The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Toxic Avenger (2025)

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When I was a teenager the USA network had a show called Up All Night that ran on Friday and Saturday evenings. They shows movies all night long. It was hosted by Rhonda Shear (Friday nights) and Gilbert Gottfried (Saturday nights). Rhonda did the whole hot blonde bimbo thing and Gottfried, well he basically just did his usual schtick. The movies were usually dumb comedies or horror films; they were almost always of the b-variety. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized a great many of the films were produced by Troma Entertainment.

Troma specialized in low-budget, self-aware fare that always seem to wink at the audience, letting you know they knew their movies were stupid. I loved that stuff as a teenager, but now I find it insufferable. I like low-budget movies. I can even dig the so bad it’s good genre of films. But the thing for me about that is that the films have be aiming for something good. It needs to have attempted to be a good movie and failed spectacularly. That’s what makes it fun. When a movie knowingly tries to be stupid in order to fall into the so bad its good category it just annoys me. Troma often falls into that category.

Admittedly, I say that as someone who hasn’t watched a Troma film in decades. I don’t really know what they’ve been doing since the 1990s. Maybe they got good. I doubt that, but maybe my memory of what they used to do has gotten washed.

Troma’s flagship film was The Toxic Avenger (1984). The main character became their mascot of sorts and there were numerous sequels and various other multi-media projects based around it. It is about a nerdy pipsqueek of a teenager who gets ruthlessly picked on. One day he falls into some toxic sludge becoming a mutant with super strength. He then wreaks ultra-violent vengeance upon his enemies. I watched the first one when I was a teenager and enjoyed it, but I haven’t seen the sequels.

When I heard they were doing a remake I was immediately on board. When it came out on Blu-ray I made it my pick of the week. As I note in that article I wouldn’t actually be interested in the film except that it was written and directed by Macon Blair. He’s an actor and director I really enjoy and I’m always excited to see one of his films. Watching him play around in the Troma sandbox sounded interesting.

The film is pretty much what you would expect from that pairing. Blair is a big fan of the studio and is happy to dive into their mix of goopy violence and goofy comedy. But he’s also too good of a filmmaker to make this truly dumb. He’s also cool enough to get actors like Peter Dinklage, Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon to star in it.

Even so it had difficulties getting made. It bounced around for a while in pre-production with several different names attached (Arnold Scwarzenneger was even slated to star at some point) and then once it was made it took forever for it to find any sort of release.

Dinklage is Winston Gooze a down-on-his luck janitor who works for a giant, corrupt pharmaceutical company. It is the kid of place that sells nonsense drugs that are suppossed to heal what ails ya, but really just gives you cancer. They also dump all sorts of toxic sludge into the river. He’s got terminal cancer and a step-son whose mother recently died of cancer herself.

His insurance won’t cover the medical costs of curing his cancer, and one day he goes to the CEO of the company, Bob Garbinger (a wonderfully unhinged Kevin Bacon) for help. He acts nice, says he’ll help, but then has him escorted out of the building, where he’s greeting by some thugs who throw him into toxic sludge. Yada Yada, Winston is now the Toxic Avenger and he gets his revenge.

Blair makes this extremely violent with some truly creative and blood-soaked deaths. But the vibe is goofy so it feels more wild and crazy than truly horrific. Elijah Wood plays Garbinger’s younger brother and he’s made up like Danny DeVito in that Tim Burton Batman movie. He’s having the time of his life.

The whole thing is super goofy. I couldn’t quite get into its wavelength, but again Blair is a good enough filmmaker, and there was a bigger budget with this thing than I expect Troma has ever had before, so it looks good. More or less.

I suspect if you love Troma than this will probably work for you (unless you feel it is a little too “good” for their kind of film). If you have no idea what Troma is, and don’t generally like goopy horror films (even if they are super goofy) then I’d stay way. For me, I’m glad I watched it, but I can’t say I’ll ever do it again.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Fright Night (1985)

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I talk a lot about growing up in the 1980s and how the slasher genre helped shape my cinematic aesthetics. I loved the Jasons and the Freddys. But the truth is I watched those films at home, edited on basic cable. It wasn’t until years later that I watched them as intended and in order. But there was another set of horror films that I watched unedited even back when I was a kid. These were, well, not family-friendly as such, but they were more palatable to the grown ups allowing us kids to watch them on videotape.

Films like The Monster Squad (1987), House (1985), and my favorite, Fright Night (1985), fall into the comedy horror genre. They are goofy and silly but still provided some good scares. I loved them as a kid. But once I grew up, I more or less forgot about them.

About fifteen years ago, not long after my daughter was born, I rewatched Fright Night and its sequel. I was a little disappointed in both. They didn’t live up to my nostalgia. But the first one has been popping up in my streaming feeds the last few weeks, and I decided to give it another revisit. I seem to be doing that a lot lately – revisiting film I loved decades ago. Trying to see if they still hold up, I guess.

I liked Fright Night quite a lot this go ’round. It is a film from the 1980s that loves classic horror, and even Hammer-era horror. It is fun, and funny, and makes great use of practical effects, and has some very decent thrills.

Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) loves old horror movies. He watches them on a local station hosted by Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), a Peter Cushing-esque old horror star. Whatever happened to those old shows where they show old movies with introductions by goofy, sexy, creepy, hosts?

We’re introduced to Charley as one of those old movies plays in his bedroom. He’s making out with his girlfriend Amy Peterson (Amanda Bearse), but when it cuts to Peter Vincent talking about one of his movies, she stops with the face sucking to tell Charley he should watch. She knows he’s a huge fan. But he’s got other things on his mind. Mainly losing his virginity. They fight over it a bit, but then she finally agrees, takes off her top, and crawls into bed. But then he notices something strange in the neighbor’s yard. Two men seem to be carrying a coffin inside.

Amy feels increasingly insecure and practically begs him to come to bed. But he’s too fascinated with what’s going on out there. She leaves in a huff, and it is only then that he seems to notice her again.

It is a fascinating way to start the film, as it tells us so much about these characters. He’s desperate to have sex with her. So much so that he doesn’t care about catching his favorite show. A show she is quite aware he loves (thus she cares about him, knowing what he likes) and uses it as an excuse to get his paws off of her for a bit. She becomes vulnerable, admitting that she’s just scared about losing her virginity and is willing to finally lose it with him. But then something real and weird and scary happens outside, and he suddenly forgets all about his girl.

That becomes something of a theme for this film. He’ll periodically declare his undying love to her, but then immediately become distracted by oncoming horror.

Anyway, over the next few days, he sees very attractive women entering the neighbor’s house but never leaving. One night he gets a binoculared view of the new owner, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), getting sexy with one of those ladies when suddenly he grows fangs. His new neighbor is a vampire!

He tries to convince Amy and his best friend Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) of this, but they aren’t having it. He tries to enlist Peter Vincent to help him destroy the vampire, but he thinks Charley’s crazy. Vincent’s having a bit of a hard time himself. He used to be an important actor. Or at least he was working. Making cult films. Now he’s hosting a cheesy late-night show for local television. And he’s just learned he’s been fired from that. Because these days “all they want to see are demented madmen running around in ski-masks, hacking up young virgins.”

Amy and Evil Ed convince Peter Vincent to lend them a hand. Not in destroying the vampires but in convincing Charley that he’s mistaken about the whole thing. They figure they can visit Mr. Dandridge, give him a few vampire tests, and all will be well.

But of course, Dandrige is a real vampire, and the tests backfire. Now the gang will have to destroy him for sure, before he turns them into bloodsuckers.

Tom Holland wrote and directed the film, and he does a nice job blending the scares with the laughs. It isn’t really scary (or all that funny if I’m being honest), but I found it quite entertaining. It has a very enjoyable vibe.

The practical effects are terrific. When the monsters die, they die slowly, transforming into goopy, bloody corpses. There is a werewolf transition that rivals the famous one in An American Werewolf in London (1981).

Roddy McDowell is great fun. He plays the pathos of this aging actor perfectly, giving him a wonderful vanity mixed with terror as he realizes that all those monsters he fought on the movie screen are real, and that he doesn’t have near the courage his characters did. Chris Sarandon is a bit miscast in my opinion. He’s clearly having fun, which is infectious, but he doesn’t have nearly the sex appeal or menace a great vampire has.

This isn’t great cinema, but it’s great fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Beyond the Door III (1989)

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Beyond the Door (1974) was an Italian horror film that basically rips off The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. The Italians were good at that. They’d take a popular American film and remake it without giving credit for the original story and make a few bucks. Rinse, repeat.

The Americans are good at it too. Beyond the Door was quite successful. So in 1977, when Mario Bava directed a supernatural film called Shock, when it came to American theaters, they renamed it Beyond the Door II. More than a decade later, the Italians made a completely unrelated (to either film) supernatural horror flick, and some crude individual dubbed it Beyond the Door III.

It is surprisingly good.

A group of American students travels to Yugoslavia to witness a sacred ritual that is only performed once every 100 years. They are told it is a Passion Play, but also that it takes place from the time before Christ. Which should have probably been their first red flag.

They are met in Yugoslavia by Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson), who seems very nice. We quickly learn he is not so nice when he receives a telegram for Beverly Putnic (Mary Kohnert), one of the students (and our main protagonist), informing them that her mother has died in a tragic accident, and he rips it up without telling her.

He puts them on a boat, and they travel to the middle of nowhere, where they get off, walk through the woods, and come upon a small village full of strange people in Eastern European peasant garb who just stare at them menacingly.

Without further ado, they put the kids to bed. Everybody but Beverly is asked to sleep in a single cabin, but Beverly is taken on her own to a special place. They give her a white nightgown and probably drug her, for once she’s asleep an old hag checks to ensure she’s a virgin (gross!).

In the morning they set fire to the other student’s cabin. All but one escape with their lives. Beverly awakens from her slumber, and they take off running. All but two of them jump on a train rolling down the tracks. One girl misses it, and a chivalrous dude jumps off to be with her (hurting his leg in the process.)

The train is full of more strange-looking characters who are utterly unhelpful. And then things get really weird. There is a supernatural force that causes all sorts of blood-soaked harm. This is a film that isn’t afraid to let its freaky gore flag fly. It has some terrific kills with some gooey practical effects.

The train is apparently unstoppable. Sometimes the magic flips the rail switch, and it will just run straight into the ground and keep on going (making great use of some very cool miniatures.) Interspersed with these scenes are some cuts to some presumably Yugoslavian government workers who seem to be monitoring the train’s movements. They presumably speak in Slavic, definitely not English, and AMC+ did not provide English subtitles. I assume they were just freaking out about the runaway train, but who knows?

The cinematography by Adolfo Bartoli is surprisingly great. This film looks amazing. There are lots of scenes at night and in the dark, but it is so well lit you can see everything beautifully. This is especially true during the numerous scenes lit by fire. Seriously, this film has no reason to look this good.

It has no reason to be this good. I mean, the plot is rather silly, and the acting isn’t great. But for a little low-budget sort-of (but not really) final part of a horror trilogy, Beyond the Door III is well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Whistle (2026)

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I get pretty spoilery in this post so if you don’t like those stop reading.

ted me. It begins with a scene that takes place before the real movie sets in, designed to give you a little fright before it has to do the boring work of developing characters and building a plot.

There is a high school basketball game. Our presumed heroes are down by a few points, and there are only a few seconds left. Our presumed main character takes the ball and makes a basket, narrowing the margin to one more point. Then he sees something in the stands. Smoke billows, and there is a strange figure standing there. He shakes it off and gets the ball again. He runs. He shoots. He…the basketball does that thing it always does in basketball movies where it bounces back and forth around the rim in slow motion before it goes in. While it is doing that, a smoky, charcoal creature appears before the boy.

He runs to the locker room, takes out some kind of relic, and begs for his life. The creature appears again, and the boy smashes the relic. The creature disappears. Hurrah. The rest of the team comes in, and our boy takes a shower. Then he’s burnt to a crisp by the monster.

Flash forward three months. Nobody cares about that dead kid. He isn’t our hero. Neither are any of his friends or family. He exists so we can so the film can start with a bang. Oh, and I guess so our actual main character can easily find the relic.

She’s Chrys Willet (Dafne Keen), and she’s new to the school. She gets the dead boy’s locker, and even though it has been three months since he died, and presumably that was a tragic event for the school, no one has bothered to clean out his locker. She grabs the relic and puts it in her bag.

She makes a few friends who seem to be the only people at this school. Seriously, she goes to her first class, and the only students are like the five people she just met in the hallway. They aren’t really her friends either. She just met them, and two of them were mean to her. One stared at her like she knew who Chrys was, but she doesn’t like her. The other is her cousin. They will become friends in the next scene because the film needs them to be. It needs some characters it can kill off to keep things exciting.

The relic does look cool. It’s kept inside this black crystal-like box, but the real thing has a groovy skull on one side and a little whistle thing on the other. When you blow it, death comes knocking. You see, when you are born, your death is also born. Death spends its, um, life looking for you. When it finds you at the slated time, it kills you. But the whistle summons your death early. Each person’s death looks like them at the slated time of their death, and if death comes early, you get killed in the manner you were always going to die.

This makes little sense but does create some fun kills. So, let’s say you are supposed to get run over by a bus in twenty years. You blow the whistle, and death comes calling sooner than expected. When it finds you, your body gets mutilated just like it would if you were hit by that bus.

I’m probably saying too much. I’ll have to add a spoiler tag at the front. But honestly, this film is dumb. I can’t really recommend it anyway.

Our heroes (and us in the audience) learn this lore through the typical creepy old lady character we always find in this type of movie who collects ancient artifacts and knows all about spooky spells.

This movie reminded me of The Craft. Partially because it is about a weird new girl coming to a school, bonding with some newfound, and fighting supernatural powers. But also because it really isn’t that great, but I fully suspect there’s a group of teenagers who will become extremely nostalgic about it in twenty years.

At least The Craft took some time developing its characters and developed its story. This film just throws everything together without bothering to make something cohesive.

Nick Frost is in it, and that’s always a good thing. He plays the teacher who is the first adult to get a look at the relic and figure something out about it. But then he exits the film way too early. So much so I’m surprised someone of his status agreed to the role. Sophie Nélisse is one of the friends who becomes the love interest. That seems to be her thing now. But I’m here for it.

Whistle is a dumb movie. It doesn’t take the time it needs to tell a good story. Instead it just jumps from scene to scene, advancing the plot in very familiar ways. But it never made me care about these people and their story. It tries very hard to be cool. Chrys is a goth and a lesbian, and she listens to bands like The Cure and Iron Maiden on vinyl. At one point the film has her lying on her back, the camera shooting her from above, her super cool records neatly laid out around her head like a halo. Like I say, this is a film a certain type of teen will identify with, and I look forward to their essays on how misunderstood it was when I’m a much older man.

But the thing is, I kind of had a good time. The actors are decent. The directing does what it needs to do. The kills are pretty fun, even if they do use too much CGI. I won’t watch this again, and I certainly won’t feel nostalgia over it in a couple of decades, but I don’t hate myself for watching it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: They Will Kill You (2026)

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They Will Kill You had the utter misfortune of being released at the same time as the Ready or Not sequel. The studio did it an even bigger disservice by creating a trailer that made this film look like a clone of the other one. But despite some similarities – a young woman being trapped in a large building and hunted by the rich – They Will Kill You has a lot of surprises up its sleeve.

Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) gets a job as a maid in a swanky hotel run by the mysterious Lily Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette), but she soon discovers that everyone in the hotel is part of a cult that plans to make her the evening’s sacrifice.

I’m afraid to say much more about the plot would spoil the fun. This is a film that gets a lot of mileage out of its many twists and turns. I especially appreciated how it did differentiate itself from Ready or Not, and those differences were worth being surprised about.

I will say this is an incredibly enjoyable and thoroughly weird film. This is a film where everyone involved just decided to go for it, and it mostly works.

Sometimes it doesn’t. It brings up several threads and then never follows through with them. For instance, there is a moment where it is implied that each floor of the hotel corresponds with one level of Dante’s Inferno, but the only one we get a hint at is the “Fuck Floor.” A few times the film will hint at fun things it could have explored, and then it just doesn’t.

The action is quite good, and the camera movements are very florid, but it does that thing where it often relies on computer effects instead of practical ones. This is true even in scenes where they could have just built a real set and made things look much more real. But modern movies tend to do that a lot.

But Zazie Beetz is a freaking star. She’s so much fun in this. Patricia Arquette is absolutely chewing the scenery, and the rest of the cast (including Tom Felton and Heather Graham) seem to be having a blast as well.

I had a ton of fun watching this, and I highly recommend it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Twins of Evil (1971)

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I suspect if you were to run some statistics on The Midnight Cafe, you’d find that I’ve reviewed more movies from Hammer Studios than any other one, and that Peter Cushing would be somewhere in the top in terms of actors I’ve written about. He is my seventh most watched actor, with some 37 of his films having been watched by me. I’ve written about eight of those films, most of which were Hammer Horror films. I’ve written about 24 different films from that studio.

That seems weird to me because Cushing isn’t one of my favorite actors. I mean, I do love him, but if I were to make a list of my favorites, he wouldn’t be on it. And I imagine if you took my ratings of all the Hammer films and averaged them out, the number you’d get wouldn’t be that high.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I keep watching these films. That’s not true. I do love me some Hammer Horror even while I can admit they aren’t always the greatest of films. It is interesting to me that I keep turning to them and that it’s only been the last decade that I’ve become a fan.

Anyway, Twins of Evil is pretty great.

Cushing plays Gustav Weil, a stern Puritan who leads a gang of dudes who love burning pretty young women at the stake. I mean, sure, they declare them witches first, and there does seem to be quite a few folks getting horribly murdered, lending credibility to some kind of ungodly horror going on, but really it’s just fun to burn girls out in the forest.

Up on the hill in his castle overlooking the village, Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) dabbles in Satanism (and I absolutely love that all the summaries of the film use that language, “dabbles in Satanism.”) While doing a bit of pretty young woman sacrificing of his own, he accidentally awakens Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Katya Wyeth) from her grave. She immediately turns him into a vampire.

Meanwhile, two twin sisters, Freida Gellhorn (Mary Collinson) and Maria (Mary Collinson), arrive in the village due to their parents dying. They take up residence with the good Gustav, their uncle. Now Maria is a good girl who wants to please her uncle, but Freida is a bad girl. She likes to sneak out at night and get into trouble. When she meets the Count, she’s all over that stuff.

Because this is a Hammer film and one made in 1971, both girls love to show off their cleavage and spend a great deal of the movie in their nightgowns with strategically placed camera angles.

The girls are a pain in their uncle’s neck. He believes them to be evil (one might even say Twins of Evil, actually Gustav says exactly that at one point.) Slowly everyone realizes the Count is a vampire, and Gustav will finally use God’s name in the service of fighting actual evil.

As per usual with Hammer, the production design is impeccable. The sets and costumes look great; the lighting is gorgeous. Cushing is wonderful. Unlike a lot of characters in films like this, he isn’t driven by an insane need for power, but rather he is a true believer. He truly thinks Satan is out there destroying the world. That warped faith drives him to do mad things. One could probably say something about how his Puritanical sense of sex drives him to burn beautiful young women at the stake, but I’ll leave that be. The Collinson sisters are a delight. Madeline especially has a lot of fun as the wild Freida.

Also, as per usual with Hammer films, the script isn’t great. It introduces the vampire aspect but doesn’t do a lot with it. The vamps do recoil from crosses, but don’t seem to mind daylight. But the look of the film and the performances make it well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Drop (2025)

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Drop is the sort of those high-concept, utterly ridiculous thrillers they used to make a lot of in the 1990s. It is all kinds of dumb but still a lot of fun to watch.

Violet Gates (Meghann Fahy) is just beginning to get over the death of her abusive husband. Oh, she’s not sad he’s dead, for he was an awful piece of…but she survived years of abuse and nearly let him kill her baby boy, and that’s hard to get over. Even if you are a therapist.

She’s been talking to a handsome photographer named Henry (Brandon Sklenar) through one of those online dating apps, and tonight she’s finally agreed to meet him face-to-face for a dinner date at one of those fancy restaurants that sits atop a skyscraper, giving panoramic views of Chicago.

She leaves her sister June (Violett Beane) in charge of the boy (and her wardrobe) and nervously goes on the date. Before they can even order hors d’oeuvres, she starts receiving these strange airdropped digital messages. At first they are just sort of annoying, and the couple play a little game as to who it could be, but soon enough they become threatening.

Look at the video footage from her at-home security cameras, it says. They show a masked man in her home. Do what I say, or your family will be killed, it says. Tell no one what is happening. Do not call the cops. Do not let your dinner date leave.

The tormentor seems to know everything she is doing. He’s somehow got access to the restaurant’s internal camera system. He’s also placed cameras inside the bathroom and next to her table. He’s cloned her phone.

I won’t spoil exactly what he asks her to do except that it has to do with destroying some evidence and causing harm to someone. It makes very little sense as it is a dumb way to get what they want, but you just have to roll with it.

Director Christopher Landon keeps the tension high, and writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach find clever ways for Violet to solve her problem. Because those digital drops have to be sent from someone close they have a lot of fun hinting it might be this person or that one. I guessed correctly pretty quickly so it isn’t really that hard to figure out. It ends in a climactic battle that’s all sort of ridiculous, but I had a good time with it.

Landon directed both Happy Death Day films and Freaky, and I wish he’d leaned a little more heavily into the ridiculousness of this situation and made it a little funnier. But it’s still an entertaining little film. Like I said, they used to make this sort of film a lot in the 1990s, and I kind of miss them. Sometimes you want something ridiculous and not so serious.

Small housekeeping note. We are in May, and that means we’re geared up for mysteries. Crime stories often blend mystery, thriller, and horror together, but it is always difficult to find one that leans that mix a little more toward horror for Friday nights. I thought this one would do the trick, but it really is much more of a thriller than a horror film, but it is late and this is what you get.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Evil Dead Trap (1988)

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I’ve talked about the J-Horror craze of the 2000s in these pages a few times. Generally speaking, Japanese horror from this time period relied more on mood than gore. Their stories often involved elements of folklore, and the villains were often ghosts or other supernatural elements.

But there is another side to the J-Horror phenomenon that is part of the larger Asian Extreme horror movement. Folks like Takashi Miike were making films filled with heavy violence and gruesome depravity.

Evil Dead Trap falls into the latter category.

It is the kind of film I would have loved back in the late 2000s, when I was first discovering horror films outside the slashers I loved as a teenager and the classic Universal stories I loved in college. Back then I loved extreme horror. I thought it was cool to discover these weird little films that took gore to the max.

These days I prefer my horror a bit more gothic and subdued.

This film starts out promising. Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) hosts a late-night TV show. It is the sort of thing that likes showing off the wild and the weird. She often asks folks to send her videotapes of their crazy stuff. One day she gets a tape showing a woman (that looks remarkably like her) having her eyeballs sliced open and her stomach stabbed. It looks real. She is intriged. She takes her fellow showmakers to an abaonded military base where she thinks the film was shot.

Naturally, things go bad. A killer starts picking them off in some pretty gruesome ways. It feels a lot more like those slashers from the 1980s than a typical Japanese horror movie. This is especially true in the buildup. Our heroes consist of five girls and one guy. Of course they split into groups to explore the grounds. Nami goes at it alone. The guy and the girls have sex. Then he hides and jumps out to scare everyone.

Nami runs into a creepy guy, Daisuke Muraki (Yuji Honma) who says he’s there looking for his brother. He warns Nami to stay away from the place, then goes off on his own. There is a touch of Saw in one scene with a complicated trap set, forcing one of the girls to kill the other. The score is reminiscent of something Goblin would do for Dario Argento, with a main theme repeating every time the killer comes near.

It is unnerving, and it pushes hard into the extreme horror ideas with lots of gore and a pretty horrific rape scene. The last act gets really goofy, weird, and gross.

It really is the kind of film I would have loved twenty years ago. It is one of those things I’d love to ask other people if they’d seen it, feeling cool because they hadn’t. And then going into some of the wilder details.

These days I can admire what it’s doing and appreciate the weirdness, but I can’t say I really liked it.

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)

terrorvision

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.