOWER

(1987)

Dir - Freddie Francis/Ken Wiederhorn

Overall: MEH

 

An international co-production that was shot in Barcelona, Spain, Dark Tower is generic enough to dupe one into thinking that haunted skyscraper movies are more common than they technically are.  Besides the 1996, Tales from the Crypt episode "Last Respects", this was the final directorial effort from legendary cinematographer/British horror maestro Freddie Francis, joined by co-writer Ken Wiederhorn behind the lens.  The supernatural presence steamrolling the story's diabolical tomfoolery is kept largely vague throughout the running time, which on paper should make it a purely evil force worth cowering in fear over.  In reality though, said otherworldly force mostly just blows a lot of wind at people when it forgets that it can also posses them.  There is also some psychic medium nonsense thrown in that only adds to the cliche pandering instead of conveying an effective atmosphere of dread.  Jenny Agutter, Kevin McCarthy, and a rare top-billed role for Larry Cohen's main-man Michael Moriarty, (who is agreeably less smirky than usual), all give the film some familiar, horror movie star power, but most viewers may check out too early to care.

HOUSE III

(1989)

Dir - James Isaac

Overall: MEH

Though each of the House entries were narratively exclusive from each other, House III, (House III: The Horror Show, The Horror Show), is the only one that tonally does not belong, so much to the point where producers released it domestically outside of the franchise.  It got the jump on Wes Craven's schlock-fest trainwreck Shocker by six months, (which has a near identical premise and a more awesome soundtrack), but this one is at least not insultingly obnoxious by comparison.  In fact, the straight-faced approach is surprising considering that it was initially conceived to be part of an already two-deep, horror/comedy film series that was getting increasingly goofy; this one coming off more sincere than the still ridiculous-on-paper material deserves.  Brion James is ideally cast as the supernaturally vengeful serial killer, spouting his same crazed-eyed, slick-backed hair look that he had in Tango & Cash sans the Australian accent.  In the lead, a 0.9% body fat Lance Henricksen is solid as always and though some of the set pieces are arbitrarily nasty and fun, Leslie Bohem and Allyn Warner's screenplay is loose with the its otherworldly details and it gradually turns into hokey window dressing with cliches abounding.