Tag: horror movies

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004)

ginger snaps 2 poster

Ginger Snaps (2000) is a wonderful coming-of-age horror film about two angst-filled, sarcastic teenagers who form a death pact before one of them gets bitten by a werewolf and begins to change.

Its sequel finds one of the girls, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) stuck in a rehab clinic after she overdoses on the wolfsbane she’s been injecting to keep her own transformation at bay.

At the clinic, she meets Tyler (Eric Johnson) who trades whatever the girls are addicted to for sexual favors, and Ghost (Tatiana Maslany) a young ward of the clinic who quickly realizes that Brigitte is a werewolf and becomes her only friend.

The film loses a lot of what made the original so great – mainly the bond between the two sisters and their withering takes on suburban life in high school. Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) does appear in the film, but only as a hallucination and she’s more foreboding than fun). Ghost doesn’t provide nearly the same punch.

Yet, it is still an enjoyable film. It relies more on the drama of whether or not Brigitte will escape the clinic and stop her full transformation into a werewolf than horror tropes. Though there is a werewolf stalking her, looking for a mate.

The first film used the werewolf transformation as a commentary on puberty, this film critiques the ways in which men tend to prey on young women.

When the horror does come it is appropriately violent, and gory. Overall it isn’t quite as great as the first one, but it’s still carries quite a bite.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Special Effects (1984)

special effects movie poster

There is a question that, I suppose, needs to be asked here. What, exactly, is a horror movie? Sometimes that’s easy to define. Horror movies have ghosts or monsters in them. Vampires, blobs, werewolves and other creatures of the night fill the screen of many a horror film. But what about more pedestrian horror? Movies in which the villain is human.

Jason Vorhees is just a man in a hockey mask with a machete (at least in the early films, he later becomes superhuman and virtually unkillable). But there are lots of crime movies with higher body counts. No one would argue that the Friday the 13th movies are anything other than horror, but serial killer movies are often called thrillers.

Maybe that’s because there usually isn’t a police detective trying to solve the case of the Jason killings. But then there are a lot of Italian horror films, giallos especially, that plotwise are basically police procedurals.

Maybe horror movies are more gore-filled. But that doesn’t always track either because some cop flicks concentrate on the extreme violence of their killers. And plenty of horror films have very little gore or none at all.

I don’t have an answer here. It is a big debate that I won’t solve in these pages. I mention it because tonight’s Friday Night Horror movie could be considered more of a thriller than a horror, but it does carry the horror genre label on IMDB and that’s what I thought it was coming into it, so that’s what we’re gonna keep calling it.

Andrea Wilcox (Zoë Lund) left her husband Keefe (Brad Rijn) and small child in Texas to go to New York City and pursue an acting career. Though she’s willing to sleep with producers and directors and anybody who will give her a part she’s only able to find jobs doing nude modeling and the like.

When Keefe comes to get her back and bring her home she lies and says that her career is starting to take off. Why, she has a meeting that evening with Neville (Eric Bogosian) a famous movie director. She does in fact go to his house that evening and literally begs him to at least take a look at her.

He does look at her, then sleeps with her, and secretly films the encounter, and strangles her to death. He cleans her up, puts her inside Keef’s car, and dumps it at Coney Island.

The cops immediately suspect Keef and arrest him. Neville hires an expensive attorney and gets him free on bail. He then decides to make a movie about Keef and Andrea. He gets Keef to play himself and finds an amazing Andrea look-alike in a woman named Elaine (also played by Zoë Lund) to play Andrea.

Things get weird from there.

B-movie auteur Larry Cohen mixes Vertigo (1958) with Body Double (1984) and bits of Peeping Tom (1960) into a sleazy cauldron of awesome. He has Brian DePalma’s flair for taking Hitchcockian ideas and amping up the sex and violence, but very little of either director’s sense of style. Though he does create some really interesting sets, especially Neville’s giant apartment filled with mirrors and water.

The film really is more thriller than horror as Neville takes his movie ideas to extremes and is more than willing to kill again to maintain his cinematic goals.

Special Effects wasn’t at all what I was expecting when I put it on, but I found it to be quite enjoyable.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

the popes exorcist poster

I love going into a movie completely blind. Not knowing anything about a film before watching it can lead to beautiful surprises. It can also lead to utter befuddlement and disappointment.

The only thing I knew about The Pope’s Exorcist before watching it tonight was that it starred Russell Crowe. Well, I knew it was a horror movie, and I was pretty sure it was going to involve some exorcism, but that’s it.

Honestly, I kind of thought it was going to be about the Pope getting demon-possessed and Russel Crowe was going to save him. I didn’t really think about the details of how that might work – how the head of the Catholic Church could get possessed – but it sounded kind of cool. It still does.

But no, the title refers to the fact that Russel Crowe’s priest – Father Gabriele Amorth, who was a real person – was hired directly by the Pope and would, in fact, be his personal exorcist were he to be possessed. But that doesn’t happen here. Instead, a demon possesses a little boy (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney).

Though Amorth was a real person and he was the official exorcist for the Diocese of Rome, the actual story is completely made up. Although one could easily argue it was mostly stolen from The Exorcist (1973). The boy does all the things demon-possessed kids do in these types of movies. He curses, he blasphemes, he sexualizes his mother, turns crosses upside down, etc.

There is also a mom (Alex Essoe) and an older sister (Laurel Marsden) and a tragic backstory (the dad was killed in a car accident, the boy saw it happen). But all of that is very bland and the film doesn’t really care about any of it.

Russel Crow plays Amorth like a jokester who carries a lot of pain. His performance reminded me of his character in The Nice Guys (2016). He periodically, though not often enough, lays down these great little sly jokes. I wish they’d leaned into that aspect a lot more. I rally wish I’d watched The Nice Guys again, that movie is terrific. Mostly this film is a very serious slog.

They don’t do anything new with the possession angle, but do spend a lot of time having Amorth and his newfound buddy Priest Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto) dig up the church’s sins (the Spanish Inquisition and the child abuse scandals) and blaming them on the devil.

It all concludes in a big sloppy, CGI mess that is as incoherent as it is dumb.

The Babysitter (2017)

the babysitter movie poster

Netflix has been recommending The Babysitter to me since it came out in 2017. The plot sounded fun, and I’ve almost pressed play a few times. But it stars Bella Thorne who is like the new Paris Hilton – famous for being famous, and attractive and exploiting that attractiveness into social media points (and money, presumably). I have zero interest in watching anything with her in it.

In the years since I’ve very much become a fan of Samara Weaving. She’s terrific in films like Mayhem and Ready or Not, she was the best part of the recent Scream film. So when I realized she was the actual star of The Babysitter I decided to give it a spin. The film is pretty good, actually, and Samara is terrific.

The plot is full of clever callbacks and the dialogue is often very funny. The story involves a shy, nerdy 12-year-old (Judah Lewis) who is sort of embarrassed to be the oldest kid on the block who still has a babysitter but less embarrassed that the babysitter looks like Samara Weaving and is super cool and actually seems interested in spending time with him. He’s then full-on mortified when he learns she’s the head of a satanic cult and needs his blood for a sacrificial ritual.

From there, it becomes a Home Alone-type situation with the boy trying to keep the babysitter and her friends from killing him. Well, Home Alone where the violence is a lot more visceral and less cartoony. It is mostly quite a fun thrill ride. Even Bella Thorne is enjoyable. She plays a vacuous, superficial, dumb-dumb who is more concerned with her beauty than anything else (when she gets shot in the chest she is more worried that it will ruin her boobs than whether she’ll live or die). You could argue it isn’t much of a stretch for the actress.

The problem lies in the direction. McG started life as a music producer and video director and it shows. So much of The Babysitter feels like it belongs on MTV. It is filled with fast cuts, big needle drops, and neon-bright directorial swings. He draws clear influence from folks like Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright but has none of their panache or understanding of how to use stylistic flourishes to support the story. Instead, it feels like he’s just beating us on the head with them.

Had the script been given maybe one or two more go-overs and it had been helmed by a real director The Babysitter could have been a true cult classic. As it is, I’m once again swooned by Samara Weaving, and entertained by the story, but I leave it wishing there was more to it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987)

a return to salmes lot poster

‘Salem’s Lot was one of the first Stephen King novels I ever read. It remains one of my favorites. Tobe Hooper made a pretty good TV mini-series out of it in 1979. Apparently, Larry Cohen had originally been slotted to adapt the book, but the executives hated his screenplay and gave Hooper the job instead.

Years later Warner Brothers approached Cohen to direct a low-budget horror film for them and he pitched the idea of a sequel. Interestingly, the sequel was intended as a theatrical film and in fact, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and saw a limited American release. But the reviews were terrible and the box office a dud and so it pretty quickly went straight to the VHS shelves.

Outside of a few gorey effects, a couple of naked breasts, and a lot of children swearing, the film feels very much like a made-for-TV movie. The budget was clearly small, the acting amateurish, and it is edited within an inch of its life.

It follows Joe Webber (Michael Moriarty), an anthropologist who is called away from studying a native tribe in the South American jungle to take care of his young, troubled son Jeremy (Ricky Addison). He takes him to a run-down house he’s inherited in the small New England town of Jerusalem’s Lot (or Salem’s Lot as it is sometimes called).

Pretty quickly he realizes the town’s inhabitants are either vampires or their human slaves. Actually, they pretty much straight-up tell them who they are because they want him to write a book about them. To convince him to do this they kidnap the boy and get a young vampire girl to sweet-talk him into becoming a vampire as well.

Joe figures this is a good time to hook up with his childhood sweetheart and do a little remodeling of his old homestead. Seriously, the film makes some really odd choices.

Soon enough a Van Helsing-like vampire hunter shows up (played by director Samuel Fuller in a rare acting role) and eventually our heroes get to some actual vampire slaying.

A Return to Salem’s Lot feels like it should have been a mini-series. There are a lot of ideas floating around in it, but few of them get explored. A lot of scenes feel like they were cut short, as if maybe a lot of footage was shot but due to time constraints they had to be cut. Or maybe they just didn’t have the budget to shoot everything in the script.

As it is it feels very disjointed, and unrealized. There are some interesting ideas. The original story is basically ‘what if Dracula showed up in a small American town’ and this one takes that concept and has the vampires take over the entire town. Yet here they are also a persecuted minority. They fled Europe with the Pilgrims for the safety of the new world. They are good Americans. They don’t even kill humans (well, most of the time) but breed cows for their blood needs – and it is quite a scene watching some elderly actors pretend to suck the blood out of cows lying in a pasture.

All of this creates some light satire of American consumer culture, but again it is pretty disjointed and cut to shreds.

Despite all of this I still rather enjoyed it. Cohen knows his way around a low-budget picture and he gives it enough oomph to make it not terrible. Fuller is having a blast playing the crotchety old hunter.

Not a great movie by any means, but a fun one to watch.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Evils of the Night (1985)

evils of the night poster

I’m fascinated by the careers of classic film stars late in their lives. Every now and again an aging star will land a wonderfully juicy film role, but mostly they found themselves in cheesy television shows as guest stars, or in low-budget horror films, slumming.

Julie Newmar, Neville Brand, Aldo Ray, John Carradine, and Tina Louise weren’t exactly the biggest stars of their day, but they made some good movies and starred in some enjoyable TV shows in their prime. They deserve better than this.

I watched Evils of the Night primarily based on that cast list and the basic plot description that involves vampire aliens kidnapping attractive young people for their blood.

I should have just gone to bed early.

I’m a fan of bad movies. I love the so-bad-its-good genre of cinema. This film doesn’t deserve to be called bad. It’s terrible.

The first twenty minutes find a bunch of sexy teens frolicking at a lake and sexing on the beach. Some dudes in ski masks (Neville Brand and Also Ray) snatch some of them and take them back to a hospital where Tina Louise, John Carradine, and Julie Newmar attempt to extract their blood, but not actually kill them.

It is never quite clear what they need the blood for, only that it has to come from healthy young people (but not too young) and that they can’t have any bruising (which is a problem for them because the guys is ski masks keep beating the kids up before they bring them in.) There is some business about the bosses screwing up by landing them in this small town where there aren’t enough healthy youngsters or intelligent minions to make their plan work. But nothing is really explained.

It is a weird mix of ’80s boner comedy and slasher horror with a bit of sci-fi alien story mixed in. But it feels completely thrown together with very little thought or effort put into it. For example during the numerous sex scenes, everybody keeps their shoes on and the guys never even unbutton their pants (the girls, including porn stars Crystal Breeze and Amber Lynn, naturally, get completely naked). The masked dudes wear masks to conceal their identities, but also overalls with their names on them. The spaceships come from clips stolen from the original Battlestar Galactica series (the poster includes a slightly modified Millenium Falcon).

One imagines they blew their entire budget on the stars and then just slapped something together fast and cheap hoping to recoup their money based on name recognition alone.

Please, do everyone a favor and don’t watch this film. It is bad enough that I had to.

Awesome ’80s in April: Monkey Shines (1988)

monkey shines poster

For some reason, I assumed this movie was based on a Stephen King novel. I think that was because the poster features one of those toy monkeys with cymbals in its hands. King wrote a short story featuring the same toy (which I’ve read part of, but didn’t finish because the audiobook had to be returned to the library). It is based upon a book, but not anything by King, but rather a British author named Michael Stewart. The film has nothing to do with a toy monkey either. But its plot does run into Stephen King territory.

At the beginning of the film we know something is going to happen to law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) because he is out running on a beautiful morning and all seems to be right with the world (and films don’t begin that way unless something bad is going to happen.) Since it features him running athletically and focuses on his muscular legs, he’s naturally hit by a truck which renders him a paraplegic.

He has a tough go of it in the beginning and tries to kill himself. But fails. His kooky scientist friend, Geoffrey (John Pankow) hooks him up with a helper monkey. Geoffrey doesn’t tell Allan that he’s been secretly injecting the monkey, named Ella, with a human brain cell-laden serum.

At first, things seem great. Ella is super helpful and seems to anticipate Allan’s every need. But because this is a horror movie, one directed by George A. Romero no less, things go sideways quickly. Actually, quickly isn’t the right word here, because the film takes its time to get to the psychotic monkey killing people. But they do eventually get there.

Basically, the monkey forms a psychic connection with Allan and it especially attaches to Allan’s anger, and unlike people who might think they’d like to kill someone in a fit of anger, the monkey translates things literally and does some bad, bad things.

There are a few too many side plots involving, among other things, Geoffrey’s boss (who doesn’t like his experiments, and is played by Stephen Root in his first film role), Allan’s Nurse Ratched-like healthcare worker, and Allan’s wife having an affair with his surgeon (Stanley Tucci in his third film role – the wife is played by Janine Turner). There is also a romance with the monkey’s trainer that includes a very interesting sex scene (one of the few on-screen sex scenes involving a paraplegic.)

Romero handles the material well, but this is definitely one of his lesser films. It isn’t exactly boring, but I was very much ready for the monkey to turn psycho much earlier than it did.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Chopping Mall (1986)

chopping mall poster

“Well, if you are going to watch a movie from the ’80s it ought to have a mall in it.” My wife, when she learned what movie I was watching tonight.

Although malls were popular from the 1970s through the 1990s there is something so very 1980s about them. They were a staple of my life growing up. I almost never go to the mall these days (the nearest Apple store is located in one and I sometimes have to take my phone in for repairs there, but that’s about it). It seems most people don’t go to malls these days either. As they all seem to be closing down. But there was a time when malls were the place to be.

Mention to me KB Toys or Spencer’s Gifts or Orangejulius or a dozen other stores and my memories are flooded with nostalgic glee. I’m sure it does for many others as well. There is a reason why large chunks of Season Three of Stranger Things was set in a mall. Malls are the 1980s.

It makes perfect sense that they’d set a horror movie from the 1980s in a mall. I’m surprised they didn’t set more of them there.

The plot of Chopping Mall is pretty simple. The Park Plaza Mall has just installed a state of the art security system. Impenetrable steel shutters block all the entry doors after the mall closes and three high-tech robots roam the floors at night subduing any trespassers.

On the very first night this new security system is implemented a group of young, attractive mall workers decide to throw a party at the mall’s furniture store. After a bit of partially nude sexy times all hell breaks loose. A lightning strike short-circuits the robots and they go on a killing spree, killing everybody but a Final Girl and the dweeb.

That’s it. That’s the plot.

The movie is all kinds of dumb, but it is also kind of fun. You could call it dumb fun. In fact I just did.

In an early scene some smarmy executive types introduce us to the robots. They ensure everyone that they are perfectly safe and all they are armed with are some darts that will knock out any would-be robber. In reality the robots are equipped with much more – electrodes, plastic explosives, welding guns, and freakin’ laser beams.

Oddly enough they are not equipped with any sort of chopping equipment which would have been appropriate considering the name of the film. Victims are electrocuted, thrown over a ledge, strangled and one poor girl has her head exploded, but not a single person is in any way chopped to death.

The budget is decidedly low, the direction from Jim Wynorski is sloppy and the acting pretty shabby. The violence consists mostly of explosions (lots and lots of explosions, actually) but there is very little gore (save for one scene).

The robot lasers are capable of exploding a head, and blowing up doors. But sometimes they merely cause a slight wound to a leg, or crack a vase. At one point a robot shoots a mirror and apparently that repels the blast back and electrocutes the robot. I say apparently because it really isn’t clear that’s what happened, but there was a mirror in the scene and the robot was electrocuted so I pieces these things together and decided that’s what happened. It is that sort of film. You sometimes have to guess as to what is actually happening.

There are some nice cameos for fans of low budget movies from the ’80s. Dick Miller appears for a nice death scene, and Mary Waranov and Paul Bartel show up as a couple of wiseacres in the opening scene. Kelli Maroney is the Final Girl (sorry for the spoiler but it is pretty obvious from the very beginning she’ll be the one who survives.) I just watched her in Night of the Comet and now I’m declaring myself a fan.

So yea, Chopping Mall is a dumb movie. But it is a good dumb movie. Sometimes that’s all I need.

Awesome ’80s in April: Night of the Comet (1984)

night of the comet poster

While working on my list of movies I wanted to watch during the Awesome ’80s in April I headed over to Letterboxd, turned on their giant list of all films, filtered out everything but movies made in the 1980s, sorted it by highest rated, and systematically made my way through the entire list. I was looking for movies I had never seen, but had always wanted to watch. Or movies I’d never heard of but that looked interesting (one of the cool things about Letterboxd is that it lets you see how your friends rated any film, and read any reviews they might have written).

Night of the Comet falls into the latter category. I’d never heard of it before, but it was rated pretty highly by people whose thoughts on movies I respect and the plot sounded interesting.

Honestly, even after all of that, I expected something much cheesier. The plot synopsis sounds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Night of the Living Dead at the end of the world. But what I got was something more thoughtful, and well-made than that synopsis makes you expect.

An opening salvo tells us that a huge comet will be passing by Earth for the first time in millions of years. Everybody is excited. Parties are being held outside to watch the comet pass. The whole world is outside watching. The whole world except for Reggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Larry (Michael Bowen). They work at a movie theater and Larry has convinced Reggie to help him rent out a reel to some guys who will illegally duplicate it. Reggie really wants to see the comet pass by, but Larry is willing to pay her a whole $15 bucks and that’s hard to turn down.

They wind up spending the night in the steel-lined projection booth. The next morning they wake up to find that the comet has turned everybody (well, almost everybody) into red dust. A few people did survive but they seem to have been turned into brain-eating zombies. Larry meets his end pretty quickly and Reggie returns home to find her sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) is still alive. Turns out that after an argument with her mother Sam slept in the steel-lined shed.

Together, they do what any red-blooded American teenager would do after a zombie apocalypse – they head to the mall. Actually, they head to the radio station first because a DJ’s voice can be heard playing records and they figure finding another human alive would be a good thing. The DJ is actually just a recording on a tape, but they do discover Hector (Robert Beltran) at the radio station. Hector almost immediately leaves the girls as he needs to find out if his mother is still alive (he’ll come back to the movie a little later). That’s when the girls go to the mall.

There are some scientists types who survived by hiding in an underground bunker. They must now try to rebuild humanity and that begins by running tests of the few other humans who survived to see if there is a chance at finding a vaccine to counteract the effects of the cosmic rays.

Night of the Comet does a great job of blending comedy with horror and thriller elements. The Buffy mixed with Night of the Living Dead elements I mentioned at the beginning of this post are more apt than I thought. Although it is more like Dawn of the Dead since a great portion of the movie is spent inside a mall. But it is a much better film than that synopsis might indicate. It was made on a tiny budget, but they put every dollar they had to good use. It is funny and thrilling, and has a nice sense of what it’s trying to do.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Barbarian (2022)

barbarian movie

It is very rare that a movie surprises me. Rarer still is a horror movie that surprises. Barbarian surprised me at least twice and left me breathless on multiple occasions. We’re not talking jump scares – though there are plenty of those – or just general weirdness (though it is a deeply weird movie). Barbarian surprised me in ways that supplanted my expectations. In the best possible ways. That it doesn’t quite stick its ending, and that its Horror was a little too much for me, doesn’t change the fact that this is exactly the kind of horror movie I love to see.

It is also a movie that truly is best seen completely cold, so I will do my best to remain vague and spoiler free.

Tess (Georgina Campbell) travels to Detroit for a job interview. She books an Airbnb and arrives late at night in the pouring rain. The lockbox opens but is missing the key. The rental agency does not answer the phone. Just as she’s leaving, a man, Keith (Bill Skarsgård), opens the door. Turns out he also rented the place for the night.

Being in a strange city, in the middle of the night, during a rainstorm, finding herself stuck staying in a house with a complete stranger doesn’t exactly make Tess feel comfortable. The film has a lot of interesting things to say about the ways men and women must travel through the world in different ways to feel safe.

It also does a great job of building tension around this situation. We (and therefore Tess) are never quite sure whether or not Keith is a potential friend or a danger. In order to not spoil what comes next I’ll fast forward to a second story the movie tells.

But let’s just say this is a horror story.

AJ Gilbrade (Justin Long) is a working actor – not quite rich and famous yet, but he’s getting there. He’s introduced driving a convertible down an ocean-side highway singing along to Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi.” A phone calls interrupts this happy moment and he’s informed that his costar on his upcoming television series has accused him of sexual misconduct.

Losing that job and basically becoming untouchable to everyone else, AJ realizes he needs to liquidate some things fast in order to have the money to live on while things get sorted. Queue him traveling to Detroit to sell one of his rental properties.

Guess which house is his?

The two stories intersect but again it goes in directions I was not expecting at all.

Justin Long is a likable actor and we naturally assume that his declarations of innocence over the misconduct allegations are true. The film teases out what actually happened in some really interesting ways, and makes some comparisons to…well, again I don’t want to spoil anything.

I’ll say no more about the plot. Writer/director Zach Cregger has created a most interesting story and found ways to interject something new into some pretty familiar-sounding horror tropes. As a director, he creates a good sense of space and an eerie sense of mood and creeping horror.

The jump scares mostly worked on me but they were the least interesting aspects of the film. Likewise, the actual horror parts of the film, by which I mean the more atypical scary parts of the movie (sorry, I do want to be vague and that makes it difficult to say what I mean just here) were a little too over the top for my tastes. But otherwise I completely fell for this film.