The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Addition: Dolls (1987)

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Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator (1985) and for that he will have my eternal gratitude. That film, along with Evil Dead II (1987) opened my eyes to gonzo horror that mixed crazy violence with comedy and gore, and my life was forever changed.

But while I absolutely adore Re-Animator I’ve never really taken to any of the other Stuart Gordon films I’ve seen. Dolls, his third feature film as a director, did not change that.

Dolls is part of an unrelated series of films about childhood toys that come to life that for some reason were very popular in the late 1980s. The special effects work with the puppets here is a lot of fun, but it comes in very late in the film, and unfortunately the build-up is a bit of a slog.

An obnoxious married couple with a precocious young daughter get stuck in a thunderstorm. A couple of punk girls are hitch-hiking nearby and are picked up by a doofus salesman. They too are trapped by the storm. All of these disparate people make their way into a strange old mansion where they are greeted by a kindly old couple.

Most of the characters are highly unlikable. The punks are petty thieves, and well, punks. The married couple constantly complain and are ridiculously mean to the little girl. The old couple are pleasant enough but of course they are in control of the killers dolls. What’s left is the salesman who is dumb and goofy and the precocious girl.

Naturally, the killer dolls kill the annoying characters first leaving the salesman and the girl to survive the night. Presumably creating and working the puppets was expensive so most of the film they are completely off screen. They don’t really appear until nearly 45 minutes into this 77 minute film. Once they do appear things become a lot of fun, but that’s a long 45 minutes where nothing much interesting happens before then.

I’ll argue that it is worth watching for those dolls. My wife is a doll collector and while she leans heavily into the Barbie world and these are more of the porcelain variety I still got a kick out of watching how they brought them to life (and then found creative ways to destroy them). I’m a huge fan of practical effects and they are well done here.

I just wish their was a better script that moved around the effects.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Companion (2025)

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I sometimes think about how a movie’s marketing is at odds with the movie they are supposed to be supporting. It is a common complaint that movie trailers spoil the movies. Most trailers do seem to give away too much plot, and sometimes they will give away a film’s big twist.

But I also think about the ways in which filmmakers make movies with tension and twists. When watching a thriller you pretty much know that the hero isn’t going to die and yet movies often ratchet up the tension making you “believe” that they will. Other times a movie will be about something – something they have to know will be revealed in the marketing as it is central to the reason anyone would want to watch it – yet they will dole it out like a big reveal.

Companion is like that. And it is here that I have to say *spoilers ahead* I guess.

The main character in Companion is a robot, or a “fuck bot” as one character calls her. She is a lifelike android programmed for love and sex. Her name is Iris and she’s wonderfully played by Sophie Thatcher.

If you’ve seen a trailer for the movie then you know this. If you have read even the most basic synopsis of the film you know this. Hell, if you have seen the poster for the film you probably know this.

It isn’t really even a big twist. It isn’t like Alien where the reveal of a character being an android changes everything. Iris being a robotic companion is kind of central to the entire film.

And yet for the first twenty minutes or so the film makes out like she’s real. We see her and her boyfriend/owner Josh (Jack Quaid) hold hands and talk sweet. We see her memories of their meet cute. She’s nervous about spending the weekend with his friends, afraid they won’t like her. Etc. It seems like they are a real couple, like she is a real human. But also something is off. The filmmaking has an ominous tone. At least one character makes a winking comment about who she really is.

And then they reveal she’s a robot as if it is a bit surprise.

This isn’t really a complaint. I don’t mind the way they rolled out that reveal and if you managed to see the film completely blind it might be a fun surprise. I just find that kind of thing fascinating from a marketing point of view as it would be difficult to make a trailer of this film without spoiling that aspect of it.

There are other surpsrises in store for the audience later in the film. Ones I found quite interesting and won’t spoil. Let’s just say things turn a bit dark and violent.

Using a female companion robot as a way to discuss misogyny isn’t new. I was reminded of last year’s Subservience quite a lot with this film. Companion doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the subject either.

Yet I still quite enjoyed the film. It has that slick quality a lot of modern horror films have. It feels pre-packaged in a way, like it was built by a corporation and not a filmmaker with a singular vision. It is very well made. The acting is good. The script does a nice job of balancing the horror, the action, and the comedy. The characters all seem sort of self aware and say things like “You’re an emotional support robot that fucks.” and Josh’s pet name for Iris is Beep Boop.

I enjoyed myself, but in a week I’ll struggle to recall anything about it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Monkey (2025)

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“Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us… horribly. And that’s life.”

So says a mom to her twin boys just after attending the funeral of their babysitter whom they both watched die in a horrible accident involving a hibachi chef and his sharp blade.

Life is random and unfair, the film tells us over and over, and sometimes darkly funny.

Loosely based on a Stephen King short story of the same name The Monkey is short on plot and not much for delving deeply into those themes, but full of creative, often hilariously droll violence and death.

Somewhere in the 1990s two twin boys, Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convery as a kid, and Theo James as an adult) live with their mother (Tatiana Maslany) as their father mysteriously abandoned them. Digging through his things they find a toy monkey holding a little drum. When they turn the key inside his back it spins its drumsticks then rat-a-tats a little song.

Later that evening the monkey, sitting in the car while the boys eat hibachi with their babysitter, plays a song on its own causing that horrific death I mentioned earlier.

A few days later Hal will wind the monkey again causing more death. When the boys realize it is the monkey causing all the horror they wrap it up and throw it down a deep, dark hole.

Flash forward twenty-five years later. The brothers no longer speak to each other and Hal has an estranged son whom he only sees once a year, for Hal is terrified he’ll cause harm to come to the boy. On their annual week together Hal receives a phone call from Bill claiming some more mysterious deaths have been happening in their hometown. The monkey must have gotten out.

There isn’t much more to it than that. Hal and his son investigate. More deaths occur. Eventually, they will figure out what is happening.

It is a weirdly glib, pitch-black comedy with wild and creative deaths. This is a film that begins with a man having a harpoon shot through his gut and when it is retracted it takes his small intestine, strung out like a chain of hot dogs, with him.

It totally worked for me.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Maniac (2012)

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Maniac has the feel of one of those gritty, nihilistic 1970s horror films. Which, in a way, it kind of is. It is a remake of a gritty horror film made in 1980. It stars Elijah Wood as Frank Zitto a serial killer who murders and scalps women. He owns a mannequin restoration shop and he takes the scalps back home, places them on the mannequins then talks to them like they are still alive.

The film is shot entirely from Frank’s point of view and I hate that gimmick. I’ve seen it in several other films and it always grows tiresome very quickly. In old films like Lady in the Lake (1947) and Dark Passage (1947) its use is cumbersome because cameras were so large movement was quite limited.

It is slightly better here mostly because cameras have gotten smaller allowing for easier movement and CGI allowed them to manipulate the images to create more interesting shots. But it is still a gimmick and a bad one at that. There is one scene where Frank is stabbing a woman and the camera moves away, and we see the action from a third-person point of view. It is an interesting moment because we realize that this is still Frank’s point of view. He feels trapped inside his body and he kills to escape. When he kills he literally (and visually in the case of the film) escapes from his body.

But the film doesn’t really do much else with that idea. There are some flashbacks (still filmed through his point of view) where we learn his mother was a prostitute and she often made him watch her have sex with her Johns. That made him a killer, I guess.

One day a kind young woman takes pictures of the mannequins he has on display at the front of his shop. She’s Anna (Nora Arnezeder) and she’s an artist. She’s got a show coming up and thinks his vintage mannequins will be perfect for it. They form a friendship and the question becomes whether she’ll save him or he’ll kill her.

Within the first few minutes of this film, as soon as I realized it was going to be completely shot from his POV I started hating this film. It didn’t help that it goes to some pretty dark places. Because so much of it is seen through the killer’s eyes we get into his headspace. We see him killing. There was a time when I would have loved the transgressiveness of that, but now I just find it depressing.

There are moments in the film where it lightens up and becomes interesting. Most of these are when Anna is on screen. Nora Arnezeder is quite good and her character’s relationship with Frank is an interesting one. She certainly lights up the screen giving what is mostly a dark, dreary movie some buoyancy. It was enough to make me like the film, but not enough to make me really enjoy it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Galaxy of Terror (1981)

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After the huge success of Alien (1979), a thousand ripoffs were churned out – some good, some not, some with big budgets, some with hardly a budget at all. Galaxy of Terror lies somewhere in between. It is decidedly low-budget, but Roger Corman’s production company New World Pictures knew how to stretch a dollar. It didn’t hurt that a young James Cameron was the production designer (more than a few fans have noticed similarities between this film and Cameron’s Aliens.

The film is better than it has any right to be and boasts an incredible cast of 1980s sort-of stars including Erin Moran (Joanie from Happy Days), a pre-Nightmare on Elm Street Robert Englund, Ray Walston, iconic exploitation maverick Sid Haig and Zalman King who is better known for directing erotica like Wild Orchid and Red Shoe Diaries.

The plot involves a group of people sent on a rescue mission to the planet Morganthus after receiving a distress call. They are sent by someone called the master who is so special his face is obscured by cosmic rays.

After crash landing on the planet (which does look a lot like the planet in Alien – good job James Cameron and crew) they encounter a series of monsters including a giant bug-looking thing that essentially rapes one of the women (bad job Roger Corman who insisted on the scene). But also Robert England fighting a clone of himself.

The plot is utter nonsense, especially the ending which indicates that everything they’ve encountered on that planet was a manifestation of their darkest fears – which upon scrutiny makes no sense whatsoever. The dialogue is bad. The acting is fine, these guys are all pros if not exactly amazing actors. What makes it worth watching is the effects work. The set designs really are quite fantastic for a low-budget picture, and there is lots of gruesome violence.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Happy Death Day (2017)

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Groundhog Day meets Scream is a good way to describe Happy Death Day. With maybe a touch of Heathers and Clueless. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it has a great lead performance by Jessica Rothe and I thought it was a lot of fun.

Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) wakes up from a night of partying with a hangover and no idea where she is. There is a boy who says his name is Carter (Israel Broussard) but she doesn’t know who he is. Since she’s in his dorm, sleeping in his bed and she’s not wearing any pants she figures she must have slept with him, but she doesn’t remember that either.

He is polite, if perhaps a bit embarrassed by this ordeal (we’ll find out later he did not sleep with her and he does become a romantic interest), but she wants nothing to do with him. She is, in a word, a bitch. A mean girl. She’s rude to everyone. We’ll discover later it is her birthday and the anniversary of her mother’s death and her meanness is in part a way for her to distance herself from her grief. But like her namesake, she needs to grow up.

Her walk of shame takes her across the campus commons. There she will cross paths with a number of memorable things – a weird goth dude stares at her, an eager woman tries to get her to sign a petition, a car alarm goes off, and some sprinklers spray a couple of picnickers. Etc. These are the types of things that will alert her to the fact that she’s reliving the same day over and over again.

The film nearly winks at the audience during this scene. We know what kind of film we’re getting into. It knows we know and welcomes us with a smile.

She’ll then meet our cast of characters who will become suspects in her murder. There’s the sorority Queen Bee, the put-upon roommate, the married doctor she’s sleeping with, etc. Then on her way to a party that evening, someone wearing a weird baby mask (the school’s mascot is apparently a baby!?) stabs her to death.

Bam. She wakes back up in Carter’s room, reliving the same day all over again. Getting murdered no matter what she does. Groundhog Day wasn’t the first film to put its character into a time loop, but it is probably the best and it is certainly the most popular. Many films have taken that premise and installed it into different genres. Slashers tend to be rather cookie-cutter in similarity so it makes perfect sense to apply the Groundhog Day scenario to it.

One of the interesting additions to the story is how her violent deaths begin taking a toll on her body. She’s stabbed numerous times and they begin to leave internal scars even as her life continues to recycle each day.

Happy Death Day relies more on the murder mystery angle than the horror. It isn’t particularly scary and the violence is decidedly PG-13. But it has fun with its premise and Jessica Rothe is wonderful. She nails the bitchiness, the pathos, and ultimately the warmth of the character.

There is a sequel and I sort-of wrote a little bit about it here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Prince of Darkness (1987)

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A priest dies. With him is a cylinder that contains a key and diary. Another priest (Donald Pleasence) is called in. he discovers the key and opens the door to a basement inside an old, abandoned church. Inside he finds a large cylinder filled with swirling liquid. The priest calls his friend Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong), a quantum physicist to investigate. He calls in a bunch of graduate students.

They discover the cylinder is ancient. The diary is coded, written in multiple languages, and full of equations. Decoded it says that the cylinder literally contains Satan and that Jesus Christ was an alien who came to Earth to warn humans about the cylinder. Jesus was killed by humans who thought he was insane.

The priest questions his faith. In some ways, Prince of Darkness is yet another inquiry into the age-old question of science versus faith. But told by horror maestro John Carpenter by way of B-movie genre cinema. It totally works for me.

Outside the church, a group of people (including a dude played by Alice Cooper) gather. They simply stand there and stare. Later one of the students will try to escape and he’ll be righteously killed by those people (and then somehow reanimated by bugs). Some of the canister goo will pour into another student’s mouth turning her into a Satan zombie. Or something. She’ll spit in other people’s mouths turning them into zombies as well.

Meanwhile, the priest, the professor, and the remaining students try to figure out how to keep the Satan goo from taking over the world.

As you can tell the plot of Prince of Darkness is pure schlock. It is goofy and weird, silly, and quite a bit dumb. But it looks great. Cinematographer Gary B. Kibbe lights the film to perfection, filling the screen with lots of beautiful candle-lit shots. And Carpenter is a master of this stuff.

It is a little disappointing that a film that promises Satan and the Apocalypse never gives us much more than goo in a jar and some silly zombies, but it doesn’t really matter. This is John Carpenter, genre master, having lots of fun. I did too.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Woman in Black (2012)

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My daughter is just starting to dip her toes into the genre of horror. I, of course, am doing my best to encourage this interest. She’s not actually much of a movie fan, preferring to watch various videos on YouTube and play games on her phone. So, I have to find my opportunities to suggest horror movies to her. This afternoon she seemed game to the idea and I spent a good bit of time trying to decide what movie I should show her.

She is relatively young so I didn’t want anything too gory, and I didn’t want the awkwardness of watching some sex scene or gratuitous nudity. I shied away from the old classics fearing she’d find them boring. I was leaning towards something from the 1990s, maybe Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer.

By the time I was ready to pick something she informed me that her friend Zoe had invited her over for a hang-out. Disappointed I looked around some old digital content I had on a hard drive and landed on this, The Woman In Black. Ultimately, I was hoping she’d get home from the friend’s house and we could watch something together. That’s what I’d hoped to write about.

Alas, the play date turned into a sleepover and here I am.

The Woman in Black is the second adaptation of the novel of the same name by Susan Hill. It is a gothic horror story complete with an old mansion filled with ghosts. It has some good jump scares and sets a nice eerie mood. It is the type of film that you wind up staring into the backgrounds because often they’ll have something move in the shadows. But its story failed to excite me in any way and I found myself just waiting for it to end.

Arthur Kipp (Daniel Radcliffe) is a young solicitor in Edwardian London. He is still mourning the loss of his wife who died while giving birth to their son, who is now three. He is tasked to go to a small village and handle the paperwork of an old woman who has just died, leaving a large estate to be taken care of.

Upon arrival, nearly everyone in the village warns him not to visit the old house and does their best to convince him to leave immediately. One man, Sam Daily (Ciaran Hinds) is friendly enough and does his best to assist the young lawyer.

The house, of course, is large and spooky, and located across a watery marsh. The only road leading to it gets washed out for hours every day. Despite all the warnings Arthur is eager to do his duty. Almost immediately he hears strange noises and sees strange things, including a mysterious woman, dressed all in black roaming the grounds.

He’ll go back and forth from the house to the village several times over several days. Mysterious things will happen at the house and then he’ll talk them over with Sam. He’ll learn of the town’s many mysteries and the strange goings on at the house.

It is all pretty standard stuff and none of it is all that interesting. I found myself mostly bored with the story. It looks good and it builds a nice mood. The jump scares mostly made me jump. But overall I kept wishing I was watching something else with my daughter.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Eden Lake (2008)

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There is a darkness to almost all horror. It is trying to scare you after all. But most horror also contains at least a sliver of light. Someone survives in the end. Evil is vanquished (at least until the sequel). But there is a certain type of horror movie that revels in the darkness, that becomes completely, and utterly bleak.

Eden Lake is one such film.

Steve (Michael Fassbender) learns that developers have bought up an old swimming hole of his, soon to be turned into a posh neighborhood. He decides to take his girlfriend Jenny (Kelly Reilly) there for the weekend.

Almost immediately they are accosted by rude, working-class teens. Though there is an entire lake to enjoy, the teens plop themselves down next to the couple, blast their obnoxious music loudly, allow their vicious dog to roam freely, and generally make asses of themselves.

Ever the hero Steve walks up to the gang, turns their radio down, and asks them to keep their dog away. But then he immediately backs down once the teens push back. This will be a recurring theme. Steve periodically puffs out his chest and roars at the kids and then whimpers back with apologies when they don’t scurry away.

In the morning they’ll find their food covered with ants. During a swim they’ll return to find their bag stolen and along with it the keys to their car. Things escalate from there and turn very dark, violent, and bad.

For the first half of the film, Jenny seems ever a pacifist. She mostly lets Steve do whatever he wants, while also urging him to just leave the kids alone. But once Steve becomes captured she becomes the more stereotypical Final Girl. But it becomes increasingly clear this film wants nothing but to make her suffer. It revels in her humiliation. Once she opens a dumpster lid and finds it completely filled with nasty, liquidy goo. Naturally, she jumps it anyway. There is no reason she couldn’t have just run at that point, but the film really wants her filthy.

All of the characters make terrible decisions all the time. Our heroes have several opportunities to just leave. The kids are obviously up to no good, and this lake, while pretty, isn’t some amazing natural wonder. Yet they stay. The kids escalate things to a ridiculous degree for no good reason.

Even though this lake used to be some kind of recreational area, complete with maps and signage, there is no car park and no discernable trails of any kind. The developers have put up a massive fence around it but apparently done no other work at all.

There is no indication that the lake (which is actually a disused quarry) is all that big, and yet the kids hunt Steve and Jenny for a good day and a half with them never finding their way to a road or a way out.

Etc., and so forth. I’m used to horror movies that make no sense and whose characters make stupid decisions, but this is beyond the pale. It is also mean-spirited. It is relentlessly savage.

Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age but I couldn’t stomach it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Dr. Terror’s House of Horror (1965)

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I was planning on watching The Substance tonight and writing about it. I’ve wanted to watch it since it came out. I ordered a free 7-day trial of Mubi just to watch it. I had to force myself to wait until Friday to watch it so I could make it my Friday Night Horror Movie.

Then Friday finally came. It was a long, busy day at work. I was unable to knock off early like I usually do. By the time I was done my daughter had already taken over the television upstairs in my bedroom. That’s usually where I watch my horror films these days as my wife doesn’t like them and she’s usually downstairs.

That’s where she was this evening, watching some crafting videos on YouTube. I was being blocked from watching The Substance, or any horror movie. I wound up back in my office playing games until supper.

After eating I did talk my wife into watching a movie, just not a horror movie. We watched Certified Copy, a very arthouse film about…well I’m not entirely sure what it was about, but I’ll be writing about it soon for Foreign Film February.

As it started getting late I started having little panic attacks. It was Friday Night and I’d not watched a horror movie, let alone written this article.

It was too late for The Substance as it is a bit long and I didn’t want to be up past midnight trying to write something. We are both big fans of Hammer Horror films and so I talked her into this film (which is from Amicus Productions, not Hammer, but they always treaded in the same waters).

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors is an anthology film consisting of five short films all tied together by an encompassing story. Five men board a train in the dead of night. Just before it leaves another man (Peter Cushing in heavy makeup) joins them in their car.

He is a soothsayer, a fortune teller, and he agrees to tell everyone their future by reading his deck of Tarot Cards. Naturally, their futures are our movie.

Five stories plus introductions to them on the train all told in 98 minutes doesn’t leave much time for each story. This is one of the reasons I don’t tend to like anthologies. All you get are quick sketches of a story. The good ones leave you wanting more and the bad ones only accentuate the fact that you could have more of the good ones.

Four of the five here are pretty good and quite economical. If your story is only going to last fifteen minutes or so it needs to be slim and lean – no fat on that bone. The one bad one is all fat. It takes time for no less than three musical interludes.

Quickly here they are.

Werewolf: A man returns to his ancestral home to help the new owner with some renovations. In the basement, he discovers a coffin in a secret room and a curse. The curse is, of course, a werewolf. It comes with a nice twist ending.

Creeping Vine: A couple comes home to find a large vine growing in their garden. When they try to cut it down it attacks them back.

Voodoo: A jazz musician gets a gig in the West Indies. There he stumbles upon a voodoo ritual and digs the music. He takes the mad beats home with him and is cursed by the voodoo gods.

Disembodied Hand: By far the best story stars Christopher Lee as a snobby art critic who lambasts artists he doesn’t like (Michael Gough) resulting in his suicide. The, you guessed it, disembodied hand of the dead guy takes its revenge.

Vampire: A doctor (a young Donald Sutherland) takes his bride home only to discover she’s a vampire (the titles of these stories are pretty obvious don’t ya think?)

The film does pretty much exactly what these types of things are supposed to do. The stories all have a very basic premise and they get in and get out with economical speed. None of them are great, but most of them are quite fun, and that’s all I’m looking for.

Well, what I was really looking for was getting to watch The Substance, but this will do in a pinch. I guess I’ll be paying for a month of Mubi in order to finally watch that movie.