The Friday Night Horror Movie: Baron Blood (1972)

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Apologies for getting this out late. My daughter had a sleepover last night, and I decided to stay up late watching a French adaptation of an Agatha Christie story with my wife rather than write this. I think you will understand.

Baron Blood was directed by the great Italian genre director Mario Bava. It was made late in his career (he’d only direct three more films before his death) when he was having trouble getting financing for any film. Beloved as he is now, Bava’s films rarely made much money when they were released.

As such, the film has plenty of style and looks amazing, but falls fairly flat in the storytelling department.

Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora), an American university student, comes to Austria to visit his ancestral castle. While there, he learns that his Great-Grandfather was a notorious sadist who tortured and killed hundreds of villagers, earning him the nickname Baron Blood. Legend says that the Baron burned a witch at the stake, but before she died, she cursed him with a spell that would allow him to rise again from the grave only to be eternally tortured by her.

Naturally, our hero, along with his friend Eva Arnold (Elke Sommer) enacts the curse and raises the baron from the grave.

But first, Joseph Cotton.

Although he is top billed, the legendary actor doesn’t appear until at least half an hour into this 90-minute film. He plays Alfred Becker, an eccentric millionaire who buys the castle at auction.

Actually, no, my timeline is off. Peter and Eve do use an incantation to raise the Baron from the grave before Becker shows up. They do it at midnight, but the clock strikes 2 ( the exact time when the Baron was murdered), and blood runs under the door, but they don’t actually see the Baron. Before they can read the recantation, a wind knocks the scroll into a fire, and it is lost.

Although they do not know it, the Baron has risen, and he kills the previous owner of the castle, hence the auction, hence the showing up of Alfred Becker.

He kills a few more people, and our heroes try to find a way to lift the curse. Etc. The plot follows a pretty standard path from there.

Cotton feels out of place here, like he’s not quite sure what he’s doing in this film. He was in his late 60s at the time, making a string of low-budget horror movies, which I can only assume was a low point in his career. Sommer seems to be the only one having any real fun, and she’s a delight.

What makes it worth watching is the setting and Bava’s usual fantastic use of color, light, and shadow. Shot on the grounds of a real castle, he makes great use of the gothic setting, complete with a tower, torture chamber, and lots of enormous chambers that give the director plenty of interesting angles to shoot from.

It is far from Bava’s best work, but even average films from him are well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Dracula (1979)

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Though I’ve seen probably a dozen Dracula movies, I’ve never actually read the book by Bram Stoker. Everything I know about the story, the characters, and the most famous vampire of all comes from the movies. I have no idea how accurate any of them are. They all change the narrative to suit their cinematic needs. But I figure between them all, I’ve probably gotten all of the details in there somewhere.

This version of the story was based on a stage play (the same one the Bela Lugosi film was based on). It doesn’t do anything particularly new with the story, though it does lean more into the seductive side of Dracula than the violent, destructive side. But it is a very good adaptation, if not exactly a necessary one.

It skips the beginning of the story with solicitor Jonathan Harker (Trevor Eve) visiting Count Dracula (Frank Langella) at his home. Instead, it begins with the arrival of Dracula on the Demeter. The ship crashes near the home of Dr. Jack Seward (Donald Pleasence), and Dracula is rescued by his daughter, Lucy Seward (Kate Nelligan).

At first, Dracula is friendly with everybody and dines that evening with the Seward’s and their friend Minda Van Helsing (Jan Francis). But that evening he’s sucking Minda’s blood and seducing Lucy.

Minda’s death brings Professor Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier) back from his journeys and…well, if you’ve seen other adaptations of the story, you more or less know what comes next.

Like I said, it doesn’t do anything particularly new with the story, but I quite liked it anyway. The sets look amazing, and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, along with director John Badham, create some stunning imagery.

Olivier is great as Van Helsing, and Pleasence is enjoyable as Dr. Seward, whose home also happens to be situated on the grounds of an insane asylum, providing the film with some of its most memorable set pieces. Tony Haygarth gives a fine, if all too brief, performance as the deranged Renfield.

The entire cast is quite good, save for Frank Langella as Dracula. His performance lacks the menace or sensuality the role requires. He plays it like he’s an old gentleman, beset by loneliness who periodically has to suck people blood to survive. There are flashes of something special hidden in there, but mostly I found it a very odd performance.

But overall this is a very good version of the old story.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Freaky (2020)

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“What if Freaky Friday, but a slasher?” – some guy in a pitch meeting, probably.

Christopher Landon directed the two Happy Death Day movies, which were basically Groundhog Day, but a slasher, and they are both quite good. So is Freaky, which handles the mashup of comedy and horror with aplomb.

Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) is an unpopular and constantly bullied teenager (despite being very pretty, relatively stylish, funny, smart, and plays the school mascot at football games) who is still mourning the death of her father one year ago.

After a game, her (alcoholic) mother “forgets” to pick her up (she’s passed out in a drunken stupor), leaving Millie alone after dark. She’s attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), who stabs her with an ancient Aztec knife. This causes a body swap, and now Millie must stab the butcher with that same knife by midnight or the body swap will be permanent.

The specific plot elements of this film are pretty dumb. But the film doesn’t take them seriously. The joy of it is watching Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton play each other. Vaughn is especially a lot of fun. He gets a lot of mileage as a middle-aged man sporting a tall, bulky frame playing a small teenage girl.

Millie has a couple of sidekicks (played by Celeste O’Connor and Misha Osherovich) who provide a lot of banter and comic relief (some of which works, some of it doesn’t). The kills are clever and surprisingly brutal.

But really, the reason to watch this is Vaughn having a ton of fun and Newton getting to act like a brutish psycho killer in the body of a teenager.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Crooked House (2008)

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We have now moved from our beloved Awesome ’80s in April to Mysteries in May. When I started this theme last year, I entitled it Murder Mysteries in May. I think I liked the aliteration more than anything, but I also seem to have known I would probably move from Murder Mysteries to just Mysteries, as when I created the category for it, I did not include “Murder.”

The thing, of course, is that you can have a mystery without there being a murder. I imagine that the majority of mysteries involve solving some sort of crime, often a murder, and Lord knows I love a good Murder Mystery, but I think I like broadening it up to other types of mysteries as well. So here we are. I’ll likely write more about that tomorrow in my normal opening salvo for the month’s theme, so I’ll move on.

It is easy to find a mystery that is also a horror film. Lots of murder mysteries have horror elements mixed in, and a good haunted house story is also mysterious. Tonight I wanted to watch something with my wife, and as she doesn’t like the hard horror stuff, I went looking for a nice mystery with just a touch of horror. It took forever, and when I finally found something, our internet went bad, so I had to find something else.

I landed on a movie called Crooked House from 2017. It is based on an Agatha Christie story, it was scripted by Julian Fellowes, and stars Glenn Close, Terrence Stamp, Julian Sands, Gillian Anderson, and Christina Hendricks. The trailer looked fun, and my Fire Stick indicated it was available on Prime.

I pressed play, and an opening scene had Marc Gatiss in it. That was a nice surprise, and I was pleased to have yet another actor I enjoy in this thing. Then the opening credits rolled, and none of the other names were familiar to me. None of those stars I just rattled off appeared either.

This was the wrong film. I backed out and looked at it again. The title card indicated the movie I wanted, and the trailer too. But pressing “play” again yielded the same results. I then searched for “Crooked House” on my Fire Stick, and now Amazon indicated that the film I wanted was not available to me.

Figuring the Mark Gatiss film was just an older adaptation of the same story, I decided to go ahead and watch.

It is not the same story. It isn’t even a movie. This Crooked House was a television series created by Mark Gatiss, who also wrote it. It ran for three episodes in 2008. Presumably, someone put the episodes together and made them into a movie. It works like an anthology series, which fits the premise well.

Gatiss conceived it as a homage to both the stories of M.R. James and the films of Amicus Productions. I’ve not read anything by James, but I am quite familiar with Amicus, which made a bunch of low-budget horror films in the 1970s that feel like low-rent Hammer Horror knock-offs.

A high school history teacher, Ben Morris (Lee Ingleby), brings an ancient door knocker he’s recently discovered to the local museum, where he presents it to the curator (Mark Gatiss). He says it must be from the old Geap Manor and proceeds to tell him two ghost stories about the place.

The first story finds an old miser restoring the Manor after he got rich on an investment that ruined the other speculators. Soon enough, he’s hearing loud knocks coming from the walls, which seem to turn to blood in the wee hours of the night.

The second story takes place in the Roaring Twenties, with a wild party going on in the manor. The new owner announces his engagement to the daughter of a tradesman, much to the chagrin of his ex-girlfriend and grandmother. The ex is jealous, but the grandmother tells a story of a terrible suicide that happened to her sister on her wedding day. And the curse the woman put upon all new brides in that house.

Our final story involves Ben Morris as he takes the knocker home and puts it on his own door, only to begin hearing creepy knocking at 3 every morning and finding his house transformed into the old manor.

None of the stories is particularly good, but they do have a certain creepy charm to them, and there are a couple of good scares to be found. The fact that it was initially a television series somehow makes it better. I can totally see myself enjoying it that way. And I do dig that Amicus vibe.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: Night of the Demons (1988)

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These days I meticulously log all the films I watch on Letterboxd. Before that I used to have a blog post where I listed out everything I watched. I also marked the films on IMDB as I watched them, and I often tried to remember everything I had ever seen and marked them as watched and rated them as best I could remember.

Often, after I’d watch a movie, I’d click on an actor and then scroll through all the films they’d ever been in, carefully marking the ones I’d seen as watched and rating them. It wasn’t a perfect system. I’m sure there are lots of films I never marked down – movies that I watched as a kid and have long since forgotten, etc. And there are probably some movies I marked as watched that maybe I hadn’t actually seen. Memories are weird like that.

As I get older, I find there are a lot of films I’ve marked as watched, but then when I sit down with them again I realize not a single scene is familiar. I have no idea if I actually did watch them and have just forgotten everything in the film, or if I somehow thought I had seen it but actually had not.

Night of the Demons is a film I would have sworn that I had seen before. I remember watching it. Okay, I remember watching some of it. Well, alright, I remember one particular scene in which one of the actresses got topless. What can I say? I would have been about 14 at the time, pubescent and horny.

But watching it tonight there wasn’t a single moment that seemed familiar. Most of the actresses do get topless, but none of them rang that memory bell. And it seems like I would have probably remembered multiple instances of sex and nudity and not just one scene. So maybe I watched one of the sequels. Or maybe it was something else and I somehow conflated it with this film. Possibly I remember the movie poster for this (which I definitely saw many times at the local video store) and watched something else and my memories of the film got mixed in with the cover art. Or maybe I just watched part of the movie and had to turn if off for some reason (possibly my mother caught the nudity and yelled at me for watching it).

None of this matters, of course. You’re probably wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about this. I’m just forever fascinated by how my brain processes all the movies I’ve seen.

The film itself is a silly bit of 1980s horror. Some dumb teenagers (all played by actors who are clearly well out of high school) go to a party in an abandoned funeral parlor and accidentally unleash a demon which, one-by-one, possesses them and does a bit of light murdering.

The film isn’t big on specifics. There are some vague murmurings about the place being haunted due to some crazy murder taking place there sometime in the past. They unleash the demon by doing a half-assed seance and looking into a mirror.

The kids are all paper thin in their development and they are almost all obnoxious. Especially Stooge (Hal Havins) who loudly complains all the time, calling all the girls, “Bitch.” 1980s horror icon Linea Quigley is probably the most interesting, but that might just be because I know her from other films.

But the special effects are good. I’m a sucker for practical horror effects and there are some good ones here. Quigley’s character has a scene where she rubs red lipstick over her chest in circles and then pushes it completely into her breast. Which has got to be the most low-budget 1980s horror special effect ever.

I have no idea if I watched this movie back when I was a kid. But I’ll definitely be watching it again. It is by no means a great movie, or even a good one. The plot is barely there, the characters are annoying, but it’s still quite entertaining in that dumb ’80s horror way.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: The Initiation (1984)

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The Initiation feels like two different slashers thrown together in a way that does disservice to them both. The first part is a bit of a cliche but it is fun to watch. The other part is also a cliche but it is not fun, a bit of a mess and a kind of a slog.

College girl Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga) is pledging a sorority and for Hell Night her and her fellow pledges have been tasked with breaking into her father’s enormous department store and stealing the security guard’s clothes.

She’s also been having this terrible recurring nightmare about a strange man being burned alive in her childhood home. Unrelated to her story (or is it? – it definitely is) a man with a burned face breaking out of an insane asylum and starts killing people.

She gets cozy with graduate assistant Peter (James Read) of the psychology department who specializes in dreams. This is the part that’s a slow. He’ll analyze her dream and investigate her past and realize the connection between the dreams and the murders. But as an audience we figure that stuff out pretty quickly so the whole mystery he’s trying to solve isn’t mysterious at all.

The fun part of the film is the group of girls going to the department store and being killed off one by one. The deaths aren’t all that inventive and I’m being generous with the word “fun” here, but it is more more enjoyable to watch than the psychology nonsense.

As a certified horror fan and slasher enthusiast this is very much in my wheelhouse. I love films where characters are trapped in an en closed, but large space and have to face off against something horrible. This certainly doesn’t do anything new with it, and half the plot is a bit of a chore, but there is enough there to satisfy your hard core horror nerds.

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.