The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)

When I wrote about The Amityville Horror at the beginning of this month, I noted that every October I try to watch every film in some horror franchise. That wasn’t 100% true. I do try to complete an entire horror franchise, but I don’t usually watch all the films within the month. What I mean is, I try to watch all of the films I haven’t seen within a certain franchise. I don’t always watch the ones I’ve already seen.

I also don’t write about them all. With The Conjuring films, I decided to watch and review them all. Even though there are only four films in this series (well, there are technically nine films within the Conjuring universe, but I decided to just concentrate on the main films), I already understand why trying to review them all was a mistake. Like all horror franchises, there is a definite diminishing of returns with each sequel.

Last Rites purports to be the final film starring Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), and it definitely feels like it’s time to put them to bed.

In all of my reviews, I’ve talked about the real-life Warrens. I’ve called them charlatans. And they were. They made up stories about hauntings and possessions and presented them as truth. It is unclear if the families supposedly investigated by the Warrens were in on the scam or not. It seems likely that many of them truly thought they were being haunted, and the Warrens took advantage of that, wrote a book about it, and cashed the checks. But there were also allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse.

The Warrens were not good people. While watching the first movie in this series, you can kind of overlook that. There is a sort of tacit agreement that you are watching a movie. It isn’t real. It has ghosts, after all. It helps that it is a very good movie.

But each subsequent film works on beautifying the Warrens. It portrays them as loving, kind Christians out to help these poor people beset by demons out of the kindness of their hearts and at great personal peril. That makes the films more and more difficult to take. It is harder to separate who they really were and how they are portrayed on screen. Also, the filmmaking gets increasingly worse.

Last Rites begins with the Warrens’ first case. They are faced with, um, a haunted mirror. Yeah, these films deal in haunted objects; they make a big deal out of the Warrens’ museum of the occult. They made a whole film series out of a haunted doll. But at least that thing looks scary (the real Annabell looks like a Raggedy Anne doll, which is just hilarious). A mirror is, well, it’s just a mirror.

Anyway, the demon mirror forces a very pregnant Loraine into labor. Their baby comes out stillborn, but a little fervent prayer brings her to life. Flash forward a couple of decades, and the Warrens are taking a break from ghost busting due to Ed’s bad ticker. That daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), is all grown up and engaged to Tony (Ben Hardy).

Meanwhile, the Smurl family has somehow wound up with that demon mirror, and it’s causing all sorts of horror in their household. Naturally, the Warrens get drawn into the case. This time, they bring their daughter and her fiancé. That brings an extra layer of family into the mix.

James Wan directed the first two Conjuring films, and he has a kinetic energy that makes the scares truly terrifying and an adept ability to make the character stuff work. This film is directed by Michael Chaves, and he’s not nearly as good.

The script does him no favors. It relies far too heavily on the relationship between the Warrens and, as I’ve already stated, I can no longer separate what I know about the real family and this fictional one. The stuff with the Smurl family isn’t all that interesting or scary. A mirror just isn’t intrinsically frightening (although they did a pretty good job of making one scary in Oculus). There is also a really fake-looking ghost with an axe and an old lady ghost with some terrible makeup.

The film does a lot of that thing where a horror movie will set up a scene like it’s preparing you for a jump scare, and then it will be something mundane, only to really throw the scare at you a moment later. That sort of thing has become tedious on its best days, and here you get it far too many times.

With a runtime of 2 hours and 15 minutes, it is entirely too long. This is mostly due to this being the last film and them needing to wrap some things up for the Warrens. I was ready to turn the thing off way before then and say goodbye to the whole franchise.

The Friday NIght Horror Movie: I, Madman (1989)

I Madman (1989)

Virginia Clayton (Jenny Wright) is an aspiring actress who works at a used bookstore. She likes horror novels, and one night she scares herself while reading an obscure book by the deceased author Malcolm Brand. She calls her detective boyfriend, Richard (Clayton Rohner), over to comfort her and have a little sexy time. While the book did scare her, she liked it and attempts to find the only other book Brand wrote, I Madman. She has no luck finding it for herself, but one night it shows up on her doorstep.

The book is about a crazed man who decides the best way to express his passion for the woman he loves is to cut off his ears, nose, and lips. When she rejects him, he begins murdering people to get those body parts back. His first victim is an actress whom he stalks, murders, and cuts her hair off.

Back in reality, a woman in Virginia’s acting class has been brutally murdered; her hair was cut off. Virginia becomes obsessed with the book and believes the killer to be its author. He has come back to life and is enacting the murders he wrote about. She begins seeing him on the street. She thinks he believes she is the girl from the book that he was obsessed with.

Meanwhile, more folks are getting killed and facially mutilated just like in the book. When she witnesses one murder that happens across the street from her apartment, she calls the police. She tells her boyfriend everything. At first, they are excited to have a witness, but when she starts talking about characters jumping out of a book, they think she’s crazy. The film plays it close to the vest for a while as to whether or not she is crazy, or if this madman has come to life.

I’ve watched quite a few dumb horror movies lately. Movies that felt like the filmmakers were searching for a quick buck rather than any sort of artistic vision. Movies that give the audience some gore and boobs and call it a day. That might have caused me to rate this one a little higher than it perhaps deserves. I really appreciated that I, Madman was actually trying to make an interesting movie. It put in an effort.

I do, genuinely, think it is a good movie. Director Tibor Takács, fresh off making his cult classic The Gate, infuses the film with a wonderful sense of dread. We spend a lot of time in Virginia’s (really quite spacious) apartment, lit with nothing but lamps, giving it a cavernous feel full of shadows. He blends fiction with reality, creating an eerie dreamscape. Jenny Wright is quite good as Virginia, giving her an innocent quality that makes her feel quite vulnerable.

It isn’t a perfect film. The ending is a little silly, and Takács falls back on some of the special effects he used in The Gate. But I came to this knowing absolutely nothing about it, and I came away more than pleasantly surprised.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Tingler (1959)

William Castle was one of the great B-movie showmen. His movies often came with gimmicks. For The Tingler, he set up certain seats with a vibrating device that was set to go off at certain times in the movie, giving the audience a real jolt.

The movie itself is goofy and wild and wonderfully fun.

Dr. Warren Chapin (Vincent Price, because of course he’s played by Vincent Price) is a pathologist who has become obsessed with fear. He’s been autopsying the corpses of folks executed by the state, and he believes that the tingling in your spine when you are afraid is caused by some kind of creature – a parasite living in your spine. He calls this thing the tingler.

Chapin believes that the only way to stop this parasite from paralyzing and even killing you from fear is to scream.

One day he meets Ollie (Philip Coolidge), a nice man who runs a silent movie house with his deaf and mute wife Martha (Judith Evelyn). Chapin is fascinated by Martha, for she cannot scream, and thus she cannot tame her tingler.

Meanwhile, Chapin has a wife named Isabelle (Patricia Cutts). Theres is an unhappy marriage, to put it mildly. She openly cheats on him. She has dates every night. She brings men home when she thinks he is working, and makes out with them in the driveway when she thinks he’s home.

But she’s not really portrayed as a homewrecker or shrew. She’s just tired of being alone. He is obsessed with his work. He never wants to go out. He doesn’t like socializing. He falls asleep at the opera. When her sister falls in love with Chapin’s assistant, she refuses to let them marry. Her reasons are that she doesn’t want her to have the same fate with a husband who is never around.

None of this is all that interesting. In some ways, it seems like just something to wrap around the whole tingler concept. The story needed some padding. But it is also kind of thematically interesting. We’ve seen lots of movies where the husband is too busy with his job to pay attention to his wife, but this is so open about it. Her infidelities are spelled out, which seems strange in a movie from 1959.

Chapin never seems all that bothered by it. He truly is too obsessed with his work to care about anything else. At one point, he does seem to break. Not over her cheating on him, but over her not wanting the sister to get married. He threatens Isabelle and even brandishes a weapon, but once again all of this is actually in service to his work. He wants to see what the fear of being murdered will do to her.

His obsessions seem to be taking him over the edge. He seems more willing to do anything to actually discover the tingler. At one point, he drops some acid to fool his body into absolute terror so he can measure the feelings for himself.

He visits Matha again, ostensibly out of concern for her health. You see she fainted the first time he visited her because he cut his finger and the sight of blood terrifies her. Or rather, she didn’t faint, but because she cannot scream and thus exorcise her tingler, her body just completely shut down. He wonders that there could be such an extreme circumstance that she would literally be frightened to death.

Then that’s exactly what happens. On his second visit, he gives her some sort of shot to calm her nerves. Then he leaves. But sometime later, someone wearing a creepy mask comes in and threatens her with a knife. Doors slam shut. A bathtub is filled with blood (and Castle makes great use of color in this scene – the movie is in black and white, but the blood is bright red)

She literally dies of fright.

Not knowing what to do, her husband takes the corpse to Chapin, who begins an autopsy of her and discovers the tingler! It is a magnificent, creepy-crawly rubber thing pulled around by strings and wires.

Eventually it will escape and find its way into Ollie’s silent theater. And here we get back to William Castle being a great showman. At one point, the screen fades to black, and Vincent Price tells the audience about the monster and that they must scream to kill it. No doubt the real audience was feeling those vibrations at the time.

Castle actually introduces the film, warning the audience that we might feel a tingling sensation while watching the movie. He gives us permission to scream with abandon.

This isn’t by any means a great film, but it is a wonderful B-movie.

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

There is nothing quite like a Jean Rollin film. He’s famous for making dream-like erotic vampire movies with loads of nudity and a fascination with women wearing nothing but sheer fabric draped over their naked bodies. It comes as no surprise that he finally made a movie and called it The Nude Vampire.

This one plays out very much like a dream, with scenes that have very little logic to them. Or connective tissue. It begins with three men in masks taking blood from a naked woman in a hood. Another woman (wearing a sheer fabric, of course) is walking down some dark alleyways, pursued by several men in dark clothes and wearing animal masks. A man named Pierre (Olivier Rollin) tries to help her, but before they can escape, the animal-masked men shoot her dead.

Pierre makes it out alive and follows the masked men to a gated building. He sees some other people, dressed in fancy dress, go in. But a man at the gate stops him, for he has no invitation.

The next day his father chastises him for being there for he’s been warned to stay out of his business. But what are they doing in there? And how is his father involved? The next night, he attacks a man just before he gets to the gate, steals his invitation, and crashes the party. Inside, he’s given what is basically a bag to put over his head. The other partygoers are given the same. Then a woman’s picture flashes on a television. That same woman is given a gun, and she shoots herself in the head.

Then the woman from the night before shows up. But how can she still be alive? She drinks the dead woman’s blood. Then another face shows up on the screen. It is Pierre’s. He’s given the gun and is asked to kill himself. Instead, he shoots the guy who gave him the gun and makes a run for it.

I’m explaining all of this clearly, but it is far from clear in the film. Everything is a little hazy, clouded by shadows and fog. The film eventually explains a few things – Pierre’s father is involved in some shadowy experiments with the girl who didn’t die. Apparently, she can’t die. Her wounds heal. But she also drinks blood and cannot stand the sunlight. Maybe she’s a vampire, or maybe she has some kind of mutant genes. They want to find out. They want to find a way to live forever.

At the same time, there is a rebellion going on. Some of the scientists’ workers want to help the girl escape. Others are planning to break in and kidnap her. All of the rebels seem to think Pierre is one of them.

Rollin gives everything a psychedelic dream quality. It is both very well made and cheap-looking. He somehow manages to blend the arthouse with the grindhouse. He’s created something beautiful and ethereal with gratuitous nudity and blood drinking.

It is a wild, trippy experience.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Amityville Horror (1979)

For the last several years, I’ve tried to watch every film in a horror franchise during the month of October. I’ve seen the Friday the 13th films and all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, plus Halloween and Scream and their respective sequels. It has been a fun endeavor. Everyone knows that horror sequels can take a pretty steep decline in quality the further you get into them. For a long time, I tended to avoid them as I didn’t want to taint the originals with terrible sequels. But since I’ve become a bigger horror hound, I like being able to say I’ve watched an entire franchise.

And it is true, oftentimes the sequels are dreadful. But sometimes they can be quite good. Or at least they can take things into interesting new dimensions.

This year I’ve decided I want to tackle The Conjuring universe. Well, I’m not sure I’m going to watch all of the films, as there are a lot of them, depending on how deep you want to go. This is where I definitely say I won’t be reviewing all the films in this franchise.

The Conjuring films follow Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), real-life demonologists who studied the supernatural. There are currently four Conjuring films, but it has also spawned a couple of spin-offs. Three of them follow a possessed doll, and two involve some kind of evil nun.

The Warrens also visited the house in Amityville that contained so many horrors. Amityville Horror spawned two official sequels (which I reviewed here) and a remake, but because you can’t copyright a town’s name, there have been loads of unofficial sequels. I definitely won’t be reviewing all of them.

I’m also not sure if I’ll watch all the Annabelle and Nun movies. I’ll probably dip my toe into them, but if the first ones are bad, I doubt I’ll watch the sequels. But I will definitely watch The Conjuring movies and write about them.

To start this series off, I thought it would be fun to go back and watch the original Amityville Horror. Without it, there would be no Conjuring films.

I’ve seen Amityville Horror a few times now (and I even reviewed it here). It is not a good movie. The pacing is weird. There aren’t enough scares. It never builds any real sense of dread, and in the end there just isn’t any boogeyman or villain.

But there is something about it that makes me keep returning to it. Every couple of years I’ll get a hankering to watch it again, despite me knowing it isn’t as good as I want it to be. I think I want to like it, and after a few years I forgot how not good it is. But I do remember James Brolin’s big hair and awesome beard, and how amazing Margot Kidder looks in it. So I watch it and then go “oh yea, this film is bad.” Give me a couple more years, and I’ll probably watch it again.

One thing I always forget is that Ed and Lorraine do not make an appearance in this film. I always expect them to show up at the end, but they never do. I don’t believe they appear in the book this film is based on. My understanding is that they did show up at the house for some kind of TV special after the book became a hit. So, I guess this film really shouldn’t be included in The Conjuring universe, but as I say, there would be no Conjuring films without this one.

I pretty much stand by my original review, so I don’t think there is any need to rehash those thoughts. I was thinking about the screenplay as I watched it this time, and it is a bit of a mess. My guess is that it follows the book pretty well and, in a supposed non-fictional account, the book is probably pretty scary (at least if you buy into any of this stuff. I should probably note that this is all nonsense. The Warrens were charlatans. They made up most of their stories out of whole cloth and likely fed into the delusions of many others.) But reading a book about a haunting can sound real. Watching a movie like this borders on the ridiculous.

Because unlike something like The Exorcist or Poltergeist, there doesn’t seem to be any real villain in this film. A couple of chairs move on their own, a girl gets locked inside a closet, a priest gets attacked by a bunch of flies, etc. Even at its most hysterical, all we hear is a voice, and a door gets blown off its hinges. We never see the entity or get any kind of explanation for it. The priest (an overacting Rod Steiger) thinks it’s the devil, but his story never really gets going.)

The film literally ends with them just driving away. Nothing really tries to stop them. And that’s it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

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This has been a long week. Friday was a long, exhausting day. By the end of it, I had no energy and no brain power for much of anything. I sat down last night and watched Mad Love, a 1935 film starring Peter Lorre as a mad doctor who operates on a famous pianist’s hands and replaces them with the hands of a knife-throwing killer. It’s a good movie, and Lorre is wonderful in it.

I had intended to make that my Friday Night Horror movie. It was a pretty straightforward film, and I figured it would be easy to write about. Then I watched Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. That is not a straightforward movie, and it will be difficult to write about. But I really wanted to write about it. I found it to be a fascinating watch.

I could have still made Mad Love my Friday Night Horror film and then written about this one later on. But I’ve gotten very lax about writing about movies on this site, and I was afraid that if I put it off, I’d never get around to it. But the way my brain works is that I feel this real need to write my Friday Night Horror articles every single week. If I don’t, I feel actual guilt.

But I was way too exhausted to put anything together about this movie last night. So, I could have written about Mad Love, but that would have completed the Friday Night Horror task, and I would have never gotten around to writing about Camp Miasma. Instead, I didn’t write anything last night, and now I still feel obligated to write a Friday Night Horror movie. So here we are, Saturday afternoon, completing the article.

Truth be told, I still don’t think I’ll be able to write all that I want to about this film, but I’ll try.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is this wonderful homage to 1980s slasher films viewed through the lens of pop culture-obsessed, weirdly repressed Millennial eyes.

Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is a young, intellectual, somewhat pretentious filmmaker who is in the process of rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise. This is a Friday the 13th-esque slasher series that started in the 1980s and spawned numerous sequels before finally rendering itself irrelevant.

She is someone who says things like, “My work explores the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity,” and whose earlier film basically remade Psycho but from the point of view of the shower curtain. She’s also someone who, while watching the original Camp Miasma, sees a shot using a split diopter and joyfully says out loud, “split diopter.”

Which is to say, this is a film about and made for film nerds. People who grew up watching slasher flicks, put their Letterboxd details in their social media profiles, and run blogs dedicated to obscure films. Which is to say, this is a movie made for me.

For inspiration, Kris reaches out to Billy Pressley (Gillian Anderson), the final girl of the first Camp Misma film, who became something of a recluse after that film became a success and who now lives in the abandoned summer camp that the original film was shot in.

Anderson and Einbinder are incredible in this movie. Anderson turns Billy into this sweet, weird stoner who sounds like a horny Dolly Parton. Einbinder makes Kris into a nerdy bundle of nerves who has substituted cinema for real life.

All of their scenes together, I just loved. I didn’t so much love scenes in which she’s video chatting with her girlfriend or her agent or the movie studio people. There is some funny, satirical stuff in those scenes, but through it all, I just wanted to get back to the central relationship between Billy and Kris.

There are a ton of references to old slasher films throughout this, and even direct references to Sunset Boulevard, and probably a thousand things I missed. The opening credit sequence shows us paraphernalia from all the Camp Miasma films, which make great references to the Friday the 13th films and Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and so much more. I loved that stuff.

There are loads of flashbacks to the original Camp Miasma movie and even long sequences where Billy and Kris watch it together. Again, many of those scenes are throwbacks to real movies from the 1980s. There is one long shot, set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December,” that follows Camp Miasma’s killer – called Little Death, who wears a box mask that looks like a ceiling vent – as he kills half a dozen teens with a spear. The scene looks nothing like anything ever seen in an ’80s slasher; the kills spill CGI blood like a geyser, and “A Long December” came out in 1996.

All of those things were definite choices by director Jane Schoenbrun. I don’t see them as mistakes or some kind of budgetary decision. I think they meant it to come out the way it appears on the screen. Reading other reviews, a lot of folks seem to love that scene. It really took me out of the film. So much of the other scenes we see from the Camp Miasma films look and feel like a real 1980s slasher, so I was really thrown by the intentional decision to make that scene so not like the others.

In a similar way, Schoenbrum gives a very artificial feel to the sets. Many of the outdoor scenes have these glossy, classic movie-looking backdrops. It is a very intentional look and decision by Schoenbrum. This time I wasn’t thrown off and rather loved it, but I still am not smart enough to understand exactly what he was trying to say with them.

It has a lot to say about living inside your own head. Kris talks to Billy about how she has difficulty enjoying sex because she can’t allow herself to just live in that moment. To have an orgasm, she has to leave her own body somehow. The film plays with these ideas in some really fascinating ways. Again, I’m not smart enough to understand all of it. But I will say the villain’s name – little death (or le petite mort in French) is slang for orgasm in France.

It isn’t a perfect film. I’m perhaps a little too old to understand some of what the film is doing. And I grew up in spaces that were very far removed from the queer experience, something this film is very much delving into. But it is a very good film. One I like more the more I think about it. I’m very much looking forward to watching it again. I will very soon be watching Schoenbrun’s other films.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ghostwatch (1992)

Ghostwatch

On Halloween night 1992, the BBC aired Ghostwatch, a scripted television movie that had been shot a few months earlier. It purported to be a live event – an investigation into a paranormal occurrence at a house in London. They did an amazing job at it.

They hired Michael Parkinson, a real-life TV presenter and journalist, to host the show. He sits in the studio with Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), who is a true believer in the paranormal. Also in the studio is a phone bank where they take phone calls from folk who have also experienced strange activity in their lives. This is something real news programs did at the time on the BBC. They say the real phone number was inundated with calls from actual viewers. You might call this the English version of the War of the Worlds radio program Orson Welles did many years prior.

On location is Sarah Greene, also a real television presenter at the time. Her crew is portrayed by real BBC crew members. The house is owned by Pamela Early (Brid Brennan), who lives there with her two daughters, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kim (Cherise Wesson).

They get all the details right. I remember watching similar shows when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s. There were lots of pseudo-documentaries on during the Satanic Panic, and folks like Geraldo Rivera were always doing paranormal specials. It feels very real.

Parkinson is perfect for this type of thing. He sits and talks to Dr. Pascoe for a bit, then he’ll throw it to the phone or the location shoot. It all feels like a live shoot, as if he’s working off the cuff just a bit. Sarah gives her part a nervous energy, like someone who doesn’t really believe this stuff, but is still just a little bit scared at first.

The film starts off a bit slow. There is no indication that any of it should be taken seriously (the ghost stuff, I mean; the movie is deeply serious in its setup). But then weird things start to happen, but slowly. Some viewers call in saying they saw a shadowy figure in the girl’s bedroom. In the studio, they play the clip again. Something is visible for just a second. It looks like a man standing by a curtain. But the hosts say they see nothing. They look at it again, and the figure we saw is gone.

There are several moments in the house where we see flashes of something or someone. Stranger things happen. Loud noises occur. Tensions build. And build some more. I know this thing is fake, but it still got me. It took me a little while to get into its groove. Because they got the production values so perfect for an early 1990s TV show, I was taken back to my youth. This is exactly the sort of thing I would have watched as a teenager, for real. But it’s now the sort of thing I’d scoff at. But once it got going and I fell into its lure, I absolutely loved it.

What a unique, incredible little film.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Lust of the Vampire (1957)

Lust of the Vampire

During Mussolini’s reign, the government tightly controlled the Italian film industry. Only films deemed appropriate were allowed to be made. After the war ended, the industry grew exponentially, so by the mid-1950s, they were starting to make films that might appeal to an international audience. In 1956, director Riccardo Freda decided it was time to make a horror film. This would be Italy’s first horror film since the silent era. He made I Vampiri (or The Devil’s Commandment and Lust of the Vampire as it was called overseas) on the cheap with a shooting schedule of just two weeks. He hired his friend Mario Bava as cinematographer and special effects man. Two days before the shoot was scheduled to end, something happened, and Freda dropped out. Bava stepped in and completed the film, making substantial changes to the script.

This makes Lust of the Vampire an important film in the history of Italian cinema. I wish I could say it made it a great film, but the story is lacking. It does, however, look amazing. You can see Bava’s fingerprints all over it.

In Paris, beautiful women keep turning up dead with their blood completely drained out. The local press dubs the killer a vampire.

Sometimes we follow a reporter trying to find the vampire. Sometimes we follow Dr. Julien du Grand (Antoine Balpêtré), a scientist experimenting on corpses to find the secret to eternal life. And then there is Giselle du Grand (Gianna Maria Canale). She lives in a castle and is loosely based on Elizabeth Bathory, the real-life Hungarian noblewoman and accused serial killer who, they say, used to bathe in the blood of virgins. Our Giselle doesn’t do any bathing, but she does drink the blood of her victims, which keeps her young and beautiful.

Truthfully, it has been a long, weird week, and I was very tired while watching this. I watched it in my bedroom, lying on my bed. I nearly fell asleep. As such, I had trouble following the plot. But from the reviews I’ve read, everyone has trouble following the plot. It isn’t a well-written story.

But it looks amazing. Mario Bava filmed it in black and white, and he was a master at playing with light and shadow. They say they used only existing sets, but they found some good ones. Giselle’s castle is fantastic-looking. Bava gives it a wonderful atmospheric and gothic feel. They do some great effects with Giselle. They applied makeup in different colors and then applied different filters for different moments. This would reveal (or conceal) different makeup effects, causing her to age and become more grotesque.

It is very much worth watching, especially if you are a Bava fan (and why wouldn’t you be?)

The Friday Night Horror Movie: One Cut of the Dead (2017)

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I don’t know how to talk about this movie without spoiling a major plot conceit. So, if you like to go into movies completely blank, I’d skip this review. I will say that I liked it, and if you do go into it without knowing anything, make it past the 30-minute mark before giving up.

And now, on to the review.

One Cut of the Dead is like a horror version of Noises Off! It begins like a micro-budget zombie movie. Or rather, it is a behind-the-scenes take on a group of people making a micro-budget zombie movie that is beset by actual zombies.

As the title of the film suggests, it is shot in a single take. They use a handheld camera with natural lighting. There are some clever moments and a few funny bits, but I spent the first half hour wondering why so many people rated this film so highly. I can enjoy a low-budget horror film, but this felt amateurish in parts.

The camera work was shaky, the acting not great, and numerous moments felt like the filmmakers didn’t know what they were doing. Like they hadn’t rehearsed well enough, or that something had gone wrong, but because they had this single-take conceit, they couldn’t do anything about it. I was mentally writing this review arguing why the single-take idea was a bad one.

But then, right around the half-hour mark, our hero defeats the zombies. There is a triumphant crane shot and actual credits roll. A title pops up telling us we are headed back in time a few months.

We meet the cast and crew of the film we just watched. The fearless director Takayuki Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu) is approached by some TV producers launching a new zombie channel to make a one-take zombie film. We get to know everybody a little bit and watch them in rehearsals, etc.

This section lasts about another thirty minutes. Then we watch them make the film we just saw. We get to see all the behind-the-scenes action on how they made this one-take horror film. But we also see why that film was not very good. All kinds of crazy stuff happens, causing everybody to rush around trying to fix it.

This stuff is excellent. It really ties that first act together and makes it worth watching. Those first thirty minutes are tough to get through. I expect more than a few people have bailed before that change is made. So, you do need to stick with it, but if you do you’ll be heavily rewarded.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Incubus (1981)

The Incubus

Remember when Facebook used to be enjoyable? You’d log in, and your feed would be nothing but what your friends had posted in real time and in chronological order. These days, it’s nothing but ads, viral posts from people you don’t know, and stuff from groups you don’t belong to. Every once in a while you’ll see something from an actual friend, but it’s usually a post from two weeks ago.

I hate it, but yeah, I have to admit I still log in. I look at Facebook on my phone when I’m at the doctor’s office, or waiting on my wife, or just bored before bed. I’ve started following lots of different groups that spark even the smallest amount of my interest. I figure the more stuff I follow, the more likely I am to get at least some of it in my feed. That way, it is at least something I’m interested in instead of something I’m not.

It has mostly worked. My feed is now filled with movies and music posts. I still don’t see my friends much, but at least I’m not throwing my phone across the room like before. A lot of my movie groups just post stills from different films. Today I saw some stills from this film, something I’d never heard of before.

But it looked interesting. Well, it looked like a cheesy early 1980s horror film, but there was some nice blocking in those stills and good lighting. But mostly I was interested in it because it starred John Cassavetes. He, of course, was a titan of independent cinema in the 1970s. He directed award-winning films that are beloved by critics and cinephiles. He starred in movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Dirty Dozen, and The Killers. So, what was he doing in this thing?

I don’t really know the answer to that question. My guess is he needed the money. He often financed his own films, so presumably he used the paycheck from this film to make something he was really interested in.

Wikipedia notes that it was financed through some sort of Canadian tax shelter, so the whole endeavor seems to have been about money. They did hire real filmmakers, though. Besides Cassavetes, you have John Ireland and lots of other working actors, and it was directed by John Hough, who made films like Twins of Evil and Escape From Witch Mountain.

It was based on a book and had a complete screenplay by Sandor Stern, but they say Cassavetes rewrote something like 80 percent of it, causing Stern to remove his name from the picture. You can feel Cassavetes’ hand in the script. You can see where he was trying to make it a more human picture, trying to give his character some real depth. But you can also see where the final cut was out of his hands, and the director and likely the producers/money men pushed it into more provocative territory.

As such, the script feels very truncated, and there are numerous dropped threads. It never quite decides whether it wants to be a mystery, a supernatural thriller, or a slasher. Still, I quite liked it.

It begins like the low-budget horror that it is, with a young woman in a bikini bathing by a quarry pond. She jokes around with her boyfriend, and then he’s brutally murdered, and she’s horrendously raped. At the same time, Tim Galen (Duncan McIntosh) experiences a terrible nightmare where a woman is tortured by a mysterious figure.

Dr. Sam Cordell (Cassavetes) is the small town’s surgeon and head doctor. He’s prone to talking about things like dry intercourse, ruptured uteruses, and the massive amounts of sperm the rapist is leaving behind. Yeah, the dialogue seems to have been improvised by Cassavetes and is very weird.

More rapes and more murders occur. Some of these are staged quite well. There is one murder inside a gothic museum that is particularly well done. Cordell does most of the investigating. I love it when movies have doctors, or journalists, or anyone who isn’t the actual police do murder investigations. There are cops, but the local sheriff tends to bring Cordell into the crime scenes and lets him ask lots of questions.

There is also a journalist/love interest. Laura Kincaid (Kerrie Keane) is new to town, and she doesn’t like it much. She does love journalism, though, and she used some inheritance money to buy the local paper. She’s also invited into crime scenes and the like. Cordell also has a daughter, Jenny (Erin Noble), who is dating Tim.

There is a slight inclination toward incest between Jenny and her father. He’s jealous of Tim. In an early scene, he walks upstairs, and Jenny has left the bathroom door open while she showers. Later, she’ll give him a kiss that is slightly more than a peck. But the film doesn’t really do anything with this; it’s just weirdly hinted at. Similarly, Sam has a backstory about a dead wife and how he basically ignored Jenny when he remarried a much younger woman. But then that whole thread is dropped.

It rushes toward its conclusion in the last fifteen minutes, picking up some goofy supernatural pieces. I’m making it sound terrible, but it’s not that bad. Cassavetes gives it some grounding, and he really does seem to be trying hard. Hough’s direction is also quite good. So, it is a very watchable early 1980s horror film, but also plenty dumb and a bit goofy.