Bring Out the Perverts: Strip Nude For Your Killer (1975)

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Horror films have always been at least a little transgressive and salacious. They are trying to evoke strong emotions after all. Starting in the 1960s and moving strongly in the 1970s and 1980s they began to rely heavily on sex and violence. Horror tends to be watched by younger people and younger people buy tickets when that’s what you’re selling.

Giallo always trodded on those tropes. This makes sense since Giallo is at heart a genre about violence against women. The best films in the genre examine those tropes, they ponder the male gaze (while often at the same time offering up examples of it) and probe the links between sex and violence. The worst ones simply give the audience plenty of naked flesh and blood-letting without much thought behind it beyond making a few dollars.

Strip Nude For Your Killer is one of the sleaziest horror films I’ve ever seen. Hardly a scene goes by without someone (usually any number of beautiful women) taking off their clothes. Actually, it is always the women. This is a film that has no problem showing full-frontal nudity from a woman but always pans up just as the men are taking off their pants.

It begins with a woman lying naked on her back, her feet in stirrups. She’s getting a back-alley abortion. The doctor’s head is strategically placed so that we can see pubic hair, but not her actual genitals. That’s about as sophisticated as the film gets.

I won’t get too far into the plot, as you can read more about that in my review of the Blu-ray over at Cinema Sentries. There isn’t much plot to be found if I’m being honest. It is basically someone killing a bunch of people connected to a modeling agency.

The kills aren’t particularly interesting, and the filmmaking is rather plain. There is a groovy soundtrack and the killer does wear a pretty rad-looking leather biker suit (someday I’m gonna make a list of all the films that have a killer wearing a similar suit – there are a lot of them, and they always seem to keep their helmets on!)

It also stars Edwige Fenech and I’ll never complain about that. However, she’s not given much to do (other than strip off her clothes at every opportunity) even as she is the main character and the one who is investigating the murders.

It isn’t a terrible film, it just isn’t particularly exciting which is quite a thing to say considering how much nudity and murder it has in it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Girl In Room 2A (1974)

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I watched The Girl in Room 2A via my Forgotten Gialli Blu-ray collection from Severin Films. “Forgotten” makes them sound like some overlooked classics or some incredible bits of cinema that were lost to time. But in reality, they were forgotten for a reason. That reason being they are mostly rubbish.

That’s not entirely fair to The Girl in Room 2A. It isn’t complete rubbish, it has a few moments that make it sort-of interesting. Or at least worth a watch if you are digging into the deep well of Giallo.

It starts out with a bang. A woman is kidnapped as she leaves a building. She’s grabbed, tossed into the back of a car, and taken to some dungeon. There she is stripped and punctured with these spikey metal rods. Then she’s driven to a cliff and dumped overboard. And all of that occurs during the opening credits.

Then we meet our heroine Margaret Bradley (Daniela Giordano). She’s just been released from prison and she sets herself up in the titular Room 2A in a sort-of halfway house.

The owner of the house is nice, but a bit nosey. The room is comfortable but there is a strange red spot on the floor. She’ll clean it up, but later it will reappear. At night she hears strange noises and she keeps having strange dreams about queer-looking people dressed in red robes doing…things to her.

I quite liked this part of the film. I love a good haunted house mystery. But then the film decides to show us what’s going on. In detail. They don’t just let us see the killers but it explains who they are and what their purpose is. In detail. I won’t bother with it, but all the explanations bog the film down. The mystery is lost and it becomes rather dull.

There is also a love interest which is dull in its own way, but at least that makes sense. I can accept a love interest in this sort of film, but there is no reason to spend so much time with the death cult explaining their motivations.

There is a final action sequence that’s pretty great, but it isn’t enough to make the film interesting.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Final Destination 2 (2003)

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In the first Final Destination, a group of teenagers board a plane for a fun trip to Paris. One of them falls asleep and has a premonition that the plane is gonna explode mid-air. He, a teacher, and a few other friends get the heck off the plane, and sure enough, it does explode. Then the survivors slowly get picked off in increasingly ridiculous Rube Goldberg-esque death traps because Death is mad they escaped his grasp the first time.

Final Destination 2 is basically the same film but with less melodrama and better deaths.

Exactly one year after the plane explosion in the first movie, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) heads out for a Spring Break holiday with three of her friends. Just before she pulls onto the highway she has a premonition of a massive, deadly, pile-up on that highway (we see it too and it is the best scene in the movie). Freaked out she decides not to pull out. Moments later that accident does occur.

Knowing the story from the first movie, Kimberly is now afraid that those she saved are now being stalked by death. Knowing this is a movie, we now anxiously await those deaths.

Most of them are top-notch. The film does an amazing job of setting up a scene, showing us multiple possible ways a character could die then finding ways to surprise us. It is terrific fun.

It is less fun when it is giving us exposition. At least twice in the first twenty minutes, characters explain to us the setup of the movie (by explaining the plot of the first movie, which presumably the majority of folks watching the sequel have already seen.) Between kills the characters discuss what they need to do in order to survive.

Clear Rivers (Ali Larter, first billed but who doesn’t show up until a good 30 minutes into this 90-minute movie), the Final Girl of the first movie, has been living in a psych ward (padded cells seem safer than the real world) is brought out for helpful advice (and explain the rules of this movie).

There is less exposition in this one than in the first film, and it is cleaner and faster, but still kind of a drag. The death scenes work best when they seem to be freaks of nature rather than supernatural in nature. The early ones are the best, by the end Death (always invisible) starts moving things on his own which is a lot less fun than random crap killing the characters.

None of the characters are particularly well-developed, but honestly, who cares? You come to these films for the intricate death scenes and this one delivers on that front incredibly well.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Salem’s Lot (2024)

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‘Salem’s Lot was not the first Stephen King book I ever read (that honor would go to the short story The Langoliers) nor was it the one that turned me into a lifelong fan (that would be Mr. Mercedes) but it was the one where I realized how good of a writer he is and that I should maybe start paying attention to him (I wouldn’t do that for a few more years, but the seed was planted then.)

It remains one of my favorite King books.

The story’s basic idea is: what if a vampire came to a small town? But like so many of King’s books, it is so much more than that. It follows Ben Mears, a writer who has returned to the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot, where he grew up, to write about the Marsten House. That’s your classic old spooky mansion on top of the hill, where he saw a ghost as a child.

Naturally, that’s where the vampire lives. But before he gets there Ben makes a friend with a schoolteacher and falls in love with a girl, and meets lots of interesting people. That’s what I love about Stephen King. Sure, he’s written a terrifying story about an ancient vampire taking over a small town, but it is really a story about small-town living and the characters that fill it up.

Tobe Hooper directed a two-part miniseries of Salem’s Lot for CBS in 1979. It is far from perfect, but Hooper understands the heart of the story is its characters and the scares should be built around that. But he also creates some truly memorably scary images.

TNT adapted a version of the story with Rob Lowe in the lead in 2004 but the less said about it the better.

When I heard that had made a new adaptation for Max I was excited. I’m always excited to learn about new Stephen King adaptations. Then I watched the trailer and that excitement flew right out the window. It looked cheap. Worse than that it looked like it was going to rely too heavily on violence and jump scares. Then the reviews started coming in and they were not good.

But it is spooky season and I’m still a sucker for King adaptations so I crossed my fingers and pressed Play.

My friends I am happy to report it is not that bad. It is a long way from great, and you won’t exchange this for the Hooper version in your collection, but it is worth the watching.

They say writer/director Gary Dauberman has a three-hour cut but Max made him edit it down to just under 2 and you can feel it. The movie plays like the greatest hits of the story. It isn’t so much that it jumps straight to the action, but that it shortcuts through everything.

We meet Ben (Lewis Pullman) as he’s driving into town (the soundtrack plays Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” which is a great choice) he meets Susan (Makenzie Leigh) at the real estate office. She’s reading his book but doesn’t recognize him. But by the next scene, she’s inviting him to the movies, and we learn both their stories within a few minutes. Movies always have characters falling in love way too fast, but here it is even faster.

The realization that the weird stuff going on in this town is caused by vampires happens extraordinarily fast as well. Ben’s newfound friend, Matt (the always great Bill Camp) sees a friend in a bar looking a little pale and pekid. He takes him home and notices the guy has a couple of little scars on his neck. Later he thinks he sees the guy scurrying into an upstairs window.

That little bit of information convinces him that the town is full of vampires. He quickly convinces Ben and Susan of this information. Then the alcoholic priest (John Benjamin Hickey). The new schoolboy in town, Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter) doesn’t need to be convinced, he already knows. He’s an old-school horror nerd who doesn’t take crap from nobody.

This happens throughout the film. Relationships deepen and plot points happen offscreen, in the cuts. Before I realized that they were literally happening in the cuts, that more details had been shot and then edited out at the last minute I thought it was an interesting story choice. Now it just seems distracting.

But what is left is well done, if a little disjointed. The editing is interesting. There are a lot of shots like one in which a man is alone on a bed. The camera moves slowly to look under the bed, then it moves upward and the room is full of people – a great deal of time has shifted while the camera was under the bed. Or the camera will focus on an object and then it will cut to a similar object in a different scene.

When the violence comes it comes with that frantic modern style of scaring you with jumps, and quick edits, which is not to my liking at all. They changed the ending quite a bit. Some of it I liked – they moved it from the Marsten House to somewhere interesting. Some of it I did not – far too much generic action. But more or less it worked for me. Or perhaps my expectations were so low that anything not terrible would have been enjoyed by me at this point.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003)

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The Criterion Channel is featuring a plethora of horror movies this month. They have at least three different horror themes going on, one of which is Japanese Horror. Naturally, I’ve seen almost all of them, but I’d never watched this sequel. I try to watch the originals again before I watch the sequel which is why you were treated to my thoughts on Ju-On: The Grudge yesterday.

This sequel is basically the same film with different characters. Once again it acts like a series of vignettes in which a bunch of people are haunted, terrified, and murdered by some evil spirits. The same evil spirits that haunted the house in the first movie (er, the third movie as there were two films before Ju-On: The Grudge). There is the creepy kid and the freaky girl who can twist her body in extreme ways.

This one does have more of a semblance of a plot and there is a bit of a through line, but it still jumbles up the chronology. It, more or less, follows horror film actress “Horror Queen” Kyoko Harase (Noriko Sakai) who is given a role in a paranormal television show. They “investigate” haunted houses and the like. For this episode, they visit the house from the last film.

Naturally, things do not go well. Nearly everyone involved in the shoot is haunted by the curse and killed. The kills remain quite effective and creepy. I might even give the ones in this film a slight edge over the last one.

There is an excellent sequence in which a woman keeps hearing a banging on her apartment wall at a certain time at night. The reasons behind it are quite clever and scary.

The way this film moves back and forth in time is much more effective than the previous one. I was often confused during the previous film, but here they will show a snippet of the same scene, albeit from a different character’s point of view, before moving on to something we haven’t seen before. Those connecting points allowed me to understand what was happening at all times. That worked for me much better than in the previous film.

But really, much like the other film, the plot in this one is just an excuse to move us from one creepy scene to another. And again this worked completely for me.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Subservience (2024)

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I don’t pay super close attention to what new movies are coming out and when. I follow enough movie critics on social media that I hear some of the buzz, but I really don’t give it much heed. I don’t spend a lot of time watching new movie trailers or reading reviews, etc. But I have a general idea of what movies people are talking about.

The Substance is a new horror movie starring Demi Moore. It is getting a lot of good buzz and is definitely on my radar. Subservience is a new horror movie starring Megan Fox. It is not getting good buzz, but rather a lot of panning when anyone is talking about it at all.

Because I don’t pay close attention to these things I got these two movies mixed up. I put on Subservience thinking it was getting a good buzz. Within twenty minutes of watching it, I was confused.

People are really liking this movie? Maybe it gets better towards the end.

My friends, it did not get better towards the end, or at the end, or after the credits rolled. It is a stupid, stupid movie. It takes a old, dumb trope, and does nothing new with it. I should have realized something was up the moment I saw it was directed by S.K. Dale who also helmed Til Death which was just as dumb.

But it is also kind of fun? It reminded me a little of those dumb erotic thrillers I used to watch in the 1990s.

Nick (Michele Morrone) is a decent dude. He has a good job, a loving wife, a precocious daughter, and a baby boy. He’s living the American Dream. Except for that loving wife, she’s dying. She desperately needs a heart transplant.

Working that good job while taking care of those two kids and trying to be there for his wife is a little more than he can handle. So he does what anyone in that situation would do. He buys a super hot robot to handle the domestic chores.

Her name is Alice (Megan Fox) and she’s programmed to take care of his every need and desire (wink, wink, nudge nudge.) He doesn’t bother to tell his wife, Maggie (Madeline Zima) who is basically a permanent resident at the hospital that the robot he bought looks like Megan Fox. The look on her face when she first sees Alice is precious.

Alice is good with the kids, she’s great at cleaning up, and she’s a pretty good cook (though her lasagna is nothing like mom’s.) She can tell Nick is stressed out and would do anything to help relieve it for him.

You can see where this is going. Alice’s programming gets mucked up causing her to go haywire. If Nick is stressed then she’ll take off her robe and give him a release. If some guy at work is causing problems then she’ll go to his house and shoot him in the face. If Maggie’s health problems are causing trouble then she has to go to.

It is the kind of film where you have to just enjoy the ride. Because if you start thinking about it you’ll start to wonder things like: How can a guy with a relatively low-level construction job afford a big house, what must be enormous medical bills, and what can only be an incredibly expensive robot? Or why is the robot anatomically correct in every way? Are they all programmed to seduce? Or how can a person who just had a heart transplant do all that running and sexing and fighting?

Those aren’t questions the film is prepared to answer. It is better to just enjoy the not-particularly talented Megan Fox give a robotic performance that actually works in her favor for once. Or dig into the nostalgic vibe this thing is giving off. They don’t really make erotic thrillers like this anymore (even if the erotic aspects are fairly tame and it never quite thrills like you want it to.)

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Trap (2024)

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I watched The Sixth Sense in the theatre when it first came out. I managed to see it before the surprise ending was ruined for me. I remember liking it that first viewing quite a lot. But then some friends of mine wanted to see it and I was visiting them in Arkansas so I felt like I couldn’t say no. Even though I was pretty sure that the film would disappoint since I now knew the surprise. It did disappoint. I was bored during that second viewing.

That whole day was weird. I was good friends with her in high school. But since going away for college I hadn’t talked to her in over a year. Her husband I didn’t know at all. So the day was full of awkward conversations and then this movie I didn’t want to see. I also randomly remember her listening to The Eagle’s greatest hits on cassette and I hate the freaking Eagles.

Anyway, The Sixth Sense was of course an enormous hit and made M. Night Shyamalan an instant celebrity director. He followed it up with the underrated Unbreakable and then the quite fun but rather ridiculous Signs, and then the very creepy but completely dumb after the trick ending is revealed The Village.

By this point, he was starting to feel like a one-trick pony where every movie had a surprise ending. Everybody hated Lady in the Water and The Happening became an instant joke.

Shyamalan was on the outs. But then a funny thing happened on the way to career suicide. People started liking him again. It was as if after all the hype died down, and expectations became low, people realized he was actually a pretty good stylist and while his scripts were often ridiculous, his films were rather fun.

Or maybe that’s just me. I like most of his movies. They are dumb, but he’s a skilled enough director to keep me interested.

Trap is an absolutely stupid movie. There are so many instances in the film where I kept shouting at the screen that whatever was happening wasn’t the way things work. People don’t behave like that. Concerts don’t have multiple random intermissions. Police don’t let serial killers hug their daughters and play with their son’s bicycles.

And yet, I still quite enjoyed myself.

The plot involves a serial killer named Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), known as “The Butcher,” (and this isn’t a spoiler as it was revealed in all the trailers, reviews, and the first ten minutes of the film). He’s kidnapped at least a dozen people, then killed them, then chopped them up into pieces and displayed their parts in public. But he’s also a decent family guy.

He’s taken his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan – the director’s real-life daughter who is in fact a real singer – you gotta love a dad who basically makes a movie to show off his daughter’s talents). But the cops and the feds have been clued into the fact that The Butcher is gonna be there so the entire concert is one big trap for him.

Cooper must find a way to escape so he can continue killing. And being a family guy. It is a testament to Hartnett’s skill as an actor and Shyamalan as a director that I found myself rooting for a serial killer for most of the film’s runtime.

Truly this is one of the most ridiculous films I’ve seen in a long time. Ridiculous decision after ridiculous decision is made by Cooper, the police, Lady Raven, and everyone really. My eyes rolled into the back of my head and then fell right out.

And yet, again, I quite enjoyed myself. Shyamalan never takes anything too seriously. He’s quite aware his film is dumb. But he’s having fun. And so was I.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: An American Werewolf In London (1981)

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There are certain movies that evoke a particular time and place in your memories. An American Werewolf in London is one such movie for me. I don’t remember the first time I ever watched it. I know I owned a copy of the VHS tape in college. My collection was pretty small back then, so the movies I owned made it into rotation regularly.

I’d pop this film on during a lazy Sunday afternoon, or after school on a Tuesday night. Me and my roommates would sit and watch it and laugh. We’d marvel at the special effects or how every song in it contained lyrics about the moon. I’m pretty sure its placement of “Moondance” began my journey into Van Morrison super fandom.

It became background noise in a sense. We’d put it on casually, not really paying much attention to it. This was before smartphones so we didn’t have social media or whatever to distract us so movies like this became something to do.

But at some point, I kind of turned on it. Sure the special effects were great and the needle drops, while super obvious, were on point, but it also felt very shallow. There wasn’t any depth to it.

That opinion stayed with me for decades. I don’t think I’ve watched the film since I left college, certainly, I haven’t seen it in a couple of decades. But for some reason, it crept into my thoughts this past week. Probably someone mentioned it on social media and I decided to give it another show.

My opinion didn’t change that much with this viewing. It is a shallow film. There isn’t much to it. But, also, I find I don’t care. Not every film needs to be deep. Not every movie has to carry with it layers of meaning and symbolism.

This movie is such fun to watch. And at 90 minutes it gets in, gets out, and leaves you satisfied.

The plot is quite simple. Two Americans, David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), are backpacking across Europe. While Jack would really prefer to be in sun-soaked Italy they begin their travels in the North of England. We are introduced to them riding in the back of a sheep-filled truck.

They walk along the moors for a bit then stop at a pub for a hot beverage and a bite to eat. They are greeted like a stranger in one of those old Western movies. The entire pub stares at them quietly. But then one of them mentions Texas and one of the punters tells a joke about the Alamao and everybody laughs. Then David mentions the pentangle on the wall and the bar goes quiet again. They are told to get out. To get lost. Oh, and be mindful of the full moon and stay on the road.

Naturally, there is a full moon out and the boys wander off the road. Jack is killed by a werewolf and David is pretty good and mangled. He awakes in London in a hospital with a pretty nurse named Alex (Jenny Agutter). David keeps having terrible dreams and one day Jack appears to him. As a corpse. His face all torn to shreds. He tells David that he will turn into a werewolf at the next full moon and that he is now forced to wander the Earth as the living dead unless David, the last in the werewolf line kills himself.

David and Alex get cozy. David turns into a werewolf and kills a bunch of people. Can Alex save him? The end.

There really is nothing to it. But writer/director John Landis fills it with a real feeling of time and place. It isn’t the real England, but rather the England of movies. That pub (wonderfully called The Slaughtered Lamb) feels like it comes straight out of one of those old Hammer Horror movies I so love. Most of the English characters are like characters Americans have of English people.

It wonderfully blends horror and comedy. The murders are gruesome and the camera lingers on the gore. There are some nice scenes of suspense from when the boys are in the moors and something keeps howling at them to a late scene when the werewolf stalks a man through the underground. There are good gags and the editing often strikes a wonderfully jarring juxtaposition between the horror and the humor.

The special effects really are the gold standard for this sort of thing. There is a long scene where we watch David turn into a werewolf and it is fantastic. An absolutely brilliant use of practical effects. Every time Jack shows up after he’s dead, his body deteriorates even more. I can’t imagine how long Griffin Dunne had to sit in makeup to get all his flesh to look like it was hanging off of him, but it was time well spent.

So maybe not the greatest movie ever made. Certainly, it doesn’t have much to say about the state of humanity, but it is a completely entertaining 90 minutes to spend at the movies.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Longlegs (2024)

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A young F.B.I. agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), and her partner go house-to-house door knocking. They are looking for someone. Someone dangerous. As soon as she gets out of the car she stares at one particular house. She knows it is the one. The killer is there.

She tells her partner. She suggests calling for backup. He scoffs. How could she know? She’s right. The killer is there. She has some light clairvoyance.

Right from the start Osgood Perkins lets us know this film is going to be a police procedural, and one that believes in the supernatural. It also lets us in on the fact that Nicolas Cage is gonna give one of his strongest performances.

In a brief flashback, the film opens with a little girl hearing a noise out on her isolated farmhouse. A man (Cage is some wild prosthetics and makeup) appears seemingly out of nowhere. Cage affects a high-pitched voice and behaves erratically. It is a bizarre, yet effective performance. More on that in a minute.

Harker is recruited by Agent William Carter (Blaire Underwood) to join his task force investigating a series of murder-suicides. In each case, the father kills his wife and children before offing himself. Each time a note is left behind with some strange symbols, written in an unknown person’s handwriting, and it is signed “Longlegs.”

Harker has an innate ability to decipher the symbols and follow clues that will lead her and Carter to Longlegs. But he seems to have a connection to her, too. He visits her house and leaves her a note.

I won’t spoil what happens next except to say I wasn’t always with it in terms of story and plot. I found the last twenty minutes to be a bit much. But the film creates a vibe that I really dug. It is full of dread and menace.

It is a film that makes you look in the background just to see what might be sneaking up on you. There is one scene where something happens in the back of the screen that I had to rewind just to see how they did it.

And that Cage performance is one for the books. He’s an actor that can often go way over the top and this is crazy even for him. I’m not sure I actually loved it but I admire it just the same.

Actually, the entire film is a bit like that. I did not love it, but I dig that this type of film is still being made. Filmmakers are willing to take risks and do something a little different.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Legend of Hell House (1973)

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I had a random hankering for a haunted house movie today. I could not for the life of me tell you why. But I went to my trusty Letterboxd and did a little search. Found some lists and landed on this incredibly creepy, moody thriller. It is one of those movies that sucks you in with its atmosphere, lighting, mood, impeccable costumes and set design. The fact that the story doesn’t quite succeed never really bothered me.

That story is about an eccentric millionaire who enlists three people to spend a week in the legendary Belasco house (also known as the Mount Everest of haunted houses also known as Hell House). The three people are Physicist Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revell), a mental medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), and a physical medium named Benjamin Fischer (Roddy McDowall). Along for the ride is Lionel’s wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicut).

It seems the house was once owned by Emeric Belasco a strange, eccentric millionaire who used to host wild orgies inside the house. After one such night of debauchery, dozens of people were found dead in the house, and Belasco missing. Ever since the house has been haunted by the victims of that night. Our heroes have been hired to prove the existence of an afterlife. Lionel has spent his career searching for said proof and comes with an array of scientific instruments. Florence is a mental medium meaning she can speak with ghosts but cannot manifest them in any physical way. Benjamin cannot speak to them but his presence allows them to take some physical form (which in this film mostly means they throw stuff about).

Sometime before the events of this film several other scientists and mediums undertook the same research and all but one died. That one is Benjamin who is only doing it again because he’s being paid a huge sum of money to do so.

Pretty quickly they hold a seance where Florence speaks to someone she thinks is Belasco’s son (or rather he speaks through her, using her body and his voice). Plates rattle, bottles break, furniture shakes. Later Ann will have some erotic dreams and will attempt to seduce Benjamin while in a trance. They will hold a second seance this time using lots of Lionel’s scientific instruments. Things go off the charts including some wacky ectoplasm flotation.

There are some goofy arguments between Lionel and Florence which amount to science versus spirituality except Lionel’s science is arguing that the crazy stuff that keeps happening is due to the natural energy that every human leaves behind. Since this house was filled with all sorts of insane things, that energy is supercharged.

Like I said, the plot is a bit of a letdown. Which is too bad because it was written by Richard Matheson (who I love) and it is based upon his book, but he must have been having a bad day. Everything else is terrific. It looks absolutely amazing. The set is fantastic and the lighting is divine. Everybody is taking things completely seriously which helps extend the creepy mood through all of the actual nonsense going on with the plot.

Definitely recommended.