Tag: horror movies

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Twins of Evil (1971)

twins of evil

I suspect if you were to run some statistics on The Midnight Cafe, you’d find that I’ve reviewed more movies from Hammer Studios than any other one, and that Peter Cushing would be somewhere in the top in terms of actors I’ve written about. He is my seventh most watched actor, with some 37 of his films having been watched by me. I’ve written about eight of those films, most of which were Hammer Horror films. I’ve written about 24 different films from that studio.

That seems weird to me because Cushing isn’t one of my favorite actors. I mean, I do love him, but if I were to make a list of my favorites, he wouldn’t be on it. And I imagine if you took my ratings of all the Hammer films and averaged them out, the number you’d get wouldn’t be that high.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I keep watching these films. That’s not true. I do love me some Hammer Horror even while I can admit they aren’t always the greatest of films. It is interesting to me that I keep turning to them and that it’s only been the last decade that I’ve become a fan.

Anyway, Twins of Evil is pretty great.

Cushing plays Gustav Weil, a stern Puritan who leads a gang of dudes who love burning pretty young women at the stake. I mean, sure, they declare them witches first, and there does seem to be quite a few folks getting horribly murdered, lending credibility to some kind of ungodly horror going on, but really it’s just fun to burn girls out in the forest.

Up on the hill in his castle overlooking the village, Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) dabbles in Satanism (and I absolutely love that all the summaries of the film use that language, “dabbles in Satanism.”) While doing a bit of pretty young woman sacrificing of his own, he accidentally awakens Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Katya Wyeth) from her grave. She immediately turns him into a vampire.

Meanwhile, two twin sisters, Freida Gellhorn (Mary Collinson) and Maria (Mary Collinson), arrive in the village due to their parents dying. They take up residence with the good Gustav, their uncle. Now Maria is a good girl who wants to please her uncle, but Freida is a bad girl. She likes to sneak out at night and get into trouble. When she meets the Count, she’s all over that stuff.

Because this is a Hammer film and one made in 1971, both girls love to show off their cleavage and spend a great deal of the movie in their nightgowns with strategically placed camera angles.

The girls are a pain in their uncle’s neck. He believes them to be evil (one might even say Twins of Evil, actually Gustav says exactly that at one point.) Slowly everyone realizes the Count is a vampire, and Gustav will finally use God’s name in the service of fighting actual evil.

As per usual with Hammer, the production design is impeccable. The sets and costumes look great; the lighting is gorgeous. Cushing is wonderful. Unlike a lot of characters in films like this, he isn’t driven by an insane need for power, but rather he is a true believer. He truly thinks Satan is out there destroying the world. That warped faith drives him to do mad things. One could probably say something about how his Puritanical sense of sex drives him to burn beautiful young women at the stake, but I’ll leave that be. The Collinson sisters are a delight. Madeline especially has a lot of fun as the wild Freida.

Also, as per usual with Hammer films, the script isn’t great. It introduces the vampire aspect but doesn’t do a lot with it. The vamps do recoil from crosses, but don’t seem to mind daylight. But the look of the film and the performances make it well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Evil Dead Trap (1988)

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I’ve talked about the J-Horror craze of the 2000s in these pages a few times. Generally speaking, Japanese horror from this time period relied more on mood than gore. Their stories often involved elements of folklore, and the villains were often ghosts or other supernatural elements. 

But there is another side to the J-Horror phenomenon that is part of the larger Asian Extreme horror movement. Folks like Takashi Miike were making films filled with heavy violence and gruesome depravity.

Evil Dead Trap falls into the latter category. 

It is the kind of film I would have loved back in the late 2000s, when I was first discovering horror films outside the slashers I loved as a teenager and the classic Universal stories I loved in college. Back then I loved extreme horror. I thought it was cool to discover these weird little films that took gore to the max.

These days I prefer my horror a bit more gothic and subdued.

This film starts out promising. Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) hosts a late-night TV show. It is the sort of thing that likes showing off the wild and the weird. She often asks folks to send her videotapes of their crazy stuff. One day she gets a tape showing a woman (that looks remarkably like her) having her eyeballs sliced open and her stomach stabbed. It looks real. She is intriged.  She takes her fellow showmakers to an abaonded military base where she thinks the film was shot.

Naturally, things go bad.  A killer starts picking them off in some pretty gruesome ways. It feels a lot more like those slashers from the 1980s than a typical Japanese horror movie.  This is especially true in the buildup. Our heroes consist of five girls and one guy. Of course they split into groups to explore the grounds.  Nami goes at it alone. The guy and the girls have sex. Then he hides and jumps out to scare everyone.

Nami runs into a creepy guy, Daisuke Muraki (Yuji Honma) who says he’s there looking for his brother. He warns Nami to stay away from the place, then goes off on his own. There is a touch of Saw in one scene with a complicated trap set, forcing one of the girls to kill the other.  The score is reminiscent of something Goblin would do for Dario Argento, with a main theme repeating every time the killer comes near.

It is unnerving, and it pushes hard into the extreme horror ideas with lots of gore and a pretty horrific rape scene.  The last act gets really goofy, weird, and gross. 

It really is the kind of film I would have loved twenty years ago. It is one of those things I’d love to ask other people if they’d seen it, feeling cool because they hadn’t.  And then going into some of the wilder details.

These days I can admire what it’s doing and appreciate the weirdness, but I can’t say I really liked it.

Awesome ’80s in April: Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

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In elementary school I can remember bragging about how many times I’d seen the original Star Wars. I’d even brag that my brother had seen it more than me, something like 27 different times. My mother says it played constantly on HBO, and we’d watch it every time it was on.

But then I also remember when I was a young teenager renting the original trilogy, and it felt like new. I knew I had seen the films before, but I only had vague memories of them. And I can remember excitedly talking to my friends about it like it was a new discovery. 

Yet I also remember watching Return of the Jedi in the theater. I would have been seven years old.  

I don’t know what to make of all that except that memory is a weird thing.

I don’t remember ever seeing Poltergeist II: The Other Side before. I’d never logged it on Letterboxd or IMDB. For the first two thirds of the film, nothing was familiar. And then the family ran into the garage to flee the ghosts. Suddenly I remembered that they were about to get attacked by power tools. Suddenly I remembered talking about that scene with my friends right after we watched the movie. We felt it was the best scene in the entire film.  Clearly I had seen the film before; I just couldn’t remember it.  

Like I say, memory is a weird thing.

Truth be told, other than that garage scene, most of the movie is rather forgettable.

Poltergeist was so popular a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was how do you make a sequel to a haunted house movie when the haunted house was completely destroyed at the end of the movie?

The reasoning for the haunting in Poltergeist was that they built the house on top of an old cemetery and only bothered to  move the headstones and not the actual corpses.

For the sequel, they retcon some business about how underneath the Freelings house not only was there part of a cemetery but also a big cave where an insane preacher incarcerated his flock because he felt the end of the world was nigh.  They all died there, and the preacher has now turned into a spectral beast that’s now hunting poor Carole Anne (Heather O’Rourke) because of her time spent in the netherworld, and maybe she can help get him out.

Or something. It is all a lot of silly hogwash.

The preacher (Julian Beck) can manifest into a physical form and looks a bit like a reject from Children of the Corn. He’s actually quite creepy and makes for the second-best part of the entire film.

The Freeling family has moved in with Diane’s (JoBeth Williams) mother. They are trying their best to forget about the past and move on with their lives. But Carole Ann keeps having psychic visions, and that darn preacher keeps showing up. Then the old psychic from the first movie, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), shows up declaring all sorts of terrible things to come.

The thing I loved about the first film is that it slowly revealed what was happening. It allowed us to get to know the Freelings, and the scares were doled out a little at a time. That built the tension over the course of the movie.

It isn’t that things come too fast in this movie, for it too takes its time before the real scares come, but the buildup just isn’t interesting. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg made those early scenes fun to watch. Here it’s just a lot of myth building that the first film didn’t need.

There are some good scares. The preacher is creepy, and that garage scene is great. There is another moment where Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) eats the worm in a bottle of tequila, and things get really nasty. 

But mostly this feels like a sequel that was rushed into production without much thought being given to why it should exist at all.

The Awesome ’80s in April: Poltergeist (1983)

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I was too young to have seen Poltergeist in the theater, but I discovered it not long after on home video and cable television. It became one of the defining movies of the 1980s for me. But unlike films like The Goonies or Harry and the Hendersons, Poltergeist still holds up remarkably well all these years later, even watching it as an adult (and I say that as someone who still enjoys The Goonies but recognizes its many flaws).

It certainly helps that it had Steven Spielberg as a cowriter and a very hands-on producer. This is Spielberg in the 1980s, the absolute peak of his powers. There is actually a bit of controversy over how much work he did on this film. Tobe Hooper is the credited director, but it has long been rumored that Spielberg did most of the helming. He was in the middle of making E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial at the time, and his contract on that film said he couldn’t direct anything else while making that film.

As far as I can tell, Hooper did direct it, but Spielberg was on set most days, was very enthusiastic about the picture, and likely persuaded Hooper to his way of directing in numerous moments.

Whoever directed what, this is still a great movie. I made my daughter watch it with me last night, and she loved it. I still do, too.

Something I noticed this time around was that the Freeling family are good people. They all clearly love each other, and there aren’t any real problems going on between them. Spielberg’s parents divorced when he was 19 years old, and it had a clear impact on him and his art. Many of his films deal with broken homes, so it is interesting to see how solid the marriage is in this film.

I love how deliberate the film is with its storytelling and the manner in which it doles out the horror. It begins with Carole Ann (Heather O’Rourke) putting her hands on the TV playing static just after the patriotic sign-off (and I had to explain to my daughter that TV used to shut down for the night) and talking to it. The next night she’ll do it again and utter her famous “they’re here.”

Before that, the boy Robbie (Oliver Robbins) will get frightened by a storm, the creepy tree just outside his window, and a clown doll (that freaking clown!), both of which will come back later in terrifying ways. But then we’ll see the dad, Steve (Craig T. Nelson), come in to comfort him. He explains how you can tell a storm is moving away by counting the time between the lightning flash and the thunder (something I did for years after watching this.). When the storm moves closer, the two youngest will wind up sleeping with Steve and their mother, Diane (Jobeth Williams,) but not before Steve tells his oldest daughter, Dana (Dominique Dunne), to get off the phone and go to bed.

All of this allows us to see that this is a real, loving family. We’ll later see Diane fixing the kids breakfast and Steve trying to sell a house to a nice couple. These are nice, normal people.

The frights are slowly dropped into these domestic scenes. The dining room chairs stack themselves onto the table. It gives Diane a fright, but then she’s curious about it. She experiments with them. By the time Steve gets home, she’s figured out if you place a chair in one spot, it will slide to another. She’s even marked the starting spot with a circle on the floor and drawn arrows down to indicate its path. She’s more fascinated by this than scared. She’ll even allow Carol Anne (with a football helmet on) to slide across the floor.

This is the most Spielbergian moment in the film to me. There is a sense of wonder about what’s going on here. It reminds me of that scene in Close Encounter of the Third Kind where the little boy stands in front of a doorway with this immense bright light shining down on him. His early films always had this sense of marvel and delight at the unexplained and unknown.

Then, of course, all hell breaks loose. The ghosts come, Carol Ann disappears, that freaking clown attacks. The horror amplifies. As an audience member, I am thrilled. They bring in parapsychologists to study the phenomenon. A powerful medium, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), comes to try and contact Carol Ann. She gets a great entrance, marching into the house as everybody moves out of her path until she comes into the living room, her hair pulled back, her big glasses shining, her small stature feeling so big.

All of this allows the film to pull back a little from the horror. So many horror films lean into the monsters; they push them into our faces so we’ll be scared. This film studies the phenomenon, allowing the audience to feel slightly safer. That sense of wonder remains. But then again the scares come, and we are unsettled. It is a brilliant balancing act, pushing and pulling us between that sense of wonder and being scared out of our wits.

I forgot how much I loved this film, but watching it again with my daughter made me relish just how brilliantly it is made and how fantastic it still remains.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Invitation to Hell (1984)

Wes Craven’s debut film, The Last House on the Left (1972), was quite successful financially, but its brutal violence led it to be censored and banned, and didn’t exactly make it easy for him to get financing for another film. He actually returned to his porno roots, making the hardcore incest film The Fireworks Woman, before he was able to get financing for another horror film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). It was also a big hit, and from there he started to get really noticed.  He moved to Los Angeles and made several modest hits before directing A Nightmare on Elm Street, which made him a horror icon. 

Just before that film came out, he made this one for ABC TV. It is unbelievable that he made those two movies back to back. One is a horror masterpiece; the other is this film.

Invitation to Hell is like a mix of The Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matt Winslow (Robert Urich), is a brilliant computer scientist who prefers to work alone. But there isn’t a lot of money in that, so he eventually agrees to work for some big tech firm with his fraternity brother Tom Peterson (Joe Regalbuto). This involves a lot more money than he’s ever made before and a big office. This allows him, his wife Pat (Joanna Cassidy), and two children, Chrissy (Soleil Moon Frye) and Robert (Barrett Oliver), to move into a big, fancy house in the suburbs. 

He loves his job. The company is building a fancy spacesuit for NASA, and Matt is in charge of fitting it with lots of computer stuff so the astronauts will be able to do things like tell the surface temperature and determine if the living creature in front of them is human or alien.  The suit is also fireproof and shoots lasers.

Everyone at the office keeps pressuring him to join the Steaming Spring Country Club run by the beautiful Jessica Jones (Susan Lucci). But Matt isn’t a joiner, and something seems fishy at the club, so he keeps declining. But the wife and kids like the place, so they keep going to it, and eventually join.

With a title like Invitation to Hell, I don’t think it really counts as a spoiler to say that Jessica is some kind of demon or maybe even Satan him (or her) self. When people join the club, she gets your soul, which she keeps in Hell, and some kind of replicant comes out. The mechanics of all that are left to the imagination.

All of this is reasonable well done. If you recognize it is a made-for-TV movie from the early 1980s and keep your expectations real low, then you might find you can enjoy yourself. The final 15 minutes are pretty great. Sort-of spoilers ahead for (again) a movie called Invitation to Hell – Matt finds a portal to Hell at the club, dons his fancy space suit, and goes in to save his family. Hell looks amazing. Craven saved all his budget for this scene. There are some great matte paintings and killer set designs. The climactic battle with Jessica (who wears an amazing dress) is, well, not all that climactic, but it doesn’t matter because the sets are so darn cool.

I can’t really recommend this film except to Wes Craven nerds, but if you dig the man, then there is enough here to allow me to recommend it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

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In 1974 Shaw Brothers Studio teamed up with Hammer Films to produce The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. On paper that sounds like a dream come true. Both studios are known for making terrific genre films with high production values on low budgets. Hammer was the king of remaking classic monster movies with gothic style and extra violence and sex appeal. Shaw Brothers mastered the art of kung fu style. Mixing them should have created an incredible film full of beautifully drawn castles whereupon kung fu masters battled vampires, werewolves, and other assorted demons.

Sadly, the actual film is rather dull and poorly produced.

The plot is a simple thing. Kah (Chan Shen), a Daoist monk, travels to Dracula’s castle in hopes that he can restore the glory of the 7 Golden Vampires who have ruled a small Chinese village for centuries, but when a poor villager killed one of them, their power was drained.

At first Dracula (sadly not Christopher Lee, but here played by John Forbes-Robertson) is like, “Nah, I’m good,” and “I don’t take orders from people like you; I make them my slaves.” But then he realizes he’s been stuck inside his castle for some reason, and the only way to get out is to take control of Kah’s body. Once that happens, he figures he might as well see what the whole Golden Vampire thing is about. Then he disappears for almost the entire film, only showing back up at the very end.

Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, yea!) is lecturing at a Chinese university about vampires but gets the shrug-off by most of the intellectual community there. Only one kid believes him. Hsi Ching (David Chiang) is from the village of the Golden Vampires, and it was his grandfather that killed one of them.

He convinces Van Helsing, along with his son Leyland (Robin Stewart) and a rich blonde woman, Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who is financing the entire thing, to follow him and his martial expert six siblings to travel to the village and kill the Golden Vampires.

The journey is long and difficult and filled with many battles. Eventually they get to the village, fight the Golden Vampire, and then Dracula comes out to fight Van Helsing one on one.

So what went wrong? It was a troubled shoot from the beginning. They shot at Shaw Studios in Hong Kong with a British director (Roy Ward Baker), a mostly English cast (at least for the speaking roles), and a Chinese crew. Communication was difficult as most of the Chinese didn’t speak English and vice versa.

Baker had made some decent films for Hammer, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the kung fu aspects of the film. Eventually the Shaw Brothers people hired Chang Cheh to handle the action sequences because Baker was out of his depth with them.

Trouble is they shot most of the film outdoors on the rather barren, scrabble mountains near Hong Kong. Hammer Films is known for its great use of gothic castles, intricate sets, and bold color designs. You get very little of that by shooting outdoors in the sunshine. There are a few scenes indoors, and Baker really shines there, but there are far too few of them to make things interesting.

The kung fu scenes are mostly unremarkable as well. There is none of that jaw-dropping stunt work that made the Shaw Brothers famous. The story is mostly dull. Even Peter Cushing seems to be phoning it in.

Truth is Hammer Studios was running out of steam. Their glory days were behind them. Shaw Brothers would keep making numerous films well into the 1980s, but even though this was shot on their home turf, they seem to have been relegated to the second string.

In the end, this is a curiosity piece. If you are a fan of both studios, it is worth watching, but you’ll probably end up much like I did, wondering what could have been.

Westerns in March: From Dusk Til Dawn (1996)

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I first watched From Dusk till Dawn in the theater when it came out. I liked the first half a lot more than the second. It felt more like a Quentin Tarantino film with its interesting dialogue and stylistic flourishes. The back half was too goopy and gore-filled for my tastes at that moment. It had some fun dialogue, and I certainly wasn’t going to complain about that Salma Hayek dance number, but it seemed like a completely different film than the first half, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.

I do remember immediately after watching it having long conversations with my buddies about the film. We loved that opening scene and those little stylistic flourishes, like how Richie Gecko (Tarantino) imagines Kate (Juliette Lewis) saying something crude to him, or how they do a little X-ray vision of the trunk of the car showing the kidnap victim inside. We all agreed that once the vampires show up, the film takes a dip.

I can’t remember if I watched it anymore during my college years, probably so, but then I took a very long break from it. I watched it again maybe ten years ago, and I didn’t like it at all. I felt the first half felt more like someone trying to write like Tarantino instead of an actual script written by him. It no longer thrilled. And the back half was even worse, just puerile horror that was more interested in goopy explosions than telling a story.

But Ryan Coogler was clearly influenced by this film, and I keep seeing people on the worst social media site basically saying that Sinners was a poor imitation of From Dusk till Dawn, so I wanted to give it another chance.

I think I liked it this go-around more than all the previous viewings. The first half does feel like Tarantino-lite. This was early in his career. He was paid to write this film in 1992 on commission. They say Tarantino took the best parts of this script and put them into Pulp Fiction. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but this is definitely not his best work.

The Gecko Brothers, Richie and Seth (George Clooney) are on the run after a daring escape from the courthouse where Seth was in custody. They’ve killed several people, including two cops, and have a hostage in the trunk of their car.

They stop at a hotel in El Paso, to plot how they are going to cross the (heavily guarded) border and into Mexico, where someone Seth knows will hide them until things cool down.

When Seth steps out to get a better view of what they are up against, Richie rapes and murders the hostage. Seth is a criminal who will not hesitate to kill someone when he deems it necessary, but Richie is a psychopath.

Salvation (or damnation, as we’ll soon find out) comes in the form of a loving family and an RV. Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) is a former Baptist minister who lost his faith when his wife died in a car accident. He’s taking his two kids, Kate and Scott (Ernest Liu) to Mexico as a getaway from their grief.

There are some nicely tense scenes with the Gecko brothers forcing the Fuller family to drive them across the border and not get caught. Then they head to a skeevy biker/trucker bar called the Titty Twister. It is open from Dusk to Dawn and is the seemingly perfect place for them to hide out until the man can come and give the brothers safe passage.

After some minor confrontations and a pretty darn sexy dance, the vampires come. Things get wild and blood-soaked from there. Tom Savini plays a biker named Sex Machine. It doesn’t seem that he did any of the special effects/makeup work, but this is the type of thing he became famous for doing. There are lots of great practical effects. The vampires have grotesque faces, and they turn to slop when staked and sometimes explode.

It can be a bit much.

When this came out, I thought Quentin Tarantino was the bee’s knees. I saw Pulp Fiction in the theater and thought it was amazing. We watched Reservoir Dogs in the dorm room and went nuts. I also very much liked Robert Rodriguez (who directs this film; Tarantino just wrote it.) I thought Desperado was a lot of fun, and El Mariachi was brilliant for a no-budget film from a first-time director.

But I’ve since very much cooled on Tarantino. I think he is a very talented director but kind of an obnoxious human. I always watch his films and often enjoy them, but the days of them being an event for me are over. The days of me having to see them in the theater are long gone. I now think Rodriguez is a hack.

This feels like the best and worst of what a collaboration between Rodriguez and Tarantino could be. There is some clever writing from Tarantino (and I find it hilarious that he wrote his character as a foot-loving, psychopathic pervert), but it’s also sloppy and disjointed. Rodriguez is at his best when he’s able to let go and just have fun with all the vampire carnage. He doesn’t do nearly as well when he’s dealing with Tarantino’s more dialogue-heavy front end. The two are very good friends, and they seem to let each other indulge in some of their worst instincts. For example, Rodriguez once again uses a crotch gun, and Tarantino gets a scene where he literally sucks beer off of Salma Hayek’s toes.

This definitely falls into the category of movie where you just have to let go and enjoy the ride. I definitely did this time around.

I know this barely qualifies as a western. It takes place in modern times and no one wears a cowboy hat or rides a horse. But it is set in the barren landscapes of Texas and Mexico and its characters would certainly fit into the lawless wild west. So I’m counting it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Funhouse (1981)

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In a scene that is clearly aping the opening moments of Halloween (1978), our movie begins with a point-of-view shot of someone walking ominously through a house. There are horror posters hanging on the room and a torture chamber’s worth of weapons and devices hanging on the wall. A hand reaches out and grabs a knife. A teenaged girl takes off her robe and steps into the shower. 

From Halloween, our movie switches to Psycho with the camera inside the shower and a knife-wielding maniac seen in shadows through the steam. The curtain opens. The blade stabs. The girl screams.

Our killer is the girls’ young brother. The knife is rubber. The scene turns from horror to goof.

With the runaway success of Friday the 13th (1980), Universal Studios was looking to get into the teenage horror game. They hired Tobe Hooper, still riding high off the triumphs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1979). It would be his first film for a major studio.

That girl in the shower is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), and she’s got a hot date. Her father warns her not to go to the carnival, for two kids were killed at one not that far away a few weeks ago. She promises she won’t, but her date Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) insists, and besides, they already told their two friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin) that’s what they were going to do.

It’s a pretty cheap and sleazy carnival with deformed animals and half-naked ladies on display. Our heroes have a good time, and Amy begins to fall for Buzz. They visit a psychic (Sylvia Miles, having a blast) but get kicked out of her tent for giggling too much. Meanwhile, Amy’s little brother sneaks out of the house and visits the carnival. 

Our heroes decide it would be fun to stay the night at the funhouse, so before everything shuts down, they find a place to hide. And have some sexy fun times. But before things get too heated, they hear something. Someone has come into the room below. It is the psychic and a large man wearing a Frankenstein mask. He’s nonverbal. She tells him if he wants it, he has to pay. He finds some cash, and she strips down. But our boy’s a little too excited, and he finishes before even getting his pants off. When she says there are no refunds, he kills her.

Yikes! Zoinks! Our heroes find that they are trapped inside this funhouse with no way to escape. Frankenstein’s (Wayne Doba) daddy, the Carnival Barker (Kevin Conway), scolds him, then beats him, knocking the mask off his deformed, monstrous face.

One of the kids drops a lighter, alerting our villains, and the rest of the movie has them chasing our heroes around the funhouse. 

Periodically we’ll find the little brother wandering around the carnival, oblivious to everything. The film hints that he’s going to be killed, even having him caught by some creepy-looking dude. But he turns out nice and calls the boy’s parents, and the boy is never seen again.  It is a nice little fake-out. The film does that a few times when the story will lean one way and then go another. 

It is a film best left with your brain checked out.  Otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why a roaming carnival has a funhouse with multiple stories, a long hallway with a giant ventilation system, and a room full of killer gears and rotating hooks.  Seriously, that temporary funhouse is enormous.

But if you can push such analytical thoughts aside, you might find there is a lot of fun to be had in this film. Hooper dives into the goofiness of the carnival aspects. It comes across like a mix between classic 1980s slasher films with something even more classic from Universal with a dash of Freaks thrown in for good measure. Not a great movie by any stretch, but an interesting one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Jason X (2001)

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There comes a time when a horror fan has to admit that the Friday the 13th films aren’t very good. I grew up in the 1980s, otherwise known as ground zero for slasher films. I loved the Friday the 13th films. Jason Voorhees is one of the greatest, most iconic villains of horror.

The reality is I never watched the full, uncut versions. I always watched them on the USA Network and TBS, or some other basic cable network where they were edited for television. Basic cable was different back then; they had to cut out the harder swear words, the nudity, and the more blood-soaked violence. I think I liked those films in part because my pubescent brain filled in those edited parts. I imagined what happened when the screen cut to something different.

I didn’t watch the uncut versions until I was in college. I gotta admit I was a little disappointed by them. What I had imagined was so much more gnarly and titillating than what was actually shown.

But also by that point I was fully into my film snob cinephilia. I was discovering the films of Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock. I had realized that films could be more than entertainment. That horror could be more than just fun kills and naked flesh. I was starting to turn my nose up at films like the Friday the 13th franchise.

I went to see Jason X in the cinema when it came out in 2001. I was a full-on film snob by then, but I was also feeling some nostalgia for the films of my youth. I was hoping for some dumb fun, and maybe a little self aware humor like the Scream film (the third of which had come out the year before.) What I got was dumb, but it sure wasn’t fun, and while there were some jokes, they weren’t the self-referential kind. 

I have not watched this film since that first viewing. But I own it on DVD. I’m still a horror nerd after all, and I own the first 8 films via a nice boxed set (which I reviewed, and you can read about at Cinema Sentries), so I just had to own the remaining films in some way.

And now, since it is Friday the 13th, I figured I’d give it a watch.

It begins in the Crystal Lake Research Facility, something that never existed in the other films. It seems to be designed solely to hold Jason and nothing else.  At least judging by how empty the rest of the facility is. Even though this film acknowledges that Jason is an unstoppable killing machine, they’ve left him in an unguarded, very large room. He is chained up and hanging from the ceiling, but why he wouldn’t be locked in a cell is unexplained.  Why there aren’t numerous guards all around him is also unexplained. There is one kid, and he does at least have a gun, but that’s it.  

The kid places a blanket over Jason’s head (the better for us and incoming soldiers to not be able to see who exactly is under the blanket in the coming moments). Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig), the head of the research facility, has plans to cryogenically freeze Jason so that some future generation can deal with him. But before that happens, some dumb soldiers enter the room and demand his release. They are led by Dr. Aloysius Wimmer (David Cronenberg, who was apparently excited to be in a Friday the 13th film and rewrote all of his dialogue), who hopes to figure out how Jason is unable to die. 

Jason, of course, has already killed that boy from (and placed him in the chains and under the blanket) and wreaks havoc on the soldiers. He chases Rowan in the room with the freezing chamber, and she manages to shoot and push him into it. But just as he’s freezing, he pushes his machete (yes, for some reason these people kept his machete within grabbing distance of the supervillain) through the chamber door, stabbing Rowan and filling the room with freezing fog.

Despite all this carnage inside what one assumes is a famous and very expensive science facility, apparently no one bothered to come in and clean up. Or do anything at all.  For the film, flash forwards to the year 2455, and both Jason and Rowan are exactly where they fell, still frozen. 

A group of randy scientists and jokey soldiers find them and take them to their ship.  The Earth has long been abandoned due to massive pollution, but these guys like to visit once in a while and salvage what they can for resale.

They use their special futuristic microrobots to fix and heal Rowan, but figure Jason is too far gone to be saved.  Naturally, he comes back to life once he thaws out.  Lots of killing ensues. 

Some of it is pretty cool; a lot of it is pretty bad.

While some of the scientists are studying Jason, and letting Rowan know she’s now in the future. Others go off to have sex. Because this is a Friday the 13th movie, and you can’t have one of those without sexy teens doing what sexy teens do.

The leader of the ship is a greedy professor who hopes to sell Jason to the highest bidder (he’s still pretty well known in the future, and rich weirdos would like to have his corpse.). And if that doesn’t clue us in to how skeevy he is, there is another scene where he talks one of his students into having (kinky) sex with him – he dresses up in women’s lingerie, she twists his nipple (which by 2001 standars is extra wild!) in order for her to get a good grade.

There is also an android named KM-14 (Lisa Ryder). And if all of this is starting to sound like an Aliens riff to you, you are not alone.  This film was conceived because the Freddy vs. Jason film was locked in development hell over rights issues, and they wanted to have some Jason film out to keep fans interest up. They hired Todd Farmer to write the film, despite him having zero credits to his name. After some thought, he figured the only thing they could do to the character was send him into space and riff on the Alien films. 

But back to the kills. Most of them are fairly standard stuff – Jason hacking folks to pieces with his machete. (Poorly rendered) CGI allowed for them to do things like hack heads and arms off without too much blood and guts, or cut a guy basically in half. One lady has her head stuck in a bowl of liquid nitrogen, and then Jason cracks it like glass. One guy gets tossed onto a massive mining drill, and we watch him slowly slide around and round to the bottom (causing another character to say, when asked how the guy was doing, “He’s screwed”)

Yeah, there are a lot of jokes like that. One-liners coming after someone gets killed. They are more like the kind of thing you get in action movies from the 1980s than ironic in-jokes from a post-Scream world. At one point, to distract Jason, they use a holographic simulator to project a version of Camp Crystal Lake to him. Out come a couple of scantily clad girls who look him in the eye and say something like, “We love having casual sex.”

Jason eventually gets destroyed, but those fancy nanobots have a mind of their own, and they put him back together, but this time they add a bunch of Terminator-esque robot parts and create an Uber Jason.

This is a bad movie.  Probably the worst in the franchise. But you know what? I’m not mad I watched it. All the Jason movies are bad, but there is a certain level of fun in them. If you can turn your brain off before it begins and revert to some dumb teenaged version of yourself, you might find yourself entertained.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Vengeance of the Zombies (1973)

vengeance of the zombies

As it is Foreign Film February, I wanted to do a non-English language film for my Friday Night Horror flick. It has also been a long day, so I grabbed the thing closest to me, which was my Paul Naschy boxed set. There are five films in that set, and I hope to watch and review them all over the next couple of months. I love the idea of reviewing all the DVDs I own, but that is a monumental task.

Vengeance of the Zombies is an absolutely bonkers film. In the booklet that came with this set, Naschy (who wrote the film) is quoted as having probably been on hashish when he sat down at his typewriter. That definitely checks out.

It also checks out that this was a chepie exploitation flick. Technically there is a plot, but it is so haphazardly put together it is impossible to make sense of.  

Someone is killing a bunch of women in London. Then someone else, a voodoo priest named Kantanka (Paul Naschy), is bringing them back to life as part of his zombie horde.  Naschy also plays Krisna an East Indian mystic.

Elvire Irving (Romy) thinks Krisna is one cool cat and follows him to his big mansion out in the country. The big mansion was once the home of an evil family who were eventually murdered and hung upon the trees in the yard.

There are a lot of dream sequences where Kantanka and some other foul faced fiends attack Elvire. In one particularly groovy dream sequence, Paul Naschy plays Satan, to whom various others make sacrifices.  Another sequence (which may or may not be a dream; it is difficult to tell), a lady wearing a big box painted like a man’s face dances around while Kantanka pours blood onto corpses to turn them alive.  Or something.

Scotland Yard gets involved but is mostly useless. 

Seriously, I just watched this film, and I’m having a hard time remembering anything about the actual plot.

There is lots of murdering. Plenty of ladies wearing sheer nightgowns. And loads of gratuitous sex.

I do love the sex scenes in these types of films. During one scene, the housekeeper is upset over something. Krisna tells her everything is going to be ok. Then he looks at her, the music starts up, and he then pulls down the covers, pulls down her top, and gropes her breasts three times. She then sits up and passionately kisses him.

In another scene, Elvire goes into a barn only to find a woman with her head nearly chopped off. Then she is attacked by a dude with a scythe. Krisna jumps in and saves the day. They then go to the house, where she tells him that he should call the cops. He brusquely says “no” to which she responds by making out with him.

I’ve been doing my seduction techniques all wrong, I guess.

The music is a wild mix of popular rock and funk. It is so crazily inappropriate for most of what’s happening on screen.

This is a ridiculously bad film in every imaginable way. But it’s also a lot of fun to watch. It is the kind of film you want to watch late at night with a group of friends while getting loaded. Check your brain at the door and get ready for ridiculousness.