The Friday Night Horror Movie: House of Usher (1960)

house of usher poster

As a producer, Roger Corman helped launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jonathan Demme. His films were very low-budget, often exploitive, but they almost always made money. He famously developed a strategy as a producer and distributor that allowed directors to have full creative control (within budget, of course) as long as they had a scene of violence and/or sex every fifteen minutes.

He’s produced an astonishing 512 films in his life (and at the age of 96 IMDB lists at least one upcoming project with his name on it). And though with a few exceptions, he stopped directing in the early 1970s he managed to helm over fifty films.

The most famous of those films are a series of eight films (very) loosely based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. House of the Usher was the first of those adaptations. It is a good one.

Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon) travels to the titular House of Usher, a grand, decaying, gothic old mansion, to visit his fiance Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey). He is told by the family butler, Bristol (Harry Ellerby) that she is very ill and bedridden. When he demands to see her anyway he is taken to see her brother Roderick (Vincent Price)

Roderick is afflicted with an illness that enhances all of his senses so that the slightest noise, or light, or rough surface drives him to near madness (well, as we’ll see later to total madness). He says his sister is afflicted with the same illness and tells a tale of their entire bloodline being infected with madness so intense it has affected the house itself.

He begs, no he demands that Phillip leave the house but he refuses. This only serves to drive Roderick further into madness and in turn, he drives Madeline to the very edge. Roderick is so intent in his belief that Madeline should not leave the house, nor marry, nor have children that he is prepared to murder her himself.

Corman makes great use of his sets. The mansion is sprawling with a seemingly endless set of rooms, hallways, and secret corridors. As Roderick’s insanity grows the house begins to crumble.

I’m used to watching gothic horror films being shot in stark black and white with great shadows overcoming the scenes, so it is surprising to see this in full, glorious color. It looks magnificent. There is a dream sequence toward the end that is saturated in color and even a bit psychedelic.

Mark Damon is a bit stiff, and Myrna Fahey is just ok, but good golly is Vincent Price great in this. I’m a huge fan of the actor and he’s full-throttling the role as only he can but it works oh-so-well here.

It is a bit slow to get going as these types of gothic melodramas can be, but once it gets into gear it’s a great deal of fun to watch.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Hunt (2020)

the hunt movie poster

A group of strangers wake up in an isolated forest with gags locked in their mouths. They stumble about until they find a large crate in the middle of a field. Inside the crate, they find a whole bunch of weapons. They find the key to their gags on the ground. As they are unlocking their gags and grabbing the weapons someone starts shooting at them. Several are killed and the rest scatter and run. They are being hunted.

The Hunt is an update on the classic story The Most Dangerous Game but with a lot of unnecessary and rather clunky political satire thrown in.

It was directed by Craig Zobel from a script by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof. It was produced under Blumouse Production and it has that same dull slickness that so many of his films contain. It looks good and its production values are nice but there isn’t a distinct directorial voice. It is entertaining, but ultimately forgettable.

The hunters pretty quickly take care of most of their prey, leaving only Crystal (Betty Gilpin) as the last one standing. They apparently didn’t do their homework as she is one tough cookie and has been in more than one fight before.

Gilpin is wonderful in this and she makes it all worth watching. She’s tough and savvy, and there is a little more than a glint in her eye as she takes down her attackers one by one. I’m a fan of The Most Dangerous Game stories (and there have been a lot of adaptations of the 1924 short story by Richard Connell) and I enjoyed seeing it in this modern update.

The hunters here are rich, liberal elites and they are preying on poor, illiterate rednecks whom they seem as contemptible (or deplorable if you will). The film tries to satirize both sides but its humor is too broad and blunt to actually be funny. My favorite bit comes when the hunters are choosing their prey by looking through a slide show of potential victims, all of whom have online profiles they disagree with. It is mostly white, bearded dudes but then a black guy in a cowboy hat shows up. Immediately the response is that they can’t hunt a black guy but then someone chimes in that they’ll get in trouble if they don’t have some diversity.

They bang the satiric drum throughout the film, mocking both sides with broad strokes so much that it distracted me completely from the pretty good humans hunting humans thriller aspects of the film.

The cast is filled with names you likely know – Emma Roberts, Ike Barinholtz, Sturgill Simpson, Macon Blair, Ethan Suplee, Glenn Howerton, and Hilary Swank – most of whom are making glorified cameos, many of which are promptly killed. I love when movies do that, and I love how those early deaths give the movie a feeling of anything can happen.

Of course, it then settles down into relative predictability, but for at least a few minutes I thought they were going off the rails in really interesting ways.

Like I said it ultimately winds up being an enjoyable but forgettable film. Gilpin absolutely makes it worth a watch.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Whip and the Body (1963)

the whip and the body

At an isolated castle in the 19th Century, on some isolated European coast, Kurt (Christopher Lee), the prodigal son returns. There is no fatted calf for this son though, as his father (Gustavo De Nardo) is unwilling to forgive his many trespasses. The most treacherous of which was seducing the maid’s daughter and then leaving her, causing her to commit suicide in his wake.

The maid, Giorgia (Harriet Medin) has vowed her revenge a hundred times over, and there is no lost blood between him and his younger brother Cristiano (Tony Kendall). Thus when Kurt turns up murdered, there are plenty of suspects.

Nevenka (Daliah Lavi) who had been engaged to Kurt before the whole maid’s daughter incident occurred, and is now married to Cristiano, begins seeing visions of Kurt whenever she turns. When more bodies start to drop the rest of the family begins to wonder if he hasn’t returned from the grave to seek his revenge.

Mario Bava was one of the great Italian horror directors. He was a pioneer of gothic horror and his film Blood and Black Lace (1964) is often credited as the first Giallo film ever made. Bava began his career in special effects, working his way into cinematography before finally directing. His films are noted for their visual beauty and style. When not shooting in stark black and white he made bold use of color.

The Whip and the Body makes great use of its gothic setting and tropes. The design of the castle in which most of the film takes place is as haunting as it is beautiful. The film is simply bathed in purples. It makes use of greens and reds, but bold purple permeates every shot.

As the title implies the sex gets a bit kinky, surprisingly so for a film made in 1963. Nevenka, who in most aspects of her life has to be subservient to the men in her life, takes control of her own sexuality. She hands Kurt a whip more than once and writhes in passion as he uses it on her. She married Christiano, because that’s what she was suppossed to do, but it is Kurt she truly loves. It is Kurt she continues to long for and envision even after his death (Or did he fake that? Or has his ghost returned from the dead? The film has fun toying with those ideas).

I’m making it sound more exciting than it is. The Whip and the Body is more of a gothic romance/drama than a horror. There is a lot of talking and passionate declarations. Too much for my taste, if I’m being honest. But it is so beautiful to look at, I never much minded.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Bloody Hell (2020)

bloody hell poster

After accidentally killing a woman while trying to thwart a bank robbery, Rex (Ben O’Toole) is sentenced to eight years in prison. Upon release, he decides to go to Finland to escape the media circus (the trial made him famous) and start a new life.

At the airport, he is noticed by a strange couple who keep staring at him and talking about him in Finish. In Finland, just arriving at the airport, he takes a cab. The driver puts releases some gas into the back cabin knocking Rex out. He awakes to find himself tied up in the basement of the strange couple’s house, with one of his legs cut off.

To tell much more of the plot would be to spoil much of the film’s fun. And it is a fun film, despite all the horror, dismemberment, killing, and gore. Rex talks to himself and this is displayed by having him literally talk to himself, as in the actor plays a more sarcastic version of Rex which we literally see as two people. That allows for a lot of humorous back and forth, which works better than it should.

The family consists of a mother and father, and twin sons who are all murderous psychopaths. But there is also Alia (Meg Foster) who understands how screwed up her family is but has not been able to escape. Naturally, she becomes a love interest of sorts.

For the most part, the film deftly mixes its thriller/horror moments with some pretty funny comedy and a surprising amount of whimsy. When Alia first talks to Rex and realizes he might be her salvation we whip into a fantasy sequence with her dancing with Rex in a beautiful field while romantic music plays. That sequence will get a hilarious replay towards the end of the film with some imaginative changes.

It doesn’t always work. The back and forth between Rex and his imagination can be a little grating at times. The family drifts a little too far into cartoonishness, especially at the end. But I found it quite enjoyable. Horror comedy is difficult to pull off and Bloody Hell does it better than most.

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)

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.