Category: Friday Night Horror Movies

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)

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My daughter is celebrating her birthday this weekend. We spent a large chunk of last night putting up decorations, cleaning the house, and otherwise preparing for her party. By the time we were done, I was whooped. I managed to watch this movie, but I was way too tired to write about it. So once again you get a Friday Night Horror Movie on Saturday morning.

When I think of movies from the 1980s, I naturally think of movies I loved as a kid. Movies I actually watched during the ’80s. Then there were also movies that I did not watch. Movies I knew about, but that wasn’t for me. Weren’t for kids. Movies for adults I had no interest in. There were other movies that I’d see in the video rental store but didn’t rent for one reason or another.  And finally, there are movies like Q: The Winged Serpent. Movies I’d never heard of until much later.  Way after the 1980s.  I mean, I don’t think I saw this film in a video store; surely I would have remembered that crazy cover of a dragon-looking monster on top of the Chrysler Building.

But as an adult, this film kept popping up in my feeds. Someone would talk about it on social media, or it would come up in some list. It definitely kept rearing its head when I went searching for movies to watch from the 1980s.

I put off watching it for a long time because I kept getting it confused with another 1980s horror movie. One whose name I can’t remember now, but that apparently has some pretty nasty rape scenes, and I’m never in the mood for that.

But it popped up again last night, and the Letterboxd reviews didn’t mention any nastiness, so I put it in.  It’s actually pretty good for a goofy, low-budget monster movie.It was directed by Larry Cohen, who was kind of the king of surprisingly good low-budget horror movies in the 1980s. He made movies like The Stuff, A Return to Salem’s Lot, and Special Effects. 

Someone is killing people in a gruesome, ritualistic way. At the same time, a number of people have literally lost their heads (and other body parts) whilst wandering around New York City. Detective Shepard (David Carradine) and Sergeant Powell (Richard Roundtree) are on the case.The ritualistic killings seem to be a part of some kooky Aztec cult, and Shepard starts to think they might have awakened Quetzalcōātl, an ancient Aztec serpent god. He’s right, of course; otherwise we might not have a movie.

Accidentally mixed up in all this is Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a cheap crook who really just wants to play jazz piano. He gets mixed up with the wrong guys, and when a robbery goes bad, he decides to hide in the top of the Chrysler Building. Guess where old Q the Winged Serpent, is hiding out, has made a nest, and laid an egg?

Made on a very modest budget of $1.1 million, Cohen keeps the monster off screen for most of its runtime. He makes great use of shadows sweeping across the New York City landscape, and we get snippets of wings, claws, and beaks.  Once it fully shows up toward the end, it looks like…well, it looks like a claymation monster made on a budget. But I’ll still take that over most of the CGI slop we get these days.

The acting is quite good for a film like this. Moriarty plays Jimmy in a way that is both sleazy and heartbreaking. He’s a guy who just can’t catch a break, and yet constantly makes the dumbest decisions.  After learning where the monster lives, he goes to the authorities but refuses to tell them where it is until they agree to give him $1 million in cash, amnesty for all his crimes, and photographic rights to the serpent.

Carradine and Roundtree are having a lot of fun as the cops. They are tough and smart-assed. Cohen keeps things moving at a clip, and he creates plenty of modest thrills.I’m a big fan of the low-budget monster movies they made a lot of in the 1950s, and it’s always fun to see homages like this from later decades. It isn’t a great movie, but darn if it isn’t a fun one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: TerrorVision (1986)

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I love 1980s movies. In particular, I love 1980s horror movies. Sandwiched between the gritty, no-holds-barred horror of the 1970s and the more self aware horror of the 1990s, the 1980s was like the Wild West for horror. Literally anything goes.

The ratings system allowed 1970s horror to be more gruesome than ever before, and the 1980s horror films picked that up and ran with it. The home video market allowed for even more flexibility in terms of violence and sexuality. But it also allowed independent studios to make low-budget films and find an audience like never before.

And while certainly there are all sorts of no-budget, terrible-looking films from the 1980s, the decade also saw a lot of fascinating horror films made on a shoestring by craftspeople who cared about what they were doing and had the artistry to create something fun.

TerrorVision is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is lovingly made and well crafted. It is a mix of goopy horror and goofy comedy.

On an alien planet, a worker bee periodically converts a monstrous mutant into energy beams and launches it into deepest space. One day he accidentally sends the beams down to Earth, where they are picked up by the Putterman family’s new DIY satellite dish.

Mom and Dad Putterman are pretty careless parents and big-time swingers. Their house is full of sexed-up pop art, she wears tight leather skirts, and he’s all unbuttoned shirts with bit gold necklaces. The grandfather is a conspiracy theorist gun nut who sleeps in a bomb shelter. The daughter is a punk rocker who’s dating a metalhead named OD, and the son is learning to follow in Grandpa’s footsteps.

The alien who accidentally sent the monster to Earth keeps showing up on their TV screens begging them to destroy the satellite dish and turn off the TV. But everybody just thinks its some dumb sci-fi flick being shown by an Elvira-esque TV hots who mostly exists to show off her cleavage.

It is basically one of those alien-invasion sci-fi 1950s movies with a totally ’80s bent. The alien comes in through the TV and starts eating everyone. The effects are wild. It in no way looks real, but it is imaginative and well-made.

Maybe it is my age, but I much prefer practical effects over CGI. The monster here looks fake. Obviously it isn’t a real alien monster, and you can tell it was made with rubber, wire, and latex. But it feels tangible in a way that CGI never does. With these types of effects, someone had to sit down, come up with the concept, and then try and figure out how to make it with real stuff. That gives it a real quality that some kid sitting down at a computer can never duplicate.

Anyway, there are lots of dumb gags, a whole lot of silliness, and plenty of goopy monster violence. Like I say, it isn’t a great movie, but I appreciate its existence anyway.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Invitation to Hell (1984)

Wes Craven’s debut film, The Last House on the Left (1972), was quite successful financially, but its brutal violence led it to be censored and banned, and didn’t exactly make it easy for him to get financing for another film. He actually returned to his porno roots, making the hardcore incest film The Fireworks Woman, before he was able to get financing for another horror film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). It was also a big hit, and from there he started to get really noticed.  He moved to Los Angeles and made several modest hits before directing A Nightmare on Elm Street, which made him a horror icon. 

Just before that film came out, he made this one for ABC TV. It is unbelievable that he made those two movies back to back. One is a horror masterpiece; the other is this film.

Invitation to Hell is like a mix of The Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matt Winslow (Robert Urich), is a brilliant computer scientist who prefers to work alone. But there isn’t a lot of money in that, so he eventually agrees to work for some big tech firm with his fraternity brother Tom Peterson (Joe Regalbuto). This involves a lot more money than he’s ever made before and a big office. This allows him, his wife Pat (Joanna Cassidy), and two children, Chrissy (Soleil Moon Frye) and Robert (Barrett Oliver), to move into a big, fancy house in the suburbs. 

He loves his job. The company is building a fancy spacesuit for NASA, and Matt is in charge of fitting it with lots of computer stuff so the astronauts will be able to do things like tell the surface temperature and determine if the living creature in front of them is human or alien.  The suit is also fireproof and shoots lasers.

Everyone at the office keeps pressuring him to join the Steaming Spring Country Club run by the beautiful Jessica Jones (Susan Lucci). But Matt isn’t a joiner, and something seems fishy at the club, so he keeps declining. But the wife and kids like the place, so they keep going to it, and eventually join.

With a title like Invitation to Hell, I don’t think it really counts as a spoiler to say that Jessica is some kind of demon or maybe even Satan him (or her) self. When people join the club, she gets your soul, which she keeps in Hell, and some kind of replicant comes out. The mechanics of all that are left to the imagination.

All of this is reasonable well done. If you recognize it is a made-for-TV movie from the early 1980s and keep your expectations real low, then you might find you can enjoy yourself. The final 15 minutes are pretty great. Sort-of spoilers ahead for (again) a movie called Invitation to Hell – Matt finds a portal to Hell at the club, dons his fancy space suit, and goes in to save his family. Hell looks amazing. Craven saved all his budget for this scene. There are some great matte paintings and killer set designs. The climactic battle with Jessica (who wears an amazing dress) is, well, not all that climactic, but it doesn’t matter because the sets are so darn cool.

I can’t really recommend this film except to Wes Craven nerds, but if you dig the man, then there is enough here to allow me to recommend it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

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In 1974 Shaw Brothers Studio teamed up with Hammer Films to produce The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. On paper that sounds like a dream come true. Both studios are known for making terrific genre films with high production values on low budgets. Hammer was the king of remaking classic monster movies with gothic style and extra violence and sex appeal. Shaw Brothers mastered the art of kung fu style. Mixing them should have created an incredible film full of beautifully drawn castles whereupon kung fu masters battled vampires, werewolves, and other assorted demons.

Sadly, the actual film is rather dull and poorly produced.

The plot is a simple thing. Kah (Chan Shen), a Daoist monk, travels to Dracula’s castle in hopes that he can restore the glory of the 7 Golden Vampires who have ruled a small Chinese village for centuries, but when a poor villager killed one of them, their power was drained.

At first Dracula (sadly not Christopher Lee, but here played by John Forbes-Robertson) is like, “Nah, I’m good,” and “I don’t take orders from people like you; I make them my slaves.” But then he realizes he’s been stuck inside his castle for some reason, and the only way to get out is to take control of Kah’s body. Once that happens, he figures he might as well see what the whole Golden Vampire thing is about. Then he disappears for almost the entire film, only showing back up at the very end.

Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, yea!) is lecturing at a Chinese university about vampires but gets the shrug-off by most of the intellectual community there. Only one kid believes him. Hsi Ching (David Chiang) is from the village of the Golden Vampires, and it was his grandfather that killed one of them.

He convinces Van Helsing, along with his son Leyland (Robin Stewart) and a rich blonde woman, Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who is financing the entire thing, to follow him and his martial expert six siblings to travel to the village and kill the Golden Vampires.

The journey is long and difficult and filled with many battles. Eventually they get to the village, fight the Golden Vampire, and then Dracula comes out to fight Van Helsing one on one.

So what went wrong? It was a troubled shoot from the beginning. They shot at Shaw Studios in Hong Kong with a British director (Roy Ward Baker), a mostly English cast (at least for the speaking roles), and a Chinese crew. Communication was difficult as most of the Chinese didn’t speak English and vice versa.

Baker had made some decent films for Hammer, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the kung fu aspects of the film. Eventually the Shaw Brothers people hired Chang Cheh to handle the action sequences because Baker was out of his depth with them.

Trouble is they shot most of the film outdoors on the rather barren, scrabble mountains near Hong Kong. Hammer Films is known for its great use of gothic castles, intricate sets, and bold color designs. You get very little of that by shooting outdoors in the sunshine. There are a few scenes indoors, and Baker really shines there, but there are far too few of them to make things interesting.

The kung fu scenes are mostly unremarkable as well. There is none of that jaw-dropping stunt work that made the Shaw Brothers famous. The story is mostly dull. Even Peter Cushing seems to be phoning it in.

Truth is Hammer Studios was running out of steam. Their glory days were behind them. Shaw Brothers would keep making numerous films well into the 1980s, but even though this was shot on their home turf, they seem to have been relegated to the second string.

In the end, this is a curiosity piece. If you are a fan of both studios, it is worth watching, but you’ll probably end up much like I did, wondering what could have been.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Funhouse (1981)

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In a scene that is clearly aping the opening moments of Halloween (1978), our movie begins with a point-of-view shot of someone walking ominously through a house. There are horror posters hanging on the room and a torture chamber’s worth of weapons and devices hanging on the wall. A hand reaches out and grabs a knife. A teenaged girl takes off her robe and steps into the shower. 

From Halloween, our movie switches to Psycho with the camera inside the shower and a knife-wielding maniac seen in shadows through the steam. The curtain opens. The blade stabs. The girl screams.

Our killer is the girls’ young brother. The knife is rubber. The scene turns from horror to goof.

With the runaway success of Friday the 13th (1980), Universal Studios was looking to get into the teenage horror game. They hired Tobe Hooper, still riding high off the triumphs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1979). It would be his first film for a major studio.

That girl in the shower is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), and she’s got a hot date. Her father warns her not to go to the carnival, for two kids were killed at one not that far away a few weeks ago. She promises she won’t, but her date Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) insists, and besides, they already told their two friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin) that’s what they were going to do.

It’s a pretty cheap and sleazy carnival with deformed animals and half-naked ladies on display. Our heroes have a good time, and Amy begins to fall for Buzz. They visit a psychic (Sylvia Miles, having a blast) but get kicked out of her tent for giggling too much. Meanwhile, Amy’s little brother sneaks out of the house and visits the carnival. 

Our heroes decide it would be fun to stay the night at the funhouse, so before everything shuts down, they find a place to hide. And have some sexy fun times. But before things get too heated, they hear something. Someone has come into the room below. It is the psychic and a large man wearing a Frankenstein mask. He’s nonverbal. She tells him if he wants it, he has to pay. He finds some cash, and she strips down. But our boy’s a little too excited, and he finishes before even getting his pants off. When she says there are no refunds, he kills her.

Yikes! Zoinks! Our heroes find that they are trapped inside this funhouse with no way to escape. Frankenstein’s (Wayne Doba) daddy, the Carnival Barker (Kevin Conway), scolds him, then beats him, knocking the mask off his deformed, monstrous face.

One of the kids drops a lighter, alerting our villains, and the rest of the movie has them chasing our heroes around the funhouse. 

Periodically we’ll find the little brother wandering around the carnival, oblivious to everything. The film hints that he’s going to be killed, even having him caught by some creepy-looking dude. But he turns out nice and calls the boy’s parents, and the boy is never seen again.  It is a nice little fake-out. The film does that a few times when the story will lean one way and then go another. 

It is a film best left with your brain checked out.  Otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why a roaming carnival has a funhouse with multiple stories, a long hallway with a giant ventilation system, and a room full of killer gears and rotating hooks.  Seriously, that temporary funhouse is enormous.

But if you can push such analytical thoughts aside, you might find there is a lot of fun to be had in this film. Hooper dives into the goofiness of the carnival aspects. It comes across like a mix between classic 1980s slasher films with something even more classic from Universal with a dash of Freaks thrown in for good measure. Not a great movie by any stretch, but an interesting one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Jason X (2001)

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There comes a time when a horror fan has to admit that the Friday the 13th films aren’t very good. I grew up in the 1980s, otherwise known as ground zero for slasher films. I loved the Friday the 13th films. Jason Voorhees is one of the greatest, most iconic villains of horror.

The reality is I never watched the full, uncut versions. I always watched them on the USA Network and TBS, or some other basic cable network where they were edited for television. Basic cable was different back then; they had to cut out the harder swear words, the nudity, and the more blood-soaked violence. I think I liked those films in part because my pubescent brain filled in those edited parts. I imagined what happened when the screen cut to something different.

I didn’t watch the uncut versions until I was in college. I gotta admit I was a little disappointed by them. What I had imagined was so much more gnarly and titillating than what was actually shown.

But also by that point I was fully into my film snob cinephilia. I was discovering the films of Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock. I had realized that films could be more than entertainment. That horror could be more than just fun kills and naked flesh. I was starting to turn my nose up at films like the Friday the 13th franchise.

I went to see Jason X in the cinema when it came out in 2001. I was a full-on film snob by then, but I was also feeling some nostalgia for the films of my youth. I was hoping for some dumb fun, and maybe a little self aware humor like the Scream film (the third of which had come out the year before.) What I got was dumb, but it sure wasn’t fun, and while there were some jokes, they weren’t the self-referential kind. 

I have not watched this film since that first viewing. But I own it on DVD. I’m still a horror nerd after all, and I own the first 8 films via a nice boxed set (which I reviewed, and you can read about at Cinema Sentries), so I just had to own the remaining films in some way.

And now, since it is Friday the 13th, I figured I’d give it a watch.

It begins in the Crystal Lake Research Facility, something that never existed in the other films. It seems to be designed solely to hold Jason and nothing else.  At least judging by how empty the rest of the facility is. Even though this film acknowledges that Jason is an unstoppable killing machine, they’ve left him in an unguarded, very large room. He is chained up and hanging from the ceiling, but why he wouldn’t be locked in a cell is unexplained.  Why there aren’t numerous guards all around him is also unexplained. There is one kid, and he does at least have a gun, but that’s it.  

The kid places a blanket over Jason’s head (the better for us and incoming soldiers to not be able to see who exactly is under the blanket in the coming moments). Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig), the head of the research facility, has plans to cryogenically freeze Jason so that some future generation can deal with him. But before that happens, some dumb soldiers enter the room and demand his release. They are led by Dr. Aloysius Wimmer (David Cronenberg, who was apparently excited to be in a Friday the 13th film and rewrote all of his dialogue), who hopes to figure out how Jason is unable to die. 

Jason, of course, has already killed that boy from (and placed him in the chains and under the blanket) and wreaks havoc on the soldiers. He chases Rowan in the room with the freezing chamber, and she manages to shoot and push him into it. But just as he’s freezing, he pushes his machete (yes, for some reason these people kept his machete within grabbing distance of the supervillain) through the chamber door, stabbing Rowan and filling the room with freezing fog.

Despite all this carnage inside what one assumes is a famous and very expensive science facility, apparently no one bothered to come in and clean up. Or do anything at all.  For the film, flash forwards to the year 2455, and both Jason and Rowan are exactly where they fell, still frozen. 

A group of randy scientists and jokey soldiers find them and take them to their ship.  The Earth has long been abandoned due to massive pollution, but these guys like to visit once in a while and salvage what they can for resale.

They use their special futuristic microrobots to fix and heal Rowan, but figure Jason is too far gone to be saved.  Naturally, he comes back to life once he thaws out.  Lots of killing ensues. 

Some of it is pretty cool; a lot of it is pretty bad.

While some of the scientists are studying Jason, and letting Rowan know she’s now in the future. Others go off to have sex. Because this is a Friday the 13th movie, and you can’t have one of those without sexy teens doing what sexy teens do.

The leader of the ship is a greedy professor who hopes to sell Jason to the highest bidder (he’s still pretty well known in the future, and rich weirdos would like to have his corpse.). And if that doesn’t clue us in to how skeevy he is, there is another scene where he talks one of his students into having (kinky) sex with him – he dresses up in women’s lingerie, she twists his nipple (which by 2001 standars is extra wild!) in order for her to get a good grade.

There is also an android named KM-14 (Lisa Ryder). And if all of this is starting to sound like an Aliens riff to you, you are not alone.  This film was conceived because the Freddy vs. Jason film was locked in development hell over rights issues, and they wanted to have some Jason film out to keep fans interest up. They hired Todd Farmer to write the film, despite him having zero credits to his name. After some thought, he figured the only thing they could do to the character was send him into space and riff on the Alien films. 

But back to the kills. Most of them are fairly standard stuff – Jason hacking folks to pieces with his machete. (Poorly rendered) CGI allowed for them to do things like hack heads and arms off without too much blood and guts, or cut a guy basically in half. One lady has her head stuck in a bowl of liquid nitrogen, and then Jason cracks it like glass. One guy gets tossed onto a massive mining drill, and we watch him slowly slide around and round to the bottom (causing another character to say, when asked how the guy was doing, “He’s screwed”)

Yeah, there are a lot of jokes like that. One-liners coming after someone gets killed. They are more like the kind of thing you get in action movies from the 1980s than ironic in-jokes from a post-Scream world. At one point, to distract Jason, they use a holographic simulator to project a version of Camp Crystal Lake to him. Out come a couple of scantily clad girls who look him in the eye and say something like, “We love having casual sex.”

Jason eventually gets destroyed, but those fancy nanobots have a mind of their own, and they put him back together, but this time they add a bunch of Terminator-esque robot parts and create an Uber Jason.

This is a bad movie.  Probably the worst in the franchise. But you know what? I’m not mad I watched it. All the Jason movies are bad, but there is a certain level of fun in them. If you can turn your brain off before it begins and revert to some dumb teenaged version of yourself, you might find yourself entertained.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ginger Snaps Back – The Beginning (2004)

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For the third (and final) film in the Ginger Snaps series, they went back to the beginning. Or rather the beginning of the beginning. Or something. What I’m saying is they made a prequel. 

Set in 1815, this film follows two sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabel), as they battle werewolves and try to keep Ginger from turning into one after she’s been bitten. 

If you’ll remember, that is exactly the plot of the original film, even down to the same actresses playing characters with the same names and (more or less) the same personalities.

Instead of being two modern girls living through the hell of high school and being obsessed with death, these sisters have survived a terrible accident that killed their parents and everyone else in their party while exploring the great wilderness.  

They come upon a nearly abandoned fort filled with suspicious characters. The people inside have been waiting for a party to return with food and supplies, but they are two months late.  Wolf-like creatures have been attacking the fort regularly.

One night Ginger discovers a strange, deformed boy hidden in a room. The boy bites her. It will come as no surprise to learn the boy was bitten by a werewolf and is starting to turn. Soon enough Ginger will start to turn as well.

To keep that from happening, she needs to kill the boy. But her father is none too keen on that happening, and killing a child proves a bit difficult for her as well.

The original Ginger Snaps was a terrific little horror film that blended the smart high school satire of Heathers with a good dash of bloody horror. This third entry feels like they just took the same concept and threw it into a different time period. The sisters act just like they do in the original film, down to the way they talk (which is rather off-putting since it takes place in the 1800s). There also isn’t much satire to it.  It really doesn’t feel like they took the time to think through the earlier time period but needed it to be a sequel since (spoilers for the previous films) Ginger is dead and Brigitte is a full-fledged werewolf. 

The end result isn’t terrible. It is a perfectly serviceable horror film. It just pales in comparison with the first one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971)

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This was one of the first Dario Argento films I ever watched. I had definitely watched The Bird With the Crystal Plumage before, and probably Suspiria, but I was not well versed in Argento or Giallo at that point.  I watched it on an old DVD that I bought on the cheap. It was one of those packs of multiple films all put onto a couple of discs where the quality is god-awful. This was a pack of like ten slasher films on two discs.

I didn’t know anything about the film; I’m not even sure I knew it was an Argento, but it sounded interesting, and I gave it a go. I mostly liked it, but I didn’t love it. 

I’ve seen it a couple of times since and have come to enjoy it more. Having now seen almost all of Argento’s filmography and a whole lot of Giallo, I can better see how it fits inside those things and appreciate it more.  It still isn’t anywhere close to my favorite, but it’s a long way from the worst.   I do find it interesting that I watched it so early.

The Cat O’ Nine Tails was the second film Argento ever directed and is the middle part of what has become known as his “Animal Trilogy” (the first is Bird With the Crystal Plumage, the last is Four Flies on Gray Velvet.)

This film suffers from it leaning more towards the murder mystery aspects of the Giallo and away from the more lurid and stylistic parts of the genre. 

Someone breaks into the Terzi Medical Institute but steals nothing. The institute studies genetics and has just made a breakthrough. It seems that individuals with an extra Y chromosome—making it XYY – have a much greater tendency toward violence. That extra chromosome is quite rare, but a study inside a prison found that those convicted of violent crimes had it at a much higher rate.

Since nothing was stolen, the police basically shrug. But a newspaper man named Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) takes an interest in the story, as does Franco “Cookie” Arno (Karl Malden), a blind man who loves working puzzles. 

Before they can figure it out, the bodies start piling up. Someone is strangling people that at first seem random, but they ultimately are found to have some connection to the institute. 

There are lots of groovy scenes featured from the killer’s point of view, usually as he’s killing someone. In the midst of this, Argento often gives us extreme close-ups on the killer’s eyes, but until the end we do not see who the killer is. With that and Cookie being blind, Argento’s themes about what we see and what we don’t are none too subtle. But still effective. 

The editing is rather fascinating. Between scenes, the film will often give us flashes of what is to come. As one scene is ending, we’ll see the beginning of the next scene  flash cut into the previous scene for a few seconds.  There are a few nicely staged scenes and some typical Dario style, but mostly he plays it straight. Which is too bad because the actual story doesn’t quite have enough in it to keep me completely interested.

It is well worth seeing if you are a fan of Argento or Giallo. It isn’t the first film I’d turn to if you are interested, but it is definitely a nice way of seeing how things developed.

As an aside note I’m counting this as part of Foreign Film February even though the copy I watched was an English dub. Like a lot of Italian films from this time I believe Cat O’ Nine Tails was filmed with everyone speaking in their native tongue and then in post production it was dubbed into English and Italian (with the main actors using their own voice when possible – so Karl Malden speaks in English, and was presumably dubbed by an Italian for that version.) So this was a foreign made film directed by an Italian so I’m counting it.

The Saturday Morning Horror Movie: All That We Destroy (2018)

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Last night the family and I went to see the King Cabbage Brass Band in concert. I’ll probably have more to say about that later, but for now I’ll say we had a blast. It was a great show.  To get there we had to leave about 6:30, and we didn’t get home until almost midnight, at which point I was utterly exhausted, and was not capable of sitting down to watch a horror movie.

I had actually planned for this and watched a movie earlier in the afternoon.  I got about half of this post written before it was time to go. So, I’m finishing it now, and we’re calling it the Saturday Morning Horror Movie. I guess I could call it the Friday Afternoon Horror Movie since that’s when I watched it, but let’s not make things complicated.

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There is just too darn much stuff to watch. My daughter wanted to watch Hamilton a couple of weeks ago, and the only way to stream it is to get Disney+. Apparently, the only way to get Disney+ is to bundle it with Hulu. Being the good father that I am, I ordered both, and we all enjoyed Hamilton.

Then I started to enjoy Hulu. They’ve got some good movies, and some great shows, and I decided to keep it for another month. Tonight I figured I’d see how their horror selection was and came across this film. The trailer looked intriguing, and I gave it a go.

Turns out it is part of a horror anthology series from horror stalwarts Blumhouse Pictures. Into the Dark, as the series was called, ran for two seasons with roughly one movie coming out per month. Each movie was holiday themed, grabbing whatever big holiday happened during the month it aired.

Somehow, I’d never heard of this.  Like at all.  Which is weird because this sort of thing is right up my alley. Like I say, there is just too darn much stuff to watch.

But now that I’ve watched this, I’m kind of glad I’d not heard of it before. There are some intriguing ideas in All That We Destroy, but none of them are explored with any real gusto.

Dr. Harris (Samantha Mathis) is a geneticist who has found a way to make perfect human clones. In her house. It is perfect timing because, as it turns out, her son Spencer (Israel Broussard) is probably a serial killer. He’d shown all sorts of signs of that growing up, but when he actually kills a human – a drifter named Ashley (Aurora Perrineu)—she’s sure of it. Instead of turning him in or getting him some kind of therapy, she clones Ashley and lets him keep killing her. 

The idea is that if she observes his killings, then maybe she can figure out what makes him tick and change him. Or at the very least, killing a clone will get those instincts out of his system (for a time), enabling him to live a normal life. And whenever those instincts pop back up, he can come home and kill another clone. 

That’s an interesting idea, but again the film doesn’t do much with it. It doesn’t really explore what makes him tick. The mom could turn into a great villain. It makes a certain sense that any mom would protect their son, but she just keeps churning out clones for him to kill. Even when the clones start to have memories of themselves and increasingly seem human, she just keeps making them.

The trouble is Spencer knows he’s killing a clone. That makes her not human, and he can tell the difference. It just isn’t the same killing a clone.  Enter Marissa (Dora Madison), the cute, effervescent neighbor who takes a liking to Spencer even though he speaks in monotone and acts very strangely. She becomes the love interest but also a real human he might have to kill.

Spencer’s Dad (Frank Whaley) shows up at some point, but only through these very strange virtual reality phone calls with his mom. When he calls, the mom picks up these little dots she attaches to her head and gets transported to a virtual world where they both walk and talk together. There are some other odd technological moments in this film that seem to exist to show that we are living in the near future or something. 

The script does nobody any favors. Madison and Perrineau give it their best, and both are quite good with what they’re given. There really is something to this story, but it’s like the filmmakers didn’t quite believe in it enough and wound up falling back on some stupid tropes.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Vengeance of the Zombies (1973)

vengeance of the zombies

As it is Foreign Film February, I wanted to do a non-English language film for my Friday Night Horror flick. It has also been a long day, so I grabbed the thing closest to me, which was my Paul Naschy boxed set. There are five films in that set, and I hope to watch and review them all over the next couple of months. I love the idea of reviewing all the DVDs I own, but that is a monumental task.

Vengeance of the Zombies is an absolutely bonkers film. In the booklet that came with this set, Naschy (who wrote the film) is quoted as having probably been on hashish when he sat down at his typewriter. That definitely checks out.

It also checks out that this was a chepie exploitation flick. Technically there is a plot, but it is so haphazardly put together it is impossible to make sense of.  

Someone is killing a bunch of women in London. Then someone else, a voodoo priest named Kantanka (Paul Naschy), is bringing them back to life as part of his zombie horde.  Naschy also plays Krisna an East Indian mystic.

Elvire Irving (Romy) thinks Krisna is one cool cat and follows him to his big mansion out in the country. The big mansion was once the home of an evil family who were eventually murdered and hung upon the trees in the yard.

There are a lot of dream sequences where Kantanka and some other foul faced fiends attack Elvire. In one particularly groovy dream sequence, Paul Naschy plays Satan, to whom various others make sacrifices.  Another sequence (which may or may not be a dream; it is difficult to tell), a lady wearing a big box painted like a man’s face dances around while Kantanka pours blood onto corpses to turn them alive.  Or something.

Scotland Yard gets involved but is mostly useless. 

Seriously, I just watched this film, and I’m having a hard time remembering anything about the actual plot.

There is lots of murdering. Plenty of ladies wearing sheer nightgowns. And loads of gratuitous sex.

I do love the sex scenes in these types of films. During one scene, the housekeeper is upset over something. Krisna tells her everything is going to be ok. Then he looks at her, the music starts up, and he then pulls down the covers, pulls down her top, and gropes her breasts three times. She then sits up and passionately kisses him.

In another scene, Elvire goes into a barn only to find a woman with her head nearly chopped off. Then she is attacked by a dude with a scythe. Krisna jumps in and saves the day. They then go to the house, where she tells him that he should call the cops. He brusquely says “no” to which she responds by making out with him.

I’ve been doing my seduction techniques all wrong, I guess.

The music is a wild mix of popular rock and funk. It is so crazily inappropriate for most of what’s happening on screen.

This is a ridiculously bad film in every imaginable way. But it’s also a lot of fun to watch. It is the kind of film you want to watch late at night with a group of friends while getting loaded. Check your brain at the door and get ready for ridiculousness.