Tag: friday night horror movie

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Exorcist (1973)

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I’m shocked I’ve never written about this movie before. I did review the sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic, for Cinema Sentries. I would have sworn I reviewed Exorcist III, but I can’t find it anywhere. The Exorcist is often considered to be the greatest horror movie of all time. I’m not quite in that category, but it is certainly a great horror movie, filled with some incredible set pieces, practical effects, and performances. It is truly a terrifying film. I’ve watched it several times, but it has been a good eight years or so since my last viewing. I always forget how slow it is for much of the movie. How it takes its time getting to the absolute terror. I remember it begins in Iraq, where an excavation digs up some old weird relic. But then in my mind, after a brief introduction of our main characters, things get dicey quick.

I remember the projectile vomiting, masturbating with a crucifix, and “The Power of Christ compels you!, and that incredible image of the priest standing before the house bathed in shadow and light,” all coming fairly quickly in the film.

But that isn’t how things play out. The film takes its time getting to the possession. We are introduced to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), a famous actress working on a film in Georgetown, and her young daughter Reagan (Linda Blair.) We spend a little time on the film set, and at home with the servants. Mother and daughter have a very nice rapport. Burstyn is wonderful in these scenes, very natural and warm toward her daughter. Blair is terrific too, just beaming, which makes her transition into something so evil even more frightening.

But we also spend a lot of time with Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a priest who is also a trained psychologist. He’s grown tired of his job, and is no longer sure of his calling. His mother is also very ill, and she’ll die before things really get going. There is also Lee J. Cobb as a cop investigating the death of one of the characters who seems to have been thrown out of Regan’s window. I wish they’d done more with him, actually.

There is an assuredness to director William Friedkin’s filmmaking in these scenes. He takes his time here, letting us get to know these characters, knowing we’ll wait for the horror to begin.

But he does tease us a little. Chris discovers a Ouija board and asks Reagan about it. She admits she’s been playing with it by herself and often talks to a spirit called Captain Howdy. We’ll see it move on its own. During a dinner party, Reagan will come downstairs in her nightgown, point to one of the guests, tell him he’s going to die, and then urinate on the carpet. One night Reagan’s bed starts shaking violently, and she takes on an angry, vulgar personality.

Chris takes her to a series of doctors, and they run a series of tests, but cannot find anything wrong with her. Again, Ellen Burkin is so good in this film. That playful, kind woman fades into a mother who is desperate and angry, filled with concern for her child. Psychiatrists are brought in, but they are no help. Eventually, someone recommends an exorcism. They don’t believe in that stuff, but if Regan thinks she is possessed, then maybe it will help.

Father Karras is brought in, and he brings Father Lankester Merrin (Max Von Sydow), an older priest who has previously done an exorcism. This is the last half hour or so. Things get intense.

By building things slowly, by letting us have numerous character moments, we really care about the actual exorcism and how it turns out. It is a wild final act to the movie. In the previous scenes, Friedkin’s camera is carefully placed. He creates some wonderful images and moves his camera fluidly. For the exorcism, things get chaotic and crazy.

One of the things I noticed this viewing is that all the scenes in that bedroom throughout the film, when Reagan is dealing with the possession, always cut before things are resolved. She’ll shake and curse, telekinetically throw things around the room, and blaspheme. But then it will do a fast cut to something else. Something more relaxed. We rarely see Reagan calmed down or anything resolved until the end. That keeps us on edge.

This is a very good movie. I especially love the practical effects. I have no idea how they did some of the things they put Reagan through (poor Linda Blair; this must have been a nightmare shoot for a 14-year-old girl). But they look amazing.

I do love this film, but never quite as much as I want to. Critically, I can appreciate the slow build, but ultimately I’m kind of ready for things to get going a bit before they really do. I think I’ve probably seen it too many times to truly be shocked by it anymore. But really, this is a terrific horror film.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Exit 8 (2025)

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My daughter has become something of a gamer. She’s not hardcore about it, but she enjoys playing. She also enjoys watching others play games on YouTube and the like. There is one YouTuber that she likes who plays a lot of horror games. I figured she might have watched him play Exit 8 and thought she might like this movie. She had not watched him play the game, but thought she’d maybe seen someone else play similar games. But anyway, she said she’d watch the movie with me. A rare treat.

The film plays out very much like a game. In fact, it begins with a first-person point of view, something I hoped would not last. Thankfully, it didn’t. An unnamed man (known as Lost Man in the film and played by Kazunari Ninomiya) stands, listening to music on a crowded subway. He hears a baby crying and watches as another man berates the mother for not keeping the child quiet. Lost Man wants to say something to this man, but instead puts his earbuds back in and ignores the situation.

Later, his girlfriend will call him on the phone, announcing that she is pregnant and wondering what he wants to do about it. He doesn’t know. This situation on the subway makes him think that perhaps he should not try to care for another human being.

As he exits the subway, he finds he is lost inside the labyrinth of underground corridors. Soon he is alone, and the corridors have turned into a game. A sign tells him that he must look for anomalies. If he finds one, he must turn back, but if there are none, then he can keep moving forward. He must make it to Exit 8 to get out of this place. If he makes a mistake, he will start over at Exit 0.

There are basically two corridors that he passes through. The first has several posters, some doors, and vents to look over; the second has a series of lockers and a few other things. He carefully takes note of everything so that he can determine if there is an anomaly.

In the first corridor, a man walks past him. This man does not speak or look at him and is unresponsive to Lost Man’s attempts to talk to him. This man is called Walking Man (Yamato Kochi). Later, we will follow Walking Man as he tries to escape this subway labyrinth. There will also be a young boy (naturally called The Boy and played by Naru Asanuma).

I’ve not played the game, but my assumption is that the anomalies are difficult to spot. Otherwise, it seems like the game would be too easy. I can see players staring at every bit of the wall looking for some slight difference in something. I might be wrong in that assumption. Certainly it isn’t that way in the movie. Though Lost Man looks closely at the posters and doors, etc., almost every time the anomaly is something easy to spot.

Once Walking Man turns and follows him. Another time, one of the doors opens and reveals, well, I won’t reveal what it reveals, but it certainly isn’t a way out. On another occasion, the lights go out, and creepy things happen. These aren’t difficult things to spot, but the characters pretty regularly fail the test. I guess it wouldn’t be much of a movie if they got out in ten minutes. I will say the atmosphere the film projects is pretty thrilling. And sometimes it is effectively creepy. This is a film best seen in a theater, or at least at home at night with all the lights off.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Faces of Death (2026)

Faces of Death (2026)

If you are a person of a certain age and a person of a certain disposition, then you likely have memories of the 1978 film Faces of Death. It became quite the rage in my high school. This would have been the late 1980s or early 1990s, nearly a decade after the film came out. I’m thinking we must have learned about it due to one of the many sequels, or maybe when they hit the VHS rental market. There was only one place anywhere near me that rented it – Mega Movies. They had bought out an old Burger King, so it had a huge amount of floor space, and they filled it with all sorts of crazy movies. My love of oddball cinema and glorious B-movies in part came from Mega Movies.

For those of you who aren’t of a certain age or disposition, Faces of Death was a purported documentary in which a mad pathologist obsessed with death shows us a whole lot of supposedly real images of death. There is man getting eaten by an alligator, a SWAT team shooting a gunman down, accidents, suicides, and a death by electric chair. In truth, only some of the scenes were real; most of them were fake. But we thought it was real. And shocking. You gotta remember this was way before viral videos were a thing. These days you can see all sorts of very real death on the internet, but back then this was it. It was utterly fascinating and horrifying.

I haven’t thought of those films in years, so when a new Faces of Death film was announced (totally fictional, just sort of based on the idea of those old films), I wasn’t particularly interested. I haven’t thought of those old films in years because I have no interest in that type of thing anymore. The real world is full of enough real horror that I don’t need to seek it out on the Internet. But then there was a certain amount of buzz, and I wanted to watch a horror film before me and the wife went to see The Odyssey in theaters, so this was it.

The story is an interesting one, but this did not work for me at all.

Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira) works for Kino, a TikTok-like company, as a content moderator. She sits in a cubicle all day, watching flagged videos and deciding whether they should be banned, allowed, or allowed with a content warning. Speed is the name of the game. She watches just a few seconds of the video and makes a determination. Interestingly, she allows a great deal more violent content than sexual. Pretty heavy violence gets an okay, but a woman giving instructions on how to put a condom on a cucumber gets banned.

One day she watches a strange video where a man surrounded by mannequins is decapitated. It looks real. But she decides it is a fake and allows it. The next day she sees a similar video where a man is electrocuted. Once again, he is surrounded by mannequins. This time she brings in her manager, but he brushes it off. It has to be a fake. And no, we can’t turn it into the cops because that might damage the company’s reputation.

When she sees a third video, she decides it is real. She presses her boss but is once again turned down. She shares the file on Reddit, where internet sleuths decide it probably is real. A little more searching and she realizes the videos are eerily similar to the ones on Faces of Death. A copycat is recreating those murders, but for real this time.

The film spends some time with the killer Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery). He uses his internet skills to find people who have said mean things to him on the Internet or who just annoy him in some way. In one pretty funny bit of satire, he grabs an influencer. We first see her at a public pool because that’s the one place you can film yourself in a bikini and not get flagged. While filming, some dude runs in front of the camera, and she yells at him for interrupting her “work.”

All of this is fine. That’s a pretty enjoyable concept for a movie, and it worked relatively well for me. There was nothing about it that I found to be particularly good, but nothing that I hated either. But then it takes a turn. Margot keeps digging. Eventually she finds the killer, and they have a showdown. Well, two showdowns. Both turn the film into very typical and very average modern horror nonsense. The killer puts his victims in cages, then stages the Faces of Death kills in a ridiculous manner. His motivation is all about likes and hits and influencer culture, and I hate that stuff. I’m probably just too old for it. A younger me may have dug that content, but fifty-year-old me has no taste for it. There is a moment near the end that I won’t spoil, but I just hated. It turned the film from something that was just ok to a great big “nope.”

The Friday Night Horror Movie: In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

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The great Sam Neill passed away this week, so I knew I wanted to pay tribute to him with tonight’s horror film. It was either this or the wonderfully weird Possession, and I decided to go with this as I’ve already written about most of John Carpenter’s films on this site. I may try to write about Possession later this weekend.

Carpenter had an insane run of great films between 1976 (Assault on Precinct 13) and 1988 (They Live). But then things drop off sharply. He reminds me of Dario Argento in the way he went from making absolutely incredible genre films one moment to making largely crap for the rest of his career. Carpenter’s drop wasn’t quite as horrid as Argento’s (though Argento has recently made some decent movies, whereas Carpenter hasn’t done anything in years). I’d argue that In the Mouth of Madness was the beginning of the end. You could probably argue that Memoirs of an Invisible Man – made two years before this one was the real beginning, but I haven’t seen it since it came out, so I’ll remain silent on its quality.

This isn’t a bad film by any means, and in fact, it has some wonderful moments, but you can just start to see things falling apart. It is actually quite reminiscent of Prince of Darkness (1987) in the sense of how preposterous the plot is, but Carpenter can make that film into something utterly wonderful, whereas he can’t quite convince me on this one.

John Trent (Sam Neill) is an insurance investigator. He’s good at his job. He’s hired to find Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), a horror writer who is a bit like a cross between Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, but way more popular. He’s so popular that riots are starting to occur at bookstores because his promised upcoming book has yet to be released. He has always been a bit of a recluse. Only his agent knows where he lives (and his agent has gone crazy and nearly killed Trent with an axe when he was learning about the job in a cafe.) Cane went missing weeks ago, just after he sent part of his manuscript to the publishing house (ran by Charlton Heston in a small role). After reading all of Cane’s books, Trent realizes that there is a secret message in their covers – a map that indicates where Hob’s End is located (the fictional town where his books are set). Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) is assigned to go with him.

The book cover map doesn’t give them exact directions, so they drive around all night hoping to find it. They run into some weirdness, but just as dawn breaks, they find the town. It is exactly as described in the books. It seems like a picture postcard small town. But it is strange. It seems almost deserted at first. Then they see some strange kids wandering around. They are greeted kindly by the inn’s elderly shopkeeper, but there is a strange painting in the lobby. One that keeps changing. Then there is the church. In the books, it is described as an absolute evil. So, naturally, they go check it out.

They find Sutter Cane there, and he’s gone completely mad. So have the townspeople. They say his books have always had a weird effect on their readers, but this latest one is turning them into something evil. It is starting to affect Styles.

The plot is pure pulp. It doesn’t always make sense. It doesn’t always have to. Sam Neil is having so much fun. Trent is the skeptic. He’s not read Cane’s books before this assignment. He thinks the town is a put-on. Something the publishers did to sell more books. But we know how things will wind up because the film begins with Trent being institutionalized. He marks up his cell, his clothes, and his face with crosses. There is some indication that the world outside is on fire.

Carpenter handles the material well, but not amazingly well. He’s playing in the Lovecraft sandbox and loving it. I’m not super familiar with Lovecraft, but apparently, there are a lot of references to his books. He uses a lot of practical effects, which I love, and his monsters are all snake-like and Cthulhu-like in appearance.

It is a good movie. I liked it quite a bit. But I always expect more from John Carpenter, and looking at the films that were to come from him, it is difficult not to think of this as a turning point. As the beginning of the end. And that’s a little hard to take.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)

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The title of this film makes no sense to me. When you think of a movie titled The Mummy, you are most likely thinking of the old Universal pictures with Boris Karloff or the Brendan Fraser films from the 1990s (or if you are a terrible person, you might be thinking of the abomination that starred Tom Cruise a while back.) But those films were all essentially connected. The later films were more or less remakes of the original. They took different slants on the story, but they are all still essentially explorers and archeologists coming across an Egyptian mummy coming to life.

This film is not that. This film is about a little American girl who gets possessed by an Egyptian demon. She is sort of mummy-like. She does get wrapped in strips of gauze or whatever, but it is nothing like those previous films. So, why call it The Mummy? I kind of get why they added Lee Cronin to the front ot the title, that helps differentiate it from the other Mummy films. I have to admit, when I first saw it, I thought, who the heck is Lee Cronin?

I don’t think he’s an incredibly well-known name. He’s probably best known for directing The Evil Dead Rise. That makes sense because this Mummy film has more in common with those new Evil Dead movies than any of the other Mummy films. Which brings me back to why they named it The Mummy in the first place. According to Wikipedia, Jason Blumhouse approached Lee Cronin with the idea of remaking The Mummy. He wasn’t too keen on it, but then sat down and wrote a much more horror-inflected film. They call that a re-imagining, but really, I’d still say this has little in common with the other films. My guess is that this is more of a marketing scheme than anything else. People have heard of The Mummy and everything, it seems, has to be connected to some earlier IP anymore.

None of this really matters, of course. What matters is whether this film is any good. My answer, sadly, is not really. It works best as a mystery and family drama, but when it moves into gore-filled horror (which is large chunks of the film, especially towards the end), I lost interest.

Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is an American TV journalist living in Cairo with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two children, Katie (Natalie Grace) and Sebastian (Shylo Molina). On the day he learns that he has been offered a job he very much wants in New York, Katie gets kidnapped. The police are no help. Despite evidence that she might have been groomed (someone was secretly giving her candy), they point the suspicion back at the family.

Fast forward eight years, and the family is living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with Larissa’s mother, Carmen Santiago (Verónica Falcón). Katie is still missing, but Larissa did have her baby, now a young girl, Maud (Billie Roy).

A plane crashes in Aswan, Egypt. Inside is a giant sarcophagus. Inside that, they find Katie wrapped in the stuff they wrap mummies in. She’s alive and has been taken to the hospital. Despite the fact that she is either unable or refuses to speak, has clear signs of abuse and self-harm, and has had to be sedated, the doctors clear her to fly home, and there the Cannons decide to just keep her at home. They refuse to take her to a local hospital or get her any sort of mental help, even when she begins acting even more erratically and terrifyingly.

Honestly, I had a hard time getting past this stupidity. The poor girl clearly needed help, and the family continually refused to give her any. They were all a bit in shock, and certainly the parents felt guilty for losing her that day. The mom is also a nurse, so she has some medical training, but that should have made her even more aware that Katie needed help.

But this is a horror movie, and we need our jump scares. When I could push that complaint away, I was able to enjoy parts of the film. The dad starts talking to one of the Cairo detectives (May Calamawy), and they slowly piece together what happened to Katie. This part of the film was the most interesting. I mean, the actual answers are horror movie nonsense, but it kept me tuned in.

But the film is more interested in gross-out violence. There are strong hints of The Exorcist and The Evil Dead throughout the film. Katie is possessed by evil. She talks in a satanic voice. She does crazy stuff. She possesses the other kids. There is vomiting and blood, and all sorts of goo. It is all done in a way that I found uninteresting. Maybe I’m just getting too old for that stuff, or maybe it just wasn’t done all that well. I dunno.

But hey, it was still better than that Tom Cruise film.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Fright Night, Part II (1988)

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Three years after the events of Fright Night, Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) is in therapy, trying desperately to forget how his neighbor turned out to be a vampire and that he teamed up with former actor and now TV host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) to destroy him. Or, if not forget, at least believe that the vampire wasn’t a vampire but rather a serial killer, and the trauma of those events caused him to imagine a supernatural evil.

Charley’s now in college, and he’s got a new girlfriend, Alex (Traci Lind.) One day after therapy, he spies several people entering his apartment complex carrying coffins. There is a similar scene in the first film. The plot of this sequel pretty much follows the same pattern as the first movie. Charley sees some spooky stuff and doesn’t believe it. Then he sees something he has to believe and tries to convince his friends. They don’t believe it until they are face to face with evil. Then they destroy the evil.

The script in this one isn’t as tight. It is a lot sillier and funnier, but the plot is a bit of a mess. There are four villains this time: two vampires, a werewolf, and a guy that eats bugs.  He might be a vampire too, or maybe something else. Mostly he eats bugs and looks menacing (he’s played by Brian Thompson, so he’s good at looking menacing).  The main vamp is Regine (Julie Carmen), and she uses her sexy vampire powers to seduce Charley. She’s ultimately going to turn him into a vamp so that she can torture him for all eternity for what he did to the vampire in the first film who was her brother.

Much like the first film, Charley mostly ignores his girlfriend while at the same time constantly begging her forgiveness. The werewolf takes advantage of this, swooping in on her when Charley has stood her up. He makes a few attempts at wooing her (and after each attempt, the eating guy tells him he was supposed to rip her throat out.)

The villains are more goofy than terrifying. There is one scene where they go bowling for some reason. It turns into a musical montage with them goofing around. One guy scoots one girl down the lanes; another one bowls with one ball in each hand. It ends with the owner’s head coming up the lane chute. It is more fun than I’m making it sound.


Eventually our heroes will have a showdown with the villains. It is pretty good, but not really all that memorable. The whole film is like that. I enjoyed myself, but it will probably be another 15 years before I have any desire to return to it.










The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Toxic Avenger (2025)

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When I was a teenager the USA network had a show called Up All Night that ran on Friday and Saturday evenings.  They shows movies all night long. It was hosted by Rhonda Shear (Friday nights) and Gilbert Gottfried (Saturday nights). Rhonda did the whole hot blonde bimbo thing and Gottfried, well he basically just did his usual schtick. The movies were usually dumb comedies or horror films; they were almost always of the b-variety. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized a great many of the films were produced by Troma Entertainment.

Troma specialized in low-budget, self-aware fare that always seem to wink at the audience, letting you know they knew their movies were stupid. I loved that stuff as a teenager, but now I find it insufferable. I like low-budget movies. I can even dig the so bad it’s good genre of films. But the thing for me about that is that the films have be aiming for something good. It needs to have attempted to be a good movie and failed spectacularly. That’s what makes it fun. When  a movie knowingly tries to be stupid in order to fall into the so bad its good category it just annoys me. Troma often falls into that category.

Admittedly, I say that as someone who hasn’t watched a Troma film in decades. I don’t really know what they’ve been doing since the 1990s. Maybe they got good. I doubt that, but maybe my memory of what they used to do has gotten washed.

Troma’s flagship film was The Toxic Avenger (1984). The main character became their mascot of sorts and there were numerous sequels and various other multi-media projects based around it. It is about a nerdy pipsqueek of a teenager who gets ruthlessly picked on. One day he falls into some toxic sludge becoming a mutant with super strength. He then wreaks ultra-violent vengeance upon his enemies. I watched the first one when I was a teenager and enjoyed it, but I haven’t seen the sequels.

When I heard they were doing a remake I was immediately on board. When it came out on Blu-ray I made it my pick of the week. As I note in that article I wouldn’t actually be interested in the film except that it was written and directed by Macon Blair. He’s an actor and director I really enjoy and I’m always excited to see one of his films.  Watching him play around in the Troma sandbox sounded interesting.

The film is pretty much what you would expect from that pairing. Blair is a big fan of the studio and is happy to dive into their mix of goopy violence and goofy comedy. But he’s also too good of a filmmaker to make this truly dumb. He’s also cool enough to get actors like Peter Dinklage, Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon to star in it.

Even so it had difficulties getting made. It bounced around for a while in pre-production with several different names attached (Arnold Scwarzenneger was even slated to star at some point) and then once it was made it took forever for it to find any sort of release.

Dinklage is Winston Gooze a down-on-his luck janitor who works for a giant, corrupt pharmaceutical company. It is the kid of place that sells nonsense drugs that are suppossed to heal what ails ya, but really just gives you cancer. They also dump all sorts of toxic sludge into the river.  He’s got terminal cancer and a step-son whose mother recently died of cancer herself.

His insurance won’t cover the medical costs of curing his cancer, and one day he goes to the CEO of the company, Bob Garbinger (a wonderfully unhinged Kevin Bacon) for help. He acts nice, says he’ll help, but then has him escorted out of the building, where he’s greeting by some thugs who throw him into toxic sludge.  Yada Yada, Winston is now the Toxic Avenger and he gets his revenge. 

Blair makes this extremely violent with some truly creative and blood-soaked deaths. But the vibe is goofy so it feels more wild and crazy than truly horrific. Elijah Wood plays Garbinger’s younger brother and he’s made up like Danny DeVito in that Tim Burton Batman movie. He’s having the time of his life.

The whole thing is super goofy. I couldn’t quite get into its wavelength, but again Blair is a good enough filmmaker, and there was a bigger budget with this thing than I expect Troma has ever had before, so it looks good. More or less.

I suspect if you love Troma than this will probably work for you (unless you feel it is a little too “good” for their kind of film). If you have no idea what Troma is, and don’t generally like goopy horror films (even if they are super goofy) then I’d stay way. For me, I’m glad I watched it, but I can’t say I’ll ever do it again.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Fright Night (1985)

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I talk a lot about growing up in the 1980s and how the slasher genre helped shape my cinematic aesthetics. I loved the Jasons and the Freddys. But the truth is I watched those films at home, edited on basic cable. It wasn’t until years later that I watched them as intended and in order. But there was another set of horror films that I watched unedited even back when I was a kid. These were, well, not family-friendly as such, but they were more palatable to the grown ups allowing us kids to watch them on videotape.

Films like The Monster Squad (1987), House (1985), and my favorite, Fright Night (1985), fall into the comedy horror genre. They are goofy and silly but still provided some good scares. I loved them as a kid. But once I grew up, I more or less forgot about them.

About fifteen years ago, not long after my daughter was born, I rewatched Fright Night and its sequel. I was a little disappointed in both. They didn’t live up to my nostalgia. But the first one has been popping up in my streaming feeds the last few weeks, and I decided to give it another revisit. I seem to be doing that a lot lately – revisiting film I loved decades ago. Trying to see if they still hold up, I guess.

I liked Fright Night quite a lot this go ’round. It is a film from the 1980s that loves classic horror, and even Hammer-era horror. It is fun, and funny, and makes great use of practical effects, and has some very decent thrills.

Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) loves old horror movies. He watches them on a local station hosted by Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), a Peter Cushing-esque old horror star. Whatever happened to those old shows where they show old movies with introductions by goofy, sexy, creepy, hosts?

We’re introduced to Charley as one of those old movies plays in his bedroom. He’s making out with his girlfriend Amy Peterson (Amanda Bearse), but when it cuts to Peter Vincent talking about one of his movies, she stops with the face sucking to tell Charley he should watch. She knows he’s a huge fan. But he’s got other things on his mind. Mainly losing his virginity. They fight over it a bit, but then she finally agrees, takes off her top, and crawls into bed. But then he notices something strange in the neighbor’s yard. Two men seem to be carrying a coffin inside.

Amy feels increasingly insecure and practically begs him to come to bed. But he’s too fascinated with what’s going on out there. She leaves in a huff, and it is only then that he seems to notice her again.

It is a fascinating way to start the film, as it tells us so much about these characters. He’s desperate to have sex with her. So much so that he doesn’t care about catching his favorite show. A show she is quite aware he loves (thus she cares about him, knowing what he likes) and uses it as an excuse to get his paws off of her for a bit. She becomes vulnerable, admitting that she’s just scared about losing her virginity and is willing to finally lose it with him. But then something real and weird and scary happens outside, and he suddenly forgets all about his girl.

That becomes something of a theme for this film. He’ll periodically declare his undying love to her, but then immediately become distracted by oncoming horror.

Anyway, over the next few days, he sees very attractive women entering the neighbor’s house but never leaving. One night he gets a binoculared view of the new owner, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), getting sexy with one of those ladies when suddenly he grows fangs. His new neighbor is a vampire!

He tries to convince Amy and his best friend Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) of this, but they aren’t having it. He tries to enlist Peter Vincent to help him destroy the vampire, but he thinks Charley’s crazy. Vincent’s having a bit of a hard time himself. He used to be an important actor. Or at least he was working. Making cult films. Now he’s hosting a cheesy late-night show for local television. And he’s just learned he’s been fired from that. Because these days “all they want to see are demented madmen running around in ski-masks, hacking up young virgins.”

Amy and Evil Ed convince Peter Vincent to lend them a hand. Not in destroying the vampires but in convincing Charley that he’s mistaken about the whole thing. They figure they can visit Mr. Dandridge, give him a few vampire tests, and all will be well.

But of course, Dandrige is a real vampire, and the tests backfire. Now the gang will have to destroy him for sure, before he turns them into bloodsuckers.

Tom Holland wrote and directed the film, and he does a nice job blending the scares with the laughs. It isn’t really scary (or all that funny if I’m being honest), but I found it quite entertaining. It has a very enjoyable vibe.

The practical effects are terrific. When the monsters die, they die slowly, transforming into goopy, bloody corpses. There is a werewolf transition that rivals the famous one in An American Werewolf in London (1981).

Roddy McDowell is great fun. He plays the pathos of this aging actor perfectly, giving him a wonderful vanity mixed with terror as he realizes that all those monsters he fought on the movie screen are real, and that he doesn’t have near the courage his characters did. Chris Sarandon is a bit miscast in my opinion. He’s clearly having fun, which is infectious, but he doesn’t have nearly the sex appeal or menace a great vampire has.

This isn’t great cinema, but it’s great fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Beyond the Door III (1989)

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Beyond the Door (1974) was an Italian horror film that basically rips off The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. The Italians were good at that. They’d take a popular American film and remake it without giving credit for the original story and make a few bucks. Rinse, repeat.

The Americans are good at it too. Beyond the Door was quite successful. So in 1977, when Mario Bava directed a supernatural film called Shock, when it came to American theaters, they renamed it Beyond the Door II. More than a decade later, the Italians made a completely unrelated (to either film) supernatural horror flick, and some crude individual dubbed it Beyond the Door III.

It is surprisingly good.

A group of American students travels to Yugoslavia to witness a sacred ritual that is only performed once every 100 years.  They are told it is a Passion Play, but also that it takes place from the time before Christ. Which should have probably been their first red flag.

They are met in Yugoslavia by Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson), who seems very nice.  We quickly learn he is not so nice when he receives a telegram for Beverly Putnic (Mary Kohnert), one of the students (and our main protagonist), informing them that her mother has died in a tragic accident, and he rips it up without telling her.

He puts them on a boat, and they travel to the middle of nowhere, where they get off, walk through the woods, and come upon a small village full of strange people in Eastern European peasant garb who just stare at them menacingly.

Without further ado, they put the kids to bed. Everybody but Beverly is asked to sleep in a single cabin, but Beverly is taken on her own to a special place. They give her a white nightgown and probably drug her, for once she’s asleep an old hag checks to ensure she’s a virgin (gross!).

In the morning they set fire to the other student’s cabin.  All but one escape with their lives. Beverly awakens from her slumber, and they take off running. All but two of them jump on a train rolling down the tracks.  One girl misses it, and a chivalrous dude jumps off to be with her (hurting his leg in the process.)

The train is full of more strange-looking characters who are utterly unhelpful. And then things get really weird. There is a supernatural force that causes all sorts of blood-soaked harm. This is a film that isn’t afraid to let its freaky gore flag fly. It has some terrific kills with some gooey practical effects.

The train is apparently unstoppable. Sometimes the magic flips the rail switch, and it will just run straight into the ground and keep on going (making great use of some very cool miniatures.) Interspersed with these scenes are some cuts to some presumably Yugoslavian government workers who seem to be monitoring the train’s movements.  They presumably speak in Slavic, definitely not English, and AMC+ did not provide English subtitles. I assume they were just freaking out about the runaway train, but who knows?

The cinematography by Adolfo Bartoli is surprisingly great.  This film looks amazing. There are lots of scenes at night and in the dark, but it is so well lit you can see everything beautifully. This is especially true during the numerous scenes lit by fire. Seriously, this film has no reason to look this good.

It has no reason to be this good. I mean, the plot is rather silly, and the acting isn’t great. But for a little low-budget sort-of (but not really) final part of a horror trilogy, Beyond the Door III is well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Whistle (2026)

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I get pretty spoilery in this post so if you don’t like those stop reading.

ted me. It begins with a scene that takes place before the real movie sets in, designed to give you a little fright before it has to do the boring work of developing characters and building a plot. 

There is a high school basketball game. Our presumed heroes are down by a few points, and there are only a few seconds left. Our presumed main character takes the ball and makes a basket, narrowing the margin to one more point. Then he sees something in the stands. Smoke billows, and there is a strange figure standing there.  He shakes it off and gets the ball again. He runs. He shoots. He…the basketball does that thing it always does in basketball movies where it bounces back and forth around the rim in slow motion before it goes in. While it is doing that, a smoky, charcoal creature appears before the boy.

He runs to the locker room, takes out some kind of relic, and begs for his life. The creature appears again, and the boy smashes the relic. The creature disappears. Hurrah. The rest of the team comes in, and our boy takes a shower. Then he’s burnt to a crisp by the monster.

Flash forward three months. Nobody cares about that dead kid. He isn’t our hero. Neither are any of his friends or family. He exists so we can so the film can start with a bang.  Oh, and I guess so our actual main character can easily find the relic.

She’s Chrys Willet (Dafne Keen), and she’s new to the school. She gets the dead boy’s locker, and even though it has been three months since he died, and presumably that was a tragic event for the school, no one has bothered to clean out his locker. She grabs the relic and puts it in her bag.

She makes a few friends who seem to be the only people at this school. Seriously, she goes to her first class, and the only students are like the five people she just met in the hallway. They aren’t really her friends either. She just met them, and two of them were mean to her. One stared at her like she knew who Chrys was, but she doesn’t like her. The other is her cousin. They will become friends in the next scene because the film needs them to be. It needs some characters it can kill off to keep things exciting.

The relic does look cool. It’s kept inside this black crystal-like box, but the real thing has a groovy skull on one side and a little whistle thing on the other. When you blow it, death comes knocking.  You see, when you are born, your death is also born. Death spends its, um, life looking for you. When it finds you at the slated time, it kills you.  But the whistle summons your death early. Each person’s death looks like them at the slated time of their death, and if death comes early, you get killed in the manner you were always going to die.

This makes little sense but does create some fun kills. So, let’s say you are supposed to get run over by a bus in twenty years. You blow the whistle, and death comes calling sooner than expected. When it finds you, your body gets mutilated just like it would if you were hit by that bus.

I’m probably saying too much. I’ll have to add a spoiler tag at the front. But honestly, this film is dumb.  I can’t really recommend it anyway.

Our heroes (and us in the audience) learn this lore through the typical creepy old lady character we always find in this type of movie who collects ancient artifacts and knows all about spooky spells.

This movie reminded me of The Craft. Partially because it is about a weird new girl coming to a school, bonding with some newfound, and fighting supernatural powers. But also because it really isn’t that great, but I fully suspect there’s a group of teenagers who will become extremely nostalgic about it in twenty years. 

At least The Craft took some time developing its characters and developed its story. This film just throws everything together without bothering to make something cohesive.

Nick Frost is in it, and that’s always a good thing.  He plays the teacher who is the first adult to get a look at the relic and figure something out about it. But then he exits the film way too early. So much so I’m surprised someone of his status agreed to the role. Sophie Nélisse is one of the friends who becomes the love interest. That seems to be her thing now.  But I’m here for it.

Whistle is a dumb movie. It doesn’t take the time it needs to tell a good story. Instead it just jumps from scene to scene, advancing the plot in very familiar ways. But it never made me care about these people and their story.  It tries very hard to be cool. Chrys is a goth and a lesbian, and she listens to bands like The Cure and Iron Maiden on vinyl. At one point the film has her lying on her back, the camera shooting her from above, her super cool records neatly laid out around her head like a halo. Like I say, this is a film a certain type of teen will identify with, and I look forward to their essays on how misunderstood it was when I’m a much older man.

But the thing is, I kind of had a good time. The actors are decent. The directing does what it needs to do. The kills are pretty fun, even if they do use too much CGI. I won’t watch this again, and I certainly won’t feel nostalgia over it in a couple of decades, but I don’t hate myself for watching it.