Friday the 13th 8-Movie Collection

For many years, I wrote for Cinema Sentries and never posted any sort of links to those reviews on this site. In those days, The Midnight Cafe was music only; I figured movie reviews would only muddy the waters. That has changed, of course, many times over, but I’ve still not linked to all my Cinema Sentries reviews.

I try to keep up with the new stuff, and sometimes I go back to the earliest reviews and systematically try to link to them. Or I start at the end and do the same. But there is still a surprising amount of stuff in the middle that I haven’t got to.

This boxed set of Friday the 13th movies, for example. I wrote this in August of 2021. Which seems like forever ago. You can read my review here.

31 Days of Horror: The Burning (1981)

John Carpenter’s Halloween is one of the most successful independent films of all time. Its budget ($300,000) to box-office results ($70,0000) made it the most profitable movie for a long time. It arguably started the slasher boom. It certainly helped create many of the tropes of the genre and spawned numerous imitators.

Friday the 13th was one of those imitators. Its massive success solidified the tropes, and it spawned its own imitators. The Burning is one.

I was far too young to have seen Halloween, Friday the 13th, or The Burning in theaters. But the success of the first two films meant I did see them years later on cable TV and home video. But The Burning was not so successful and thus didn’t get repeated on late-night TV. I don’t recall ever seeing it in the aisles of my local video stores. Which either means they didn’t carry it, or possibly that the VHS cover just wasn’t that memorable.

But lately it has been showing up in my feeds. I see it nearly every time I browse through my streaming services for something to watch, and it pops up regularly on my Bluesky and Reddit accounts. I don’t know why that is, except that we are probably all unknowingly led by the algorithm.

Presumably, The Burning is cheap to buy the rights to, which leads all the streaming services to put it on their services, presumably around this time of year. And then it adds that to the recommended lists of horror nerds like me. Some of us watch it, and then we talk about it on social media, which makes more people watch it, and that tells the algorithm to recommend it more, and the circle continues.

The Burning was also the first film credit for a young Jason Alexander, and Holly Hunter has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role. No doubt that adds fuel to the algorithmic fire.

I finally watched it, and it’s not bad.

Like Friday the 13th, this one is set at a summer camp with a bunch of horny teens. Unlike it The Burning’s camp doesn’t have a horrible past. That would be another camp not far from Camp Stonewater. In our opening scene, we see some campers play a prank at the other camp. This is five years before the events of our story really begin. Camp Blackfoot is run by Cropsey, an alcoholic arsehole whom the kids all detest. Their prank goes wrong, and Cropsey finds himself burned alive. He doesn’t die, but is grotesquely mutilated. Five years later, he gets out of the hospital and starts chopping up kids at Camp Stonewater (Blackfoot having been shut down after the incident).

At Camp Stonewater, we get the usual nonsense with the usual assortment of characters. There is the awkward nerd, the buff jerk trying to make it with the hot girl, the attractive counselor and his girl, and the jokester (Jason Alexander). Plus an assortment of others playing pranks, sports, and generally goofing around.

It is all more or less done well. There is nothing new here, but the characters are enjoyable enough. There is a lot of stalking by the killer in the first half. The now-common view of things from the killer’s POV from behind some bushes and the like happens quite a bit. That amuses me. The killer stalks these kids for like two days before he does any killing. Funny to think of this burned-up man standing around in the trees all that time just spying on them.

The older kids (who make up our main cast and get rid of most of the extras) go on a long canoe ride for a couple of days. That’s when the killings begin. The killings are pretty good (the effects were done by Tom Savini). Who lives and who dies is a little surprising. And the conclusion is pretty cool.

I’m using faint praise because this isn’t a great movie. It isn’t as good as Halloween or the original Friday the 13th, but it is better than a lot of slashers, and if you like the genre, then this is well worth watching.

31 Days of Horror: Let Us Prey (2014)

One of the main reasons I enjoy doing monthly movie themes is that it pushes me to watch movies I might not otherwise watch and to discover films I’ve never heard of before. Let Us Prey falls into the latter category.

It starts out pretty strong. It has an interesting story with convincing lead actors, but then it falls down a hole of ridiculousness.

PC Rachel Heggie (Pollyanna McIntosh) has been reassigned from the big city to a tiny little town in Scotland. On her way to her first day of work, she witnesses a speeding car smash into a man walking on the street. The driver is Caesar (Brian Vernel Sargison), and he is both panicked and belligerent. The man he hit has disappeared. Rachel arrests Caesar even though he says that without a victim there is no crime.

She takes him to the station, where she meets Sgt. Jim MacReady (Douglas Russell), a laid-back man who is exactly the kind of police boss you meet in stories like this, where bad things are about to happen in places where bad things don’t usually happen. Rachel tells him the story of Caesar and how the guy he hid has vanished. He calls in to PC Jack Warnock (Bryan Larkin) and PC Jennifer Mundie (Hanna Stanbridge) to be on the lookout for a wounded man. We meet them as they are having sex in the patrol car.

Caesar is thrown into the slammer next to a cell occupied by Ralph Beswick (Jonathan Watson), Caesar’s former teacher and intellectual who likes to beat on his wife.

Warnock and Mundie do find the injured man (Liam Cunningham), except he’s not all that injured. But he is strange and prone to making prophetic proclamations. He also seems to have some supernatural powers.

Things will get weird, and dark, and scary from there.

It is a pretty great setup. I love small-town stories where strange and horrible things occur. I like Liam Cunningham, and Pollyanna McIntosh is good. But the film’s second half turns into one big action/horror stew that’s mostly really stupid.

There is a character who shows up wearing a bunch of barbed wire fencing wrapped around his torso. That’s about the point I rolled my eyes and decided things were just going to go downhill from there.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Nude Vampire (1970)

There is nothing quite like a Jean Rollin film. He’s famous for making dream-like erotic vampire movies with loads of nudity and a fascination with women wearing nothing but sheer fabric draped over their naked bodies. It comes as no surprise that he finally made a movie and called it The Nude Vampire.

This one plays out very much like a dream, with scenes that have very little logic to them. Or connective tissue. It begins with three men in masks taking blood from a naked woman in a hood. Another woman (wearing a sheer fabric, of course) is walking down some dark alleyways, pursued by several men in dark clothes and wearing animal masks. A man named Pierre (Olivier Rollin) tries to help her, but before they can escape, the animal-masked men shoot her dead.

Pierre makes it out alive and follows the masked men to a gated building. He sees some other people, dressed in fancy dress, go in. But a man at the gate stops him, for he has no invitation.

The next day his father chastises him for being there for he’s been warned to stay out of his business. But what are they doing in there? And how is his father involved? The next night, he attacks a man just before he gets to the gate, steals his invitation, and crashes the party. Inside, he’s given what is basically a bag to put over his head. The other partygoers are given the same. Then a woman’s picture flashes on a television. That same woman is given a gun, and she shoots herself in the head.

Then the woman from the night before shows up. But how can she still be alive? She drinks the dead woman’s blood. Then another face shows up on the screen. It is Pierre’s. He’s given the gun and is asked to kill himself. Instead, he shoots the guy who gave him the gun and makes a run for it.

I’m explaining all of this clearly, but it is far from clear in the film. Everything is a little hazy, clouded by shadows and fog. The film eventually explains a few things – Pierre’s father is involved in some shadowy experiments with the girl who didn’t die. Apparently, she can’t die. Her wounds heal. But she also drinks blood and cannot stand the sunlight. Maybe she’s a vampire, or maybe she has some kind of mutant genes. They want to find out. They want to find a way to live forever.

At the same time, there is a rebellion going on. Some of the scientists’ workers want to help the girl escape. Others are planning to break in and kidnap her. All of the rebels seem to think Pierre is one of them.

Rollin gives everything a psychedelic dream quality. It is both very well made and cheap-looking. He somehow manages to blend the arthouse with the grindhouse. He’s created something beautiful and ethereal with gratuitous nudity and blood drinking.

It is a wild, trippy experience.

31 Days of Horror: The Haunting (1963)

Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) is a meek and mild middle-aged woman who has spent most of her adult life caring for her invalid mother. Now that her mother has died, she doesn’t know what to do with her life. She’s wracked with guilt, thinking she is responsible for her demanding mother’s death, but also filled with a new hope that she might actually do something with her life.

When Dr John Markway (Richard Johnson) invites her to Hill House, a supposedly haunted old mansion, to study the paranormal activity there, she excitedly accepts. Also on the adventure is Theodora (Claire Bloom) a much more worldly and cunning young woman, and Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn) the heir to the house who would rather it not be haunted so he can sell it for a large profit.

The film is slow and meditative. There are scares, but they rarely jump out at you, and you are never quite sure if they are real or not. This is slow-burn horror, designed to build a mood and atmosphere, not to make you leap out of your seat.

Theodora is clearly coded as a lesbian. It is interesting how this mainstream 1960s film deals with that and how the other characters react to it. She attempts to seduce Eleanor, who is completely oblivious. Theodora says kind things to her and comforts her when she’s scared. Late at night, when things go bump, she’ll hold her hand and hold her close. It is never overt, but it’s there. Later, Eleanor will say something cutting and mean, letting Theodora know she knows what’s been going on.

The main focus is on Eleanor. She’s a jangle of nerves and anxieties. Dr. Markway encourages her at first, but the more disturbed she becomes, the more he begins to think she should leave. But she refuses. She tries to be strong. But the house, the noises, the strange occurrences all seem to be happening to her and no one else.

Director Robert Wise shoots it in stark black and white (with some gorgeous cinematography by Davis Boulton). There are plenty of disorienting angles in this monstrous house. This is very much a mood piece. Perhaps a little too much. With a run time of just under two hours, I could have used a little more straight horror.

The acting is good. Eleanor’s emotional plight is an interesting one. I especially enjoyed her ever-changing relationship with Theodora. It is a good film, just don’t go expecting any real ghosts.

31 Days of Horror: Alone in the Dark (1982)

Dr. Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence) is one of those wacky doctors who thinks the patients at a psychiatric ward shouldn’t be called crazy or locked up and heavily medicated. They need kindness and understanding. They should be more or less allowed to do what they want, and instead of correcting their delusions, you should just run with them. Except for the people on the third floor. Those guys are nuts. They have to be securely locked away.

Even then, they make the floor look rather cozy. Oh, there are big, strong doors that can swing shut and lock in an instant, and if anyone tries to open a window, barricades come down fast. But if everyone behaves, then the place looks like a nice place to live.

The film makes a big deal about the electric locks. Those doors open and shut electronically. The windows are the same. A guard says they are perfectly safe as long as the power doesn’t go out. So naturally, the power goes out.

The four guys on the third floor escape and wreak havoc. They will eventually find their way to Dr. Dan Potter’s (Dwight Schultz) house. He’s a new psychiatrist at the hospital, having just replaced a guy who moved to another town. But the third-floor guys think he must have killed that guy, and now they want revenge.

The back half of the film becomes a station-under-siege film. It’s pretty good.

It’s also pretty weird. The third-floor guys are played by Martin Landau (as a pyromaniac preacher), Jack Palance (and a disturbed former POW), Erland Van Lidth (as a child molester known as “fatty”), and a dude who only shows his face at the end and is only known as “Bleeder.”

Before they lay siege to Potter’s house, they go into town where everybody is looting because all that stands between society and chaos is a little power outage. They have some fun and get some weapons. It is a bit silly, really.

Our villains are having a lot of fun. Donald Pleasance isn’t really given enough to make his character interesting. Once the siege starts, things get interesting. I love a good base-under-siege story, and this one’s done well.

It is a film I’m happy to watch during Spooky season, but not one I’m likely to ever return to.

31 Days of Horror: Invaders From Mars (1953)

I love 1950s sci-fi and horror movies. The anxieties over the newly discovered nuclear powers and the real possibility of space exploration created some wonderful films. A lot of those films were decidedly low-budget, but they still managed to create some pretty terrific special effects.

Invasion From Mars isn’t a particularly good film. Its story is pretty basic, and its low budget is a little too present, but there are some good sets and the alien design is wonderful.

David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) is a young boy who loves astronomy. Lucky for him, there is a giant telescope in his hometown. One night he’s awakened by a terrible thunderstorm. He looks out his window, and he sees a flying saucer touch down on a sandy beach just behind his yard. He tells his dad about it, and he promises the boy he’ll check it out in the morning.

But Dad is a bit of an astronomy nut himself, and he decides to check the story out that night. He isn’t back when his wife wakes up, so she calls the police. They check out the spot David said he saw the UFO land, and they, too, disappear.

Later that morning, Dad shows back up, but he’s acting strange. He shouts at the boy to never mention what he saw again and gives him a good smacking when he asks questions. Dad’s also got a weird scar on the back of his neck.

David almost immediately figures out what’s going on and runs to the cops. They get him to talk to Dr. Pat Blake (Helena Carter), who believes his story and gets the military involved. They’ll blast a hole in the sand and discover a series of underground tunnels and eventually the Martians.

Most of the Martians are dudes in goofy-looking suits, but the king (or emperor? or something) is this big, round head with a human face, spray-painted gold, with some tentacle-looking things sticking out of it, all encompassed in a glass dome. It is kind of awesome. The cave system is pretty cool too. It’s covered in these wild bubbles.

The story is all standard stuff. I did appreciate its similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the aliens basically controlling humans and it being difficult to tell who was ok. When the military comes in, we see a lot of stock footage of tanks and other armored vehicles moving about. And when I say a lot, I mean a whole lot. They keep cutting back to tanks, but because it is all stock footage, we don’t see them interact with anything else in the film. They also reuse a lot of footage of Martians and soldiers running around in the caves.

It gets a little dull after a while, but those sets do look good, and the little Martian is awesome.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Amityville Horror (1979)

For the last several years, I’ve tried to watch every film in a horror franchise during the month of October. I’ve seen the Friday the 13th films and all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, plus Halloween and Scream and their respective sequels. It has been a fun endeavor. Everyone knows that horror sequels can take a pretty steep decline in quality the further you get into them. For a long time, I tended to avoid them as I didn’t want to taint the originals with terrible sequels. But since I’ve become a bigger horror hound, I like being able to say I’ve watched an entire franchise.

And it is true, oftentimes the sequels are dreadful. But sometimes they can be quite good. Or at least they can take things into interesting new dimensions.

This year I’ve decided I want to tackle The Conjuring universe. Well, I’m not sure I’m going to watch all of the films, as there are a lot of them, depending on how deep you want to go. This is where I definitely say I won’t be reviewing all the films in this franchise.

The Conjuring films follow Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), real-life demonologists who studied the supernatural. There are currently four Conjuring films, but it has also spawned a couple of spin-offs. Three of them follow a possessed doll, and two involve some kind of evil nun.

The Warrens also visited the house in Amityville that contained so many horrors. Amityville Horror spawned two official sequels (which I reviewed here) and a remake, but because you can’t copyright a town’s name, there have been loads of unofficial sequels. I definitely won’t be reviewing all of them.

I’m also not sure if I’ll watch all the Annabelle and Nun movies. I’ll probably dip my toe into them, but if the first ones are bad, I doubt I’ll watch the sequels. But I will definitely watch The Conjuring movies and write about them.

To start this series off, I thought it would be fun to go back and watch the original Amityville Horror. Without it, there would be no Conjuring films.

I’ve seen Amityville Horror a few times now (and I even reviewed it here). It is not a good movie. The pacing is weird. There aren’t enough scares. It never builds any real sense of dread, and in the end there just isn’t any boogeyman or villain.

But there is something about it that makes me keep returning to it. Every couple of years I’ll get a hankering to watch it again, despite me knowing it isn’t as good as I want it to be. I think I want to like it, and after a few years I forgot how not good it is. But I do remember James Brolin’s big hair and awesome beard, and how amazing Margot Kidder looks in it. So I watch it and then go “oh yea, this film is bad.” Give me a couple more years, and I’ll probably watch it again.

One thing I always forget is that Ed and Lorraine do not make an appearance in this film. I always expect them to show up at the end, but they never do. I don’t believe they appear in the book this film is based on. My understanding is that they did show up at the house for some kind of TV special after the book became a hit. So, I guess this film really shouldn’t be included in The Conjuring universe, but as I say, there would be no Conjuring films without this one.

I pretty much stand by my original review, so I don’t think there is any need to rehash those thoughts. I was thinking about the screenplay as I watched it this time, and it is a bit of a mess. My guess is that it follows the book pretty well and, in a supposed non-fictional account, the book is probably pretty scary (at least if you buy into any of this stuff. I should probably note that this is all nonsense. The Warrens were charlatans. They made up most of their stories out of whole cloth and likely fed into the delusions of many others.) But reading a book about a haunting can sound real. Watching a movie like this borders on the ridiculous.

Because unlike something like The Exorcist or Poltergeist, there doesn’t seem to be any real villain in this film. A couple of chairs move on their own, a girl gets locked inside a closet, a priest gets attacked by a bunch of flies, etc. Even at its most hysterical, all we hear is a voice, and a door gets blown off its hinges. We never see the entity or get any kind of explanation for it. The priest (an overacting Rod Steiger) thinks it’s the devil, but his story never really gets going.)

The film literally ends with them just driving away. Nothing really tries to stop them. And that’s it.

The Movie Journal: September 2026

I watched 38 movies in September. Eighteen of them were made before I was born. Thirty-five of them were new to me.

It must have been a pretty good month, as I handed out a lot of four-star ratings. Or maybe I just got lazy with my ratings.

I only went to the theaters once, and that was for The Killing. Well, actually, I went to the theater to see the new Resident Evil movie, but something went wrong, and I went home with a refund. I meant to tell that story, but I guess I forgot.

I reviewed quite a few films for Cinema Sentries, and I’m still enjoying the Kino Film channel. Once again, there was no theme this month. But October is here and I plan to watch lots of horror movies and write about them. If that goes well I hope to reinstate the monthly themes.

Lino Ventura and Tom Baker remain number one on my most-watched actors list. Charles Bronson has jumped onto the list, tied at number two with seven films. He’s one of those actors who I liked a lot. I loved him in films like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape when he felt more like a character actor. Then he became a major star and played in a lot of dumb action films in the 1980s. I still kind of love those films, and I’ve been watching a lot this year.

It is good to see Martin Scorsese on the list again. He’s my favorite director, but I’ve seen almost everything he’s made. At least his narrative films; I still have quite a few documentaries I haven’t seen. Anyway, when I first started this list, he seemed to make it onto my most-watched directors, but I try to watch more new films than ones I’ve seen before, and so I’ve kind of stayed away from him. But now I’m coming back to him.

Here’s the full list.

The Killing (1956) ****1/2
Apology for Murder (1945) **1/2
Holiday Affair (1949) ****
Cunk on Life (2024) ****
Labyrinth (1986) ****
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) ****
Mad Love (1935) ****
The Big Caper (1957) ****
One Body Too Many (1944) ***1/2
Fear in the Night (1947) **1/2
Secret Agent (1936) ***1/2
Barbarian Queen (1985) *
From Hell (2001) ****
Supergirl (2026) ***
The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920) *****
Ghostwatch (1992) ****
The Hot Spot (1990) ****
Yakuza Graveyard (1976) ***1/2
The Inugami Family (1976) ****
Hot Enough for June (1964) ***1/2
Weapons of Death (1977) ***1/2
Shadows in an Empty Room (1976) ****
Once a Thief (1965) ****
Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1973) ***
Tintin and the Blue Oranges (1964) ***
Lust of the Vampire (1957) ***1/2
The Sentinel (1977) **
The Counsellor (1973) ***
They Can’t Hang Me (1955) ****
Two Small Bodies (1993) ***
Time Is My Enemy (1954) ***
The Teckman Mystery (1954) ****
The Evil That Men Do (1984) **1/2
10 to Midnight (1983) **1/2
Caboblanco (1980) **
The Outside Man (1972) ****
Point Blank (1967) ****
One Cut of the Dead (2017) ****

Jim Thompson: A Hell of a Man

825292081 10165038019670762 1172603173532130118 n

827990839 10165038019685762 9057578960770469431 n

I’ll have more to say about this in this week’s Five Cool Things article, but I wanted to show off some swag I got this weekend. To celebrate Jim Thompson’s birthday, the Circle Cinema showed Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (which was partially written by Thompson). They gave away free T-shirts, some postcards from the upcoming Criterion Kubrick box set and a cool little Thompson pin.

I had a blast!