The Friday Night Horror Movie: Eden Lake (2008)

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

Eden Lake is one such film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quickly here they are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Midnight (2021)

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I have to admit that the Friday Night Horror Movie is often, in reality, the Friday Afternoon Horror Movie. I tend to knock off work a little early on Friday afternoons, about the time my wife is picking up our daughter from school. With no one home, I go upstairs and put on a horror movie. Often I’ll put on another one immediately after, and sometimes I’ll even watch a third one before the night is over.

But lately, I find myself watching something with my wife in the evening. I like her and she doesn’t like horror so we’ll catch a mystery or something silly. Thus the horror movie I watched in the daylight hours becomes the thing I write about.

This afternoon I watched Severance (2006) about a group of weapons salespeople who get attacked by some crazy killers whilst out on a work retreat. It was terrible and I didn’t feel like writing about another terrible movie so I let my wife watch something with the kid and I settled down into Midnight.

I’m glad I did because it is terrific. And it was nice to watch something truly terrifying in the dark recesses of the night.

Midnight takes a couple of pretty standard thriller tropes (serial killer, deaf woman being stalked) and doesn’t necessarily do anything original with them, and some of its plot choices are baffling, but its execution is excellent.

Kim Kyung-mi (Jin Ki-joo) is a deaf woman working as a sign language customer service agent. On her way home one evening she stumbles onto a murder scene. A woman has been attacked and left for dead in an alleyway. When the injured woman throws her shoe into the street Kim investigates. Her attacker, Do-shik (Wi Ha-joon) watches from his van and then attacks Kim with a knife. He’ll wind up chasing her through the streets of the city for the rest of the movie.

Along the way, she’ll pick up her also deaf mother (Gil Hae-yeon) and the alley woman’s brother Jong-tak (Park Hoon). Together and separately they will make one terrible decision after another. The movie regularly stretches credibility in order to keep the thrills rolling.

But it makes smart use of sound, often cutting out at important moments to indicate how our two female protagonists live in a world without sound. There is a wonderful moment in which Kim is trying to escape by opening a metal gate, unable to hear the grating sound it is making, alerting the killer to her whereabouts. Another finds the killer inside the house making all sorts of noise while Kim thinks she is safe.

Kim and her mother are not just victims in this film, they fight back using every available weapon in their arsenal. The film also delves a little into the casual misogyny and overt ableism they face on a regular basis.

Most of the movie takes place on the apparently deserted streets of the city, leaving our heroes to fight the killer on their own. But even when they enter the crowded downtown area their inability to speak leaves their pleas for help falling on deaf ears.

Many of the plot choices may leave some of you smirking in your seats, but if you are able to overlook them this is one thriller packed with chills.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Opera (1987) & Tenebrae (1982)

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Apologies for my delay in getting The Friday Night Horror Movie out last night. For once I actually went to a movie theater and watched not one, but two horror movies. By the time I got back, it was late and I was too exhausted to write anything.

The Circle Cinema in Tulsa is one of my favorite places to see a movie. It opened in 1928 as a neighborhood movie house and ran as such until the late 1970s. By that time Tulsa had changed so much that the neighborhood wasn’t in much need of a neighborhood cinema and it closed its doors. Soon after it was purchased by another company and became a porno house.

In 1983 Francis Ford Coppola used it in his film The Outsiders. Then it closed its doors for a long time until reopening as an arthouse theater in the early 2000s. It has stayed as such ever since.

It does show some mainstream films, most likely to pay the bills, but its focus is on smaller-budget, foreign, and arthouse movies. It also does a lot of fun special screenings and events. I got to see James Ellroy give a talk before a screening of LA Confidential. They show Silent Movies on Saturdays with a live organ accompaniment. I’ve now seen four Dario Argento films there on a late-night showing.

I’ve always been a bit of a homebody. Covid has only intensified that aspect of my personality. I’ve come to realize I don’t go out nearly as much as I used to. I mean I was never one for clubbing or parties, but we did like to go to the park once and a while, or to fun local events. But over the last few years, we’ve mostly just stayed home and watched movies.

I’ve decided that 2025 is a year for change. I’m going to get out more. Do more fun things. Maybe meet some people. So when I learned that the Circle Cinema was doing a Dario Argento double feature last night I knew I needed to go.

They made it a fun event by calling it Splatter University. Before the films, they displayed a bunch of trivia about Argento, Giallo, and other horror films. The organizer gave a little talk before each film and at the end, they gave us a goofy little diploma.

Though I nearly fell asleep in the second feature (it didn’t start until after 10) I had a great time. They do these types of events pretty regularly and I hope to make it a habit.

The films, of course, are great. Opera is Dario Argento’s last great film. He’s made some decent films since then, but none of come close to the heights he reached at his peak. It is about a young opera singer (Christina Marsillach) who gets a chance to star in a production of Verdi’s Macbeth when the original lead singer gets into a terrible accident.

She is a great success, but soon enough a madman starts killing everyone she knows, often tying her up and making her watch in the process. In one of Argento’s great uses of violence, the killer tapes needles to her eyes forcing her to watch for if she blinks she’ll cut herself.

Made five years earlier Tenebrae stars Anthony Franciosa as an American writer of violent mysteries visiting Rome on a book tour. Soon enough someone starts killing people as a sick tribute to his latest novel, also called Tenebrae. (You can read my full review here.)

Argento is known for films with complicated, sometimes ridiculous plots and these two are no exceptions. I’ve seen them both several times before but it was fun watching them with a crowd, laughing at some of the sillier moments. But what the director lacks in plot cohesiveness he more than makes up for in style. Seeing these films on the big screen was enormously satisfying.

I’d previously watched Argento’s Suspiria and Deep Red at the Circle Cinema and I hope they’ll continue showing his films in the years to come.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Nocturne (2020)

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I don’t know why I keep watching films made under the Blumhouse banner. They are all well made. They have good production values. They look great. They are often very well-acted and usually the direction is handled well. But there is something so slick, so generic about them that I find almost all of them instantly forgettable. They feel as if they are made by a committee in a factory instead of by a passionate creator with a specific point of view.

Nocturne is a perfect example of this. It has a decent story and it was obviously made by good craftsmen. But it feels like a retread of Black Swan with a bit of Whiplash thrown in but with no interesting ideas of its own.

Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) and Vivian Lowe (Madison Iseman) are twin sisters who have been training to become concert pianists from a very young age. Vivian is the prodigy having just been accepted to Julliard while Juliet did not get accepted, and as it was the only school she applied too will be taking a year off. They are both seniors at a prestigious music academy.

The film begins with another student, the best in her class committing suicide by jumping off a balcony. She was set to star in the senior showcase and now there is an empty spot. All seniors are welcome to apply.

Juliet accidentally discovers the dead girl’s theory notebook which is full of all kinds of mystical horror movie drawings. Naturally, she starts using it and naturally her musical skills improve dramatically.

The sisters don’t seem to like each other very much and their rivalry skyrockets now that they have the chance to star in the senior showcase.

All of this is a good setup for something interesting to happen. But it never does. I expected the notebook angle to go into supernatural occult territory. It seemed to think about doing exactly that, but then pulled back. Juliet keeps studying and playing the songs inside it. Her skills improve and her life begins mimicking the weird drawings inside. But she never takes it too far.

The sisters fight. One of them gets hurt. One of them cheats with the other one’s boyfriend, but again the film never really runs with these ideas. A film like this should take extremes. It doesn’t need to be sort of realistic.

It is a Blumhouse film so the production values are high. It looks good. I think Sydney Sweeney is a very fine actress, but there is nothing for her to really bite into here.

Two months from now I’ll be scrolling through Amazon and I’ll see this film pop up. I’ll have to look it up on Letterboxd to see if I’ve seen it before and I’ll be surprised by the answer.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: All the Colors of the Dark (1972)

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A while back I started a little feature I called Bring Out the Perverts: Giallo on the Criterion Channel. That streaming service featured 13 Italian genre films and that seemed like a fun thing to review. I like the idea of having a pre-selected set of films to watch and review. I thought I’d do a bunch of them.

When I say “a while back” I mean I started this feature last September. Four months have gone by and I still haven’t finished watching 13 films. I did well through October, but the Noirvember happened and I completely forgot about this idea.

This is the second to last one and hopefully, I’ll finish it out soon after that. I still like the idea, and I’ve got some things brewing in a similar vein for this coming year. So consider this a Friday Night Horror Movie and a Bring Out the Perverts.

All the Colors of the Dark is a mixture of classic Giallo with some early 1970s psychedelia with a touch of satanism thrown in for good measure.

Edwige Fenech stars as Jane Harrison a woman whose recent car accident caused her to miscarry and lose her baby. This has sent her spiraling into mental breakdown. She begins losing her grip on reality, unable to tell her dream world full of nightmarish images and a man with a knife out to kill her, and real life.

She’s seeing a psychiatrist, but her boyfriend Richard (George Hilton) is against it. But he’s mostly annoyed that every time they start to have sex she starts envisioning that dude with the knife and has a panic attack. We’ll skip the analysis about knives and sex, stabbings, and penetration for now.

She meets a friend who suggests attending a Black Mass. There she is, well I don’t want to say raped because that feels slightly too strong a word so let’s just say strongly persuaded to drink the blood of a sacrificed dog and then engage in a lot of sex. Afterward, she’s totally into sexing up her boyfriend again. I wouldn’t touch that analysis with a ten-foot pole.

That dude with the knife keeps showing up in odd places stalking her. Sometimes she envisions him attacking her but every time that seems to just be a hallucination. At another Black Mass, she might have been forced to kill her friend who introduced her to it. Or maybe that was just a dream too. The lines between reality and hallucination become quite blurred.

It all wraps up a little too neatly for my tastes with all the solutions coming fast and clean.

Fenech is quite good. She’s the Scream Queen of Gialli and while I’m a fan, I’d never call it a fantastic actress. But she does well as this damaged woman in distress.

Director Sergio Martino leans heavily into the psychedelia of the era. He does that thing that was common at this time where the images turn into a kaleidoscope. He uses a lot of quick cuts, and he’ll repeat images over and over. I find it all very dated and rather annoying.

When he’s not giving you a visual trip he does create some rather striking images.

I’ve never been a fan of this type of psychedelic cinema and I find it especially obnoxious in horror. Looking at my Letterboxd friend list most of them seem to really like this one. So your mileage may vary.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Last Matinee (2020)

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In an old movie theater in Uraguay, a group of horror movie archetypes watch a low-budget horror movie whilst a black-gloved killer slashes them in incredibly gory ways.

The Last Matinee takes its influences from such art-house films as Goodbye Dragon Inn and Cinema Paradisio and the stylish Gialli of guys like Dario Argento and Mario Bava.

It looks great. Director Maximiliano Contenti and cinematographer Benjamín Silva make great use of the cinema’s lighting. The movie screen glows on the audience’s faces, while an usher beams his flashlight across the room. In other spaces, neon signs and popcorn machines add ambient light. The camera moves fluidly across these interesting closed spaces.

The main set consists of the movie auditorium. It is an old theater with a huge seating space and a large balcony. It is the kind of theater I wish still existed instead of the generic multi-plexes we’ve had for decades. In addition to this is the projection room, a dirty old bathroom, and lots of long hallways. The film makes great use of its single-setting.

Once it gets going it is great fun with the killer getting in some gruesome kills with stylish gore. But boy does it ever take its time getting there. It is a good hour before anything happens. Until then we spend time developing the characters.

The characters are your basic slasher film stock characters. There is the horny couple, the little kid, the old man, the punk teens, and our nice final girl.

I appreciate that the film fleshes these characters out a bit. I’ve seen slashers where the characters were nothing but cannon, er knife fodder, and that gets boring. If we don’t care about the characters just a little bit then the film becomes nothing but an exercise in gore effects.

But here we spend a little too much time developing them only to watch them get slashed and stabbed before the credits roll. Those early scenes have style, but not much else. But once the killer lets loose in that last half hour it turns into something quite fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Girl in the Pool (2024)

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Tom (Freddie Prinze, Jr) lives in a nice house in the suburbs. He’s got a beautiful wife (Monica Potter) and a couple of teenage kids. On paper, he’s got it all together. So, why is he so unhappy? In an early scene, we’ll see him on the phone with a friend and Tom asks, “Am I a good person?” We’ll quickly learn the answer to that question.

No. No he is not a good person.

Tom is having an affair with a much younger woman (Gabrielle Haugh). On his birthday he slips off work a little early and she comes over for a little fun in the pool. But they have an argument over whether or not he’ll ever leave his wife, and what her husband would do if he found out about them. Before too long she finds herself dead and he finds himself hiding her body in a pool cubby.

Before he can do anything else a bunch of people come over for a surprise birthday party.

We see the events with the mistress in choppy flashbacks. The film is coy about exactly what happened to her and why. In the present Tom slowly goes mad having to deal with a myriad of party guests, his spiteful father-in-law (Kevin Pollak), and a wife who increasingly thinks something is up.

That’s a good plot and it could be either a truly entertaining thriller or a very dark satiric comedy, but unfortunately, it is neither. Mostly it is just bland.

The thing is Tom is kind of an asshole. One of the first things we know about him is that he’s cheating on his wife with a girl who is his daughter’s age. He doesn’t seem to know half the people invited to his own birthday party and the ones he does know he doesn’t seem to like (and most of those are bros he works with). He’s hapless and sad. He’s the kind of guy who keeps thinking he has a plan to solve all his problems, but he can’t actually come up with anything other than yell at everybody.

But he’s not the kind of asshole you can love either. This isn’t Walter White or Tony Soprano – horrible people who we, if not identify with at least we can love to watch.

Every character in this film is kind of awful if I’m being honest. His friends are obnoxious, and his father-in-law is actively hateful. Even his wife and kids come off as disinterested.

You can make a great film filled with terrible people – Goodfellas comes immediately to mind. But I just never cared about any of these people, especially Tom. I never cared who killed the girl, or why he was hiding the body. I didn’t care if he got caught. So there was no real tension or interest.

Freddie Prinze, Jr. is one of a slew of actors including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, Josh Hartnett, and Jennifer Love Hewitt who were huge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But unlike those other actors, I never liked Freddie Prinze, Jr. I never thought he was a good actor. But his low-key woodenness works for him here. The rest of the cast is fine as well, so I think it is the script and direction that just didn’t work for me.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Mr. Vampire (1985)

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My pneumonia is subsiding, but definitely not fully gone. I’d say I’m up about 80 percent on that front. But you may recall when I first started getting sick I complained about having done something to my hip. Well, that is back with a vengeance. I don’t know what I’ve done to it, but it hurt like crazy anytime I stand up and try to walk.

Getting is old is not fun, my friends.

I’m in no shape to write a long review tonight, but since I missed last week’s Friday Night Horror and haven’t written much since then I wanted to talk a little bit about this movie.

I actually started Smile 2 this evening. Got about halfway through then got hungry. When I had finished my meal, my daughter had snuck into my room to watch something of her own. My wife was downstairs and she doesn’t like horror movies so after a bit we landed on this, a rather silly and not very scary horror movie.

Mr. Vampire is the first in what you might call the Hopping Vampire genre of Hong Kong cinema (I previously reviewed a later film in the genre, Encouter of the Spooky Kind (1980). The hopping vampires are actually Jiangshi, which come from traditional Chinese folklore and are something like a mix between vampires and zombies. Or so says Wikipedia anyway.

This film follows a Taoist priest and his two inept assistants who battle a super strong vampire, a couple of other vampires that he’s recently turned and eventually a succubus type ghost.

As you might suspect from that description it is a very silly movie. There are lots of broad jokes, goofy physical humor, and some pretty good kung fu action. It is, perhaps, a little too silly for my particular senses, but ultimately it won me over in its sheer entertainment value.

My wife seemed to enjoy it too. Definitely recommended when you are looking for something different.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Smile (2022)

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Smile is a horror movie in the vein of The Ring (2002) or It Follows (2014) in that it creates a sustained mood and follows a heroine as she attempts to figure out a fairly complicated mythology of the supernatural thing that wants to kill her. It isn’t as good as either of those films and it has a few too many jump scares for my tastes, but it is still a good time at the movies.

Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a therapist at the emergency psychiatric ward of a hospital. She is overworked and always exhausted, but kind and generous with her time. One day Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) comes into the hospital. She says she recently witnessed her professor kill himself and ever since she has been terrorized by an entity that appears as different people smiling strangely at her. This entity has foretold her death. Then Laura gets her own creepy smile and slices her face open.

Rose then begins seeing strange visions of people smiling that same strange smile. She first enlists the help of her boyfriend (Jessie T. Usher) and her therapist (Robin Weigert) but neither of them truly believes what is happening to her. She is able to get her cop ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner) to assist her and they learn that she has become cursed by some evil entity that thrives on trauma. Each person with the curse kills themself in some horrible manner in front of a witness causing the curse to be passed onto them.

Rose has previously suffered her own trauma watching her mother succumb to mental illness as a child and being the one to find her dead body after she killed herself. It has become cliche these days for horror movies to be about trauma, but all too often those films don’t do the work. So, it is nice to see a film that understands trauma and how it lingers. And how other characters around you may not understand how your trauma affects you, even when they have well meaning intentions.

Like It Follows I found myself constantly studying the the background, the edges of the screen looking for someone with that smile. Knowing the entity could appear at any moment and look like anyone kept an edge-of-my-seat tension going throughout. I kind of wish there had been more of that. There weren’t enough moments where she’s seeing strangers smile.

In the same way, I wish they’d followed her just a little while longer researching The Smile. Rose and Joel figured out that it affected a few people then basically stop. They talk to one guy who survived it and get a sort-of answer but then do nothing about it. I’m pushing towards true spoiler territory here so I’ll just say the decisions it makes with these things didn’t always work for me. This is especially true of the very end which felt more like a setup for the inevitable series of sequels than a truly satisfying conclusion to this movie.

But that tension building really worked for me and there are several truly great jump scares. Sosie Bacon is terrific and it is always great to see Robin Weigert in anything. The direction from first-timer Parker Finn is mostly good but there were far too many crooked angle shots and that thing where a shot starts out upside down and then it slowly rights itself.

If you liked It Follows and The Ring then I’d definitely give this one a shot.