The Friday Night Horror Movie: Galaxy of Terror (1981)

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After the huge success of Alien (1979), a thousand ripoffs were churned out – some good, some not, some with big budgets, some with hardly a budget at all. Galaxy of Terror lies somewhere in between. It is decidedly low-budget, but Roger Corman’s production company New World Pictures knew how to stretch a dollar. It didn’t hurt that a young James Cameron was the production designer (more than a few fans have noticed similarities between this film and Cameron’s Aliens.

The film is better than it has any right to be and boasts an incredible cast of 1980s sort-of stars including Erin Moran (Joanie from Happy Days), a pre-Nightmare on Elm Street Robert Englund, Ray Walston, iconic exploitation maverick Sid Haig and Zalman King who is better known for directing erotica like Wild Orchid and Red Shoe Diaries.

The plot involves a group of people sent on a rescue mission to the planet Morganthus after receiving a distress call. They are sent by someone called the master who is so special his face is obscured by cosmic rays.

After crash landing on the planet (which does look a lot like the planet in Alien – good job James Cameron and crew) they encounter a series of monsters including a giant bug-looking thing that essentially rapes one of the women (bad job Roger Corman who insisted on the scene). But also Robert England fighting a clone of himself.

The plot is utter nonsense, especially the ending which indicates that everything they’ve encountered on that planet was a manifestation of their darkest fears – which upon scrutiny makes no sense whatsoever. The dialogue is bad. The acting is fine, these guys are all pros if not exactly amazing actors. What makes it worth watching is the effects work. The set designs really are quite fantastic for a low-budget picture, and there is lots of gruesome violence.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Happy Death Day (2017)

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Groundhog Day meets Scream is a good way to describe Happy Death Day. With maybe a touch of Heathers and Clueless. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it has a great lead performance by Jessica Rothe and I thought it was a lot of fun.

Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) wakes up from a night of partying with a hangover and no idea where she is. There is a boy who says his name is Carter (Israel Broussard) but she doesn’t know who he is. Since she’s in his dorm, sleeping in his bed and she’s not wearing any pants she figures she must have slept with him, but she doesn’t remember that either.

He is polite, if perhaps a bit embarrassed by this ordeal (we’ll find out later he did not sleep with her and he does become a romantic interest), but she wants nothing to do with him. She is, in a word, a bitch. A mean girl. She’s rude to everyone. We’ll discover later it is her birthday and the anniversary of her mother’s death and her meanness is in part a way for her to distance herself from her grief. But like her namesake, she needs to grow up.

Her walk of shame takes her across the campus commons. There she will cross paths with a number of memorable things – a weird goth dude stares at her, an eager woman tries to get her to sign a petition, a car alarm goes off, and some sprinklers spray a couple of picnickers. Etc. These are the types of things that will alert her to the fact that she’s reliving the same day over and over again.

The film nearly winks at the audience during this scene. We know what kind of film we’re getting into. It knows we know and welcomes us with a smile.

She’ll then meet our cast of characters who will become suspects in her murder. There’s the sorority Queen Bee, the put-upon roommate, the married doctor she’s sleeping with, etc. Then on her way to a party that evening, someone wearing a weird baby mask (the school’s mascot is apparently a baby!?) stabs her to death.

Bam. She wakes back up in Carter’s room, reliving the same day all over again. Getting murdered no matter what she does. Groundhog Day wasn’t the first film to put its character into a time loop, but it is probably the best and it is certainly the most popular. Many films have taken that premise and installed it into different genres. Slashers tend to be rather cookie-cutter in similarity so it makes perfect sense to apply the Groundhog Day scenario to it.

One of the interesting additions to the story is how her violent deaths begin taking a toll on her body. She’s stabbed numerous times and they begin to leave internal scars even as her life continues to recycle each day.

Happy Death Day relies more on the murder mystery angle than the horror. It isn’t particularly scary and the violence is decidedly PG-13. But it has fun with its premise and Jessica Rothe is wonderful. She nails the bitchiness, the pathos, and ultimately the warmth of the character.

There is a sequel and I sort-of wrote a little bit about it here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Prince of Darkness (1987)

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A priest dies. With him is a cylinder that contains a key and diary. Another priest (Donald Pleasence) is called in. he discovers the key and opens the door to a basement inside an old, abandoned church. Inside he finds a large cylinder filled with swirling liquid. The priest calls his friend Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong), a quantum physicist to investigate. He calls in a bunch of graduate students.

They discover the cylinder is ancient. The diary is coded, written in multiple languages, and full of equations. Decoded it says that the cylinder literally contains Satan and that Jesus Christ was an alien who came to Earth to warn humans about the cylinder. Jesus was killed by humans who thought he was insane.

The priest questions his faith. In some ways, Prince of Darkness is yet another inquiry into the age-old question of science versus faith. But told by horror maestro John Carpenter by way of B-movie genre cinema. It totally works for me.

Outside the church, a group of people (including a dude played by Alice Cooper) gather. They simply stand there and stare. Later one of the students will try to escape and he’ll be righteously killed by those people (and then somehow reanimated by bugs). Some of the canister goo will pour into another student’s mouth turning her into a Satan zombie. Or something. She’ll spit in other people’s mouths turning them into zombies as well.

Meanwhile, the priest, the professor, and the remaining students try to figure out how to keep the Satan goo from taking over the world.

As you can tell the plot of Prince of Darkness is pure schlock. It is goofy and weird, silly, and quite a bit dumb. But it looks great. Cinematographer Gary B. Kibbe lights the film to perfection, filling the screen with lots of beautiful candle-lit shots. And Carpenter is a master of this stuff.

It is a little disappointing that a film that promises Satan and the Apocalypse never gives us much more than goo in a jar and some silly zombies, but it doesn’t really matter. This is John Carpenter, genre master, having lots of fun. I did too.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Woman in Black (2012)

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My daughter is just starting to dip her toes into the genre of horror. I, of course, am doing my best to encourage this interest. She’s not actually much of a movie fan, preferring to watch various videos on YouTube and play games on her phone. So, I have to find my opportunities to suggest horror movies to her. This afternoon she seemed game to the idea and I spent a good bit of time trying to decide what movie I should show her.

She is relatively young so I didn’t want anything too gory, and I didn’t want the awkwardness of watching some sex scene or gratuitous nudity. I shied away from the old classics fearing she’d find them boring. I was leaning towards something from the 1990s, maybe Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer.

By the time I was ready to pick something she informed me that her friend Zoe had invited her over for a hang-out. Disappointed I looked around some old digital content I had on a hard drive and landed on this, The Woman In Black. Ultimately, I was hoping she’d get home from the friend’s house and we could watch something together. That’s what I’d hoped to write about.

Alas, the play date turned into a sleepover and here I am.

The Woman in Black is the second adaptation of the novel of the same name by Susan Hill. It is a gothic horror story complete with an old mansion filled with ghosts. It has some good jump scares and sets a nice eerie mood. It is the type of film that you wind up staring into the backgrounds because often they’ll have something move in the shadows. But its story failed to excite me in any way and I found myself just waiting for it to end.

Arthur Kipp (Daniel Radcliffe) is a young solicitor in Edwardian London. He is still mourning the loss of his wife who died while giving birth to their son, who is now three. He is tasked to go to a small village and handle the paperwork of an old woman who has just died, leaving a large estate to be taken care of.

Upon arrival, nearly everyone in the village warns him not to visit the old house and does their best to convince him to leave immediately. One man, Sam Daily (Ciaran Hinds) is friendly enough and does his best to assist the young lawyer.

The house, of course, is large and spooky, and located across a watery marsh. The only road leading to it gets washed out for hours every day. Despite all the warnings Arthur is eager to do his duty. Almost immediately he hears strange noises and sees strange things, including a mysterious woman, dressed all in black roaming the grounds.

He’ll go back and forth from the house to the village several times over several days. Mysterious things will happen at the house and then he’ll talk them over with Sam. He’ll learn of the town’s many mysteries and the strange goings on at the house.

It is all pretty standard stuff and none of it is all that interesting. I found myself mostly bored with the story. It looks good and it builds a nice mood. The jump scares mostly made me jump. But overall I kept wishing I was watching something else with my daughter.

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.