The Friday Night Horror Movie: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

hell of the living dead poster

George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) was a huge international success. It made over $1 million in Italy alone. In 1979 Lucio Fulci made an unofficial sequel, Zombi 2 (Dawn was titled Zombi in Italy). It was quite successful as well and for the next few years, the Italians began churning out one zombie film after another.

In 1980 Bruno Mattei got into the game with Hell of the Living Dead, aka Virus, aka Night of the Zombies, aka Zombie Creeping Flesh, aka half a dozen other things. It is, well it is a mess, but kind of a glorious, ridiculous, god-awful mess. It’s also a lot of fun in a late-night weekend kind of way.

The plot, such as it is, involves a research facility in Papua New Guinea that accidentally releases an experimental gas called “Operation Sweet Death” which turns the recently deceased into flesh-eating monsters.

The government sends in an elite SWAT team to take care of business. Along the way they run into two reporters and together, they make their way through the jungle, battling hordes of monsters, to the research facility to…well it’s never exactly clear what their ultimate goal is, but there sure takes a lot of gore-filled violence to get there.

Most of the plot makes very little sense. The dubbed dialogue is hilariously bad, and the acting is atrocious. There is a ton of very obvious stock footage of animals and natives thrown in to boost the run time. The score is by the very excellent band Goblin, but all of it is recycled from various other films.

The characters make ridiculous decisions after ridiculous decisions. Though early on they figure out the only way to kill the zombies is to shoot them in the head, they constantly shoot them everywhere but the brain pan. One guy liked to taunt them and dance around them for some reason. Whenever a zombie attacks the other characters literally just stand there for the longest time watching them eat their friends until finally decide to act. Etc,. etc.

I’ve seen a lot of bad horror movies. I’ve seen a lot of bad zombie movies. This is one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen. And yet, under the right circumstance, in the right mood this film kind of works.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Sleepless (2001)

sleepless movie poster

This is the third film from Dario Argento that I’ve featured in The Friday Night Movie posts. Clearly, I like the director. I’ve been trying to catch up on his filmography past the period of what would generally be called his prime. He’s definitely made some bad movies, most of them being made in the 1990s and beyond, and there was a time when I would have said he’d not made a good movie since Opera in 1987 (in fact I more or less said that in my review of Dark Sunglasses). But I think my opinion is changing.

Nobody is going to call his late career movies better than his output in the 1970s into the 1980s, but some of his later movies aren’t bad. Sleepless falls easily into that category. He’s very much aping some of those early films with a black-gloved killer, lots of stylish camerawork, red herrings galore, plenty of blood-soaked violence and he even got Goblin to do the music.

Unfortunately, it feels a little too much like an old master copying his greatest pieces long after he’s lost the particular genius that made them so special.

The great Max Von Sydow plays an aging, retired detective who gets sucked back into an old case, one he thought was solved years ago. But when more people start being murdered in the same manner he begins to realize he pinned the wrong man all those years ago.

He teams up with a man whose mother was killed by the murderer when he was just a boy. There are a lot of twists and turns and expectations that the killer is this person or that only to have everything upturned right at the end.

Argento’s signature style is there, but it feels a little muted. There isn’t any particular image that really stood out to me. Though there is a nice bit showing the insides of an answering machine that was pretty cool. The director never shied away from extreme violence, but here he leans more toward blood and gore than stylishness.

It isn’t top-tier Argento, but it is a long way from his worst and that’s always good to see at this stage in his career.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Night (2020)

the night

After spending a pleasant evening with their friends an Iranian couple and their baby daughter get lost in Los Angeles and decide to stop for the night in an old hotel.

Almost immediately strange things begin happening. They hear loud noises coming from the floor above them. There are knocks on the door but no one is there. The man (Shahab Hosseini) sees visions of his wife (Niousha Noor) and some other woman. The woman sees a vision of a young boy who cries out for his mother.

They call the police but they are no help. They decide to leave but find they are trapped. They knock on doors but no one answers. Will this night ever end?

First-time director Kourosh Ahari fills The Night with plenty of atmosphere and creepy tension. The camera placement and framing give it a claustrophobic feel and the lighting baths everything in shadow. The soundscape and score give everything an eerie, ethereal feel.

It pays homage to several other films, most notably Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but he manages to make the film it’s own. It doesn’t break any new ground, especially with the plot details, and it runs a little long. It maintains what you might call a medium level of tension throughout but it never manages to really ratchet it up from there so that the ending feels a little like a letdown (though the final shot is a great one).

It is a co-production between Iran and the US and I appreciated its use of language. In the opening party, all of the characters are Iranian, except for one woman. Everyone speaks Farsi but the American periodically breaks into English and the other characters sometimes reply in English but usually slip back into Farsi. At the hotel, the couple speaks Farsi to each other, but outside of their room, they speak very good English to the Americans. As someone who has lived in various countries around the world, I appreciate when a film is realistic in the ways that non-native speakers code-switch their language depending on the situation.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Titane (2021)

titane poster

I watch a lot of movies and it is very rare that a movie genuinely surprises me. When you watch movies like I do you get used to the way most films work, the way they hit certain beats and behave in certain ways. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, sometimes it is comforting. But when a movie does come along and does something completely different it makes it all that more rewarding.

Titane completely knocked me out. It is completely and utterly surprising. I genuinely had no idea where it was going to go next. I’m not sure I loved where it always went. I’m not sure I didn’t, either. It is a film I’ll be thinking about for a few days to figure out what exactly I thought of it. But I loved not knowing what was coming next.

It is a film worth coming into not knowing anything about, so I won’t say much. It involves a girl who gets into an accident as a child and has a metal plate inserted into her skull. As an adult, she works as a dancer and after a rough night she goes on a long journey that takes her places you cannot believe.

It has been compared to a David Cronenberg film and that’s apt, but it is also very much its own thing. I watched Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future directly before watching Titane and let me tell you they make for one freaky double feature.

Agathe Rousselle gives an absolutely astonishing, brave, bravura performance in the lead and Vincent Lindon is quite spectacular as well. He plays, well I’d get into spoiler territory if I said who he plays, but he’s really good.

It is a film that is exciting and repulsive – sometimes I couldn’t turn and other times I had to close my eyes. This is something I don’t want every film to do to me, but it sure is exciting when they do.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Hellraiser (2022)

hellraiser 2022

I don’t know why I thought this would be good. I don’t really love the original, and while I did enjoy the sequel this franchise is just not something I’m all that interested in exploring. Yet, I have to admit I was intrigued by this reboot from Hulu. I don’t know why exactly, except that the idea of redoing the original in a more modern, even elevated way, sounded interesting. Last week I watched Prey, Hulu’s entry into the Predator franchise, and rather loved it so I decided to give this Hellraiser a try.

It is not good. As it is a reboot of the original the story follows fairly familiar tracks, but there is enough difference to keep it, well, not interesting, but at least it doesn’t feel like a retread. It follows Riley (a pretty great Odessa A’zion) a recovering addict who is struggling to pull it together. Needing rent money she agrees to follow her boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey) on a little robbery gig. Naturally, the thing they steal is the funky puzzle box. Then all, ahem, hell breaks loose.

I’m not sure familiar with all the lore associated with these films so I don’t know where this one breaks from tradition or adds to it. Here when you figure out the puzzle the swishes out a blade and cuts you. This unleashes the Cenobites upon you and changes the box into configuration 2. If you are holding the box when it has moved into configuration 6 then the Cenobites grant you a wish, or something.

The story is pretty dumb. The elevated aspect of the horror is that Riley is an addict and that makes it more harrowing, or something. The best part of the original is that it felt like a low-budget horror made with love and a renegade spirit. The Cenobites were strange and sexual – they are like S&M freaks turned up to 11. The gore was practical and very fleshy. Here the budget is bigger but it feels plastic. The Cenobite costumes are smooth and not at all terrifying. There is a lot of blood and gore, but it is mostly made from bad CGI and lacks the visceral feeling of the original.

What’s left feels more like the 8th sequel of a tired franchise made sometime in the late 1990s, not a modern reboot with something new to say.

The Friday Night Horror Movie C.H.U.D. (1984)

chud movie

The 1980s were a wild time for horror movies. The advent of home video and the rise of cable/satellite TV meant a massive uptick in potential viewership. No longer did low-budget horror movies have to rely on midnight movie screenings in large cities to make their money, there were now thousands of movie rental houses looking to fill up their shelf space, and dozens of new cable channels with time to fill. Horror Hounds have never let low budgets or shoddy effects keep them from watching a movie and so the 1980s were filled to the brim with horror movies of all shapes and sizes being churned out in straight-to-video releases.

C.H.U.D. actually received a theatrical release (at least in a limited capacity) and had a not terribly tiny budget of $1.25 million, but it is very much a movie of the ’80s. John Heard and Daniel Stern star as fashion photographers and soup kitchen operator who begin an investigation of the disappearance of numerous NYC homeless people. Stern’s character notices that the missing people were all underground dwellers, those who live in the various tunnels underneath the city.

At the same time, Bosch (Christopher Curry) a police Captain begins his own investigation despite the protests of his boss and a Nuclear Regulatory Commission goon (George Martin) both of whom are trying to cover up the disappearances.

What they find under the city are killer mutants known as C.H.U.D.s (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers) which – surprise surprise – were caused by the NRC goon dumping all kinds of industrial waste in those underground tunnels. It is all very silly and kind of dumb, but also charming in its own way.

It also stars Kim Greist (in her film debut) as Heard’s wife. She manages to be a surprisingly tough character who fights off the mutants with a sword. John Goodman, Jay Thomas, and Jon Polito also have minor roles.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Wailing (2016)

the wailing

A policeman, Jong-Goo (Kwak Do-won) is awakened from his slumber in the pre-dawn hours in a small Korean village. Someone had died, possibly murdered. But first Jong-Goo has his breakfast. The murder was brutal. The man was stabbed multiple times. His wife was chopped up and put into a bag. The likely suspect sits outside the scene, covered in blood and mud. He’s visibly shaken and does not speak.

The next night Jong-Goo and his partner are chatting about the case at the police station. In the midst of a powerful thunderstorm, just as the electricity goes out, a naked woman appears at the window covered in blood and dirt. She disappears before they can talk to her. The following day another murder was committed. That woman is at the scene screaming and yes, wailing. She’ll hang herself before the sun sets again.

As the eating his breakfast before attending to his murder scene attests, Jong-Goo is not a great policeman. In fact, he’s fairly useless. But he’s the only one that thinks there is more to these two cases than meets the eye. The official response from the higher-ups is that there has been a bad batch of mushrooms afflicting the village causing some psychotic breaks. He thinks, perhaps, there is a serial killer on the loose, or maybe something more sinister.

Local gossip points their fingers at a Japanese man who recently showed up in the village. Others think it might be an evil spirit. When Jon-Goo’s daughter stars acting strangely he pays the Japanese man a visit.

To go further into the plot would be to spoil The Wailing’s many surprises. Director Na Hong-jin’s film is busting at the seams with ideas and influences. It is a film full of mythology, folk tales, and religion. Jong-Goo will call upon both a shame and a Catholic priest for help. It feels like about four horror films in one. It is violent and goofy, thrilling and terrifying.

It is perhaps just a tad too much. With a run time of around 2 and a half hours, it feels a little longer than it needs to be. There are a lot of twists and turns, and red herrings galore. I’m not quite sure it will stand up under scrutiny, but I really enjoyed myself while in the midst of it. I’m too tired at the moment to write much more, but it is definitely worth checking out if you are a fan of horror and are looking for something a little different.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: John Dies At The End (2012)

john dies at the end

Don Coscarelli has had one interesting career as a director. After directing his very first feature film at the age of 18 he went on to create one of the more iconic horror mechanisms of the 1980s (Phantasm‘s flying silver ball). He followed that up with The Beastmaster a ridiculous, schlocky bit of fantasy starring Marc Singer as a bare-chested cross between Luke Skywalker and Doctor Doolittle which was a staple of late-night cable television in the early 1990s. He then made four increasingly bad Phantasm sequels which expanded the film’s mythology into incoherence. He also made Bubba Ho-Tep, a film that I haven’t seen but apparently stars Bruce Campbell as an elderly Elvis Presley who teams up with JFK to fight an ancient Egyptian mummy. His last film was this one which I just watched.

It is an absolute mess of a film, at times both brilliant and baffling. To explain the plot would be an exercise in futility. It involves a mind-altering drug, an alternate universe, bug aliens, and a lot of gross-out horror. It is a film so filled to the brim with ideas that it never pauses for a breath to let the viewer catch up, or to take stock of where it is going.

Coscarelli has a visual flair so it is generally interesting to look at (with the exception of some pretty dodgy CGI). It is well made and well acted (Paul Giamatti has a small role and he’s always great to see in anything – he also produced the film). There are lots of interesting things going on in the script, I just wished they had spent a little more time on any one idea and fleshed it out more, instead of throwing more and more and stuff at us. It has a tendency to be a little too jokey as well. In part, it wants to be this mind-bending, time-jumping sci-fi/horror film and in another part it wants to be a Judd Apatow-style bro-comedy. The two parts never really gel together in any coherent way.

It is definitely worth watching if you like Corscarelli or films that get a little crazy.

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

the vampire doll

I’ve talked about how the Criterion Channel is one of my favorite streaming services. Mubi is fast becoming a contender in that category. Mubi actually works as a kind of sister channel to Criterion. Where Criterion focuses on the world’s greatest films and lots of classic Hollywood films (and lots of other more esoteric themes like Snow Westerns and 1970s sci-fi) Mubi’s focus is on more modern art-house fair. They show films that premiere at film festivals like Cannes and Sundance, but that doesn’t necessarily reach a wider audience.

They also have a lot of what you might call cult films – genre movies that have been all but forgotten except by a small group of fans. The Vampire Doll is a good example of what I’m talking about. This was the Japanese film company Toho’s attempt at cashing in on the horror craze that so popular at the time.

It looks and feels like a Hammer Horror film with its creaky old mansion as a setting and its moody supernatural storyline. A man who has been traveling abroad for the last few months returns home to Japan. He immediately rides out to the country to see his girlfriend Yuko (Yukiko Kobayashi). Upon arrival, he is told by her mother (Yôko Minakaze) that Yuko is dead. She died in an automobile accident a few weeks prior.

That evening he sees a woman that appears to be Yuko. Flash forward a few days and the man’s sister, Keiko (Kayo Matsuo) and her fiancee Hiroshi (Akira Nakao) visit the old mansion because they have not heard from her brother in a while and that is unusual. Keiko immediately senses something is wrong and decides to stick around and investigate.

With a 70-minute run time, the plot moves along pretty quickly. Honestly, storywise the film isn’t great. It doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before. But it works really well as a mood piece. The mansion is full of creepy shadows, and the music is particularly moody. I mentioned Hammer Horror earlier and that is fitting. If you’ve ever seen any of those old movies then you’ll know what I’m talking about. They have a particular look and feel to them that is perfect for this type of gothic horror.

And that’s why I love sites like Mubi. I’d never heard of this film before, but they spotlighted it and now I’ve seen it and I’m glad that I did.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Black Phone (2021)

the black phone

As much as possible I try to go into a movie knowing very little. I find not having expectations on what to expect really helps the viewing experience. That’s probably a funny thing to say from a guy who regularly reviews movies a lot of you haven’t seen, but it is true.

The Black Phone is a movie I kept seeing people excitedly talking about when it came out, but I successfully kept myself from actually reading those things, and thus I came to it knowing nothing more than Ethan Hawke apparently wears a lot of scary-looking masks.

I’ll tell you all just slightly more about it. Hawke plays a crazy dude who abducts children and…well I won’t spoil what he does. Actually, I don’t really know because I haven’t finished the film. The main story revolves around one boy who is abducted and placed into a large basement. There is a phone on the wall, but it is disconnected. Except it keeps ringing and the people who answer on the other end are boys Ethan Hawke previously abducted.

I’m maybe 45 minutes into it and so far I’m digging it. It has that Blumhouse slickness to it that tends to keep me from loving films that come under that banner, but Hawke is creepy and the 1970s setting is done well. I especially was enjoying a foul-mouthed, and tough girl who is our hero’s sister. I hope she comes to his rescue before it is all said and done.

And now I must get back to it.