31 Days of Horror: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

I imagine when you are creating an original horror film, you aren’t necessarily thinking about what will happen to your characters some 17 years and 5 sequels later. Certainly John Carpenter wasn’t when he made Halloween (1978). He wasn’t particularly interested in making Halloween II (1982). His villain, Michael Myers, was unknowable, pure and simply evil, as Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) calls him in the original film. He didn’t need a backstory. We didn’t need to know what made Michael Myers tick…and kill.

But sequels, especially horror sequels, have a way of trying to fill in those blanks, of explaining away every little thing that happens in the first film. Even Carpenter did a little of that in Halloween II by making Michael Myers the brother of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) – the final girl of the first and second films – and connecting him to Celtic rituals and the occult.

Horror franchises rarely have someone overseeing every film. There generally isn’t someone keeping up with the lore and guiding the mythology every step of the way. Producers, writers, and directors come and go. Carpenter basically bailed on this series after the third film. Which is how we wound up with this mess of a film. It creates a Cult of Thorn to explain why Michael Myers kills and how he is so indestructible. It is so hated that every subsequent sequel has basically pretended this film doesn’t exist.

Set six years after Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (another film that is basically ignored by all the other sequels), everyone in this film believes Michael Myers died in the fire that ended the last one. Well, almost everyone. Loomis still thinks Myers will show up sooner or later, as he always does (and he’s always right).

The town of Haddonfield, Illinois, banned all celebrations of Halloween after Myers killing spree, but there is a movement to bring it back. The kids think it is time to move on.

Relatives of Laurie Strode’s adoptive family have now moved into the old Myers house. This includes Kara (Marianne Hagan) and her young son Danny (Devin Gardner). Across the street lives Tommy (Paul Rudd in his first film role), the kid Laurie Strode was babysitting in the first film.

Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd (JC Brandy), the little girl from the last film, is now fifteen years old and pregnant. She’s kidnapped and impregnated by the Cult of Thorn for reasons I won’t spoil.

Michael Myers is, of course, not dead, but is connected to the cult. The mythology gets a bit confusing and silly, but the good news is he’s back to killing people in Haddonfield. The bad news is the kills are spectacularly ordinary.

This film is better than its reputation, but just. It brings all of the characters I just mentioned together to try and stop Michael Myers. I appreciate the attempt to tie together some of the mythology from the previous films. It makes sense that they would tie Michael Myers ‘ indestructibility to something supernatural. It reminds me a bit of what they did in the recent Crystal Lake series in explaining Jason’s inability to die. These villains are something more than human, so you have to find some way to explain that.

The Cult of Thorn is pure nonsense, and I’m glad it was dropped in subsequent films, but I at least appreciate the attempt to bring all those loose ends together.

For some reason, they often show Michael Myers in fairly bright lights. His mask looks awful. Famously, the original mask was one of William Shatner from Star Trek, painted white. But John Carpenter was smart enough to cloud Michael Myers’ face in darkness and shadows. His mask in previous films looks otherworldly. Here it just looks silly.

Donald Pleasence gives it his old, but he’s clearly an old man and tired (he would be dead a few months later). The rest of the cast does their best. This isn’t by any means a good film, but for the sixth film in a slasher series, it isn’t terrible. You could do worse with your Halloween horror viewing.

31 Days of Horror: Friday the 13th (1980)

Friday the 13th

I’ve talked before about how I grew up in the 1980s watching slashers. Though I watched all the horror movies I could get my hands on it was the Friday the 13th series that really did it for me. I wasn’t old enough to watch them in the theater, and my parents certainly wouldn’t rent them for me so I had to watch them on basic cable. Luckily, those films were played pretty regularly. Every Friday the 13th the USA network would play two or three of them, and other stations would randomly put them on for their late-night viewings.

As such, I watched them both edited and out of order. I really don’t know if I saw them all as a teenager. I know I watched the one where Corey Feldman shaves his head, the third one with the terrible 3-D effects, and Jason Takes Manhattan. I think I saw the first one at some point, but I feel like cable stations didn’t play that one all that often, as Jason isn’t actually in it and he became the main attraction.

I remember watching Scream in college, and when Drew Barrymore answered the killer’s question about who the main bad guy in Friday the 13th was, I answered “Jason Voorhees” along with her and was surprised when that was the wrong answer. I can’t remember now if I then remembered it was his mother in the first film that was the killer, or if it came as a surprise because I had not yet seen the film. I definitely watched it soon after.

A good ten years later, not long after I got married, Wal-Mart was selling the films as DVDs for five bucks a piece. I bought the first three, with plans on watching them and then buying the others later. I remember watching the first film and thinking it was really bad. By that point I had discovered the horror films of the Italians and Japanese and watched a whole lot of other horror films. Slashers seemed kind of old hat by then. Boring and derivative. I was also a bit more of a cinephile, and so Friday the 13th just seemed like an excuse to show tits and blood on screen and little else.

Another couple of decades have passed, and I find myself back to being able to enjoy them (I reviewed the first eight films over at Cinema Sentries). With a new Peacock series, Crystal Lake, which brings us the backstory of Jason and Mrs. Voorhees, I decided to revisit the first film.

It is amazing how slow this film is to get started. We do get a kill in the first ten minutes – a flashback to 1957 sits with a happy sing-along at Camp Crystal Lake; a horny couple slips off to get sexy, only to wind up murdered. Then we move back to the present. The camp was closed a few years back when a young boy drowned, but now they plan to reopen it. Annie (Robbi Morgan), the camp’s new cook, is hitchhiking her way to camp. She comes into the nearby town and asks around about how to get there. She’s met with stares and mean glares. She shouldn’t go to “Camp Blood,” they say. A crazy man warns her that she’ll die if she does. Eventually, a trucker agrees to take her close to the camp. On the way, he warns her of the camp’s terrible past. He drops her off at a crossroads where she’s picked up by an unknown person in a Jeep. She gets herself dead.

But then we go a long time before another murder happens. We meet the rest of the counselors. They do some work around the camp. They swim in the lake and generally clown around. Some of them (including a young Kevin Bacon) get sexy with each other, while others play strip Monopoly. It is all fairly tame and rather silly. It is kind of a hang-out movie for a while.

Then the killings begin proper. None of them are particularly memorable. There are some cut throats and a pretty gruesome arrow through the neck, but the later films will do a much better job of bringing the kills. The reveal that it is Jason’s mother (Betsy Palmer) who is the killer comes out of left field. Jason is barely mentioned in the film. There are a couple of lines explaining how the counselors weren’t very attentive, and Jason drowned accidentally, but the film doesn’t make a big deal out of it. His mother is barely mentioned at all. Then, all of a sudden, there she is as the killer. It’s funny, too, because she’s an older-looking, middle-aged woman with short hair and a church lady sweater. She looks nothing like a killer. But Palmer’s unhinged performance absolutely sells it.

It is curious to realize that this film launched a massive horror franchise. It’s not a bad film; I find myself quite liking it (though I can’t really remove all the nostalgia from my mind while watching it now). But I can’t say that it is better or more interesting than any number of other slashers that came out at the same time. We don’t even get Jason in a hockey mask in this one (Jason wouldn’t really show up until the next film, and it would take the third one before the hockey mask shows up.)

But it made a lot of money and spawned sequels, and here I am talking about it some forty years later.

31 Days of Horror: Halloween II (1981)

I have always thought that John Carpenter directed Halloween II. Up until today, I would have told you that he didn’t want to direct it, but after the massive success of the first one, he was told by the studio, the producers, or some such higher-up that they were going to make a sequel with or without him, and he decided it would be best if it was with him.

Turns out I was wrong on the first part, and the second part I guess I just made up. It is true that Carpenter didn’t really want there to be a sequel, had no interest in making one, but was pressured into making it. But he was never given an ultimatum, and he never agreed to direct. That job fell to Rick Rosenthal. Carpenter did write the script, along with the original film’s co-writer Debra Hill. He was also a producer and, depending on who you believe, Carpenter either came in during the filming stage and directed a few scenes himself, or had a large hand in post-production, adding in some extra violence and gore.

It is easy to see why I believed this was a John Carpenter film. His name is featured prominently in the credits (I guess I always overlook the Directed By card), he did write and produce this one (he basically completely bowed out of all the other films featuring Michael Myers after this – he did produce Halloween III, but Myers isn’t in that one), and this looks and feels like a John Carpenter film. That feeling is helped by the plot of this one taking place immediately after the original one; it stars most of the same cast and utilizes the same cinematographer, and Rosenthal has stated he intentionally mimicked Carpenter’s style in the first film.

This one gets a lot of hate in certain corners of the internet (and I now wonder if that isn’t because it was helmed by Rosenthal and not Carpenter), but I unabashedly love it. True, it isn’t as good as the first one, but it looks fantastic, has some great deaths, and the hospital setting is terrific.

It really does begin just as the original ends. Actually, it begins a couple of minutes into the ending of the first one. We revisit Michael Myers getting “killed” by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), but from a slightly different perspective. Then we watch him walk away.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to the hospital with some cuts and bruises and a pretty banged-up leg. Weirdly, Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t have a whole lot of screen time in this film. She’ll spend the first half of it basically lying in a hospital bed. She gets plenty of action in the back half, though. But first, we’ll spend time with various nurses and staff members of the hospital. They will mostly become cannon fodder for Michael Myers.

Myers will spend that first half of the film wandering around the town of Haddonfield, randomly killing folks. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) will do a poor job of hunting him down. Eventually, Myers will hear someone say something about how Laurie was sent to the hospital, and he’ll head that way. It all leads to a long showdown between Laurie, Loomis, and Michael Myers.

The stuff in the town is fine. There are some good kills, and it helps build tension to the hospital showdown. Pleasence plays Loomis even more hysterically than he does in the first. Having shot the man multiple times at the end of the first film, he’s now more sure than ever that Michael Myers is not human but something like a demon.

The hospital stuff is well done, if a little silly at times. One of the nurses, after getting yelled at for being late, decides to slip off with a boy to the lower decks, where there is some kind of therapeutic hot tub where she gets sexy (and dead). It always drives me a little crazy when hospital lights are turned off or dimmed. Sure, you can turn your room lights off, but hospitals are notoriously bright. They have to be. Doctors, nurses, and staff can’t function if they can’t see. But yeah, it makes the movie a lot moodier.

Those long hallways are used effectively, and Michael Myers still has a way of popping into a scene seemingly out of nowhere. I’d argue that Halloween is not only one of the greatest horror movies, but is a great movie on its own merits. Halloween II is a great slasher, but not a particularly good movie.

Still, I love it so.

31 Days of Horror: Sweet Sixteen (1982)

At the heart of this relatively obscure, early 1980s slasher is Marci Burke (Dana Kimmell), a teenager and daughter of the town’s sheriff (Bo Hopkins). She’s bright, outgoing, and a bit of a detective herself. When Sheriff Burke comes across a murder scene, she is with him. But she doesn’t recoil from it; she’s enthralled. She gives her Dad ideas on how to best investigate. He calls her Nancy Drew and tries to keep her away from the gore.

The scenes with her are delightful. I could watch a whole movie of her and her dad solving crimes in this small town. But this isn’t a fun little mystery movie; this is a slasher horror, so of course we don’t stick with those two.

It is Melissa Morgan (Aleisa Shirley) who is our protagonist. She’s the fifteen-year-old who thinks of herself as much older and wiser than the kid she really is. She’s also new to town; her father has moved her there for some kind of Native American archeological dig. And she’s a big flirt. The film begins with her walking to the seedier side of town, talking a boy into giving her a ride home, and almost immediately making out with him.

The thing is, every boy she flirts with gets himself brutally killed. Naturally, she becomes a suspect. But Sheriff Burke is a good cop. He’s not going to arrest a 15-year-old girl right before her Sweet Sixteen birthday. Bo Hopkins has such a natural screen presence. I immediately like him, and he plays the Sheriff with real warmth.

There is a lot of typical 1980s slasher nonsense in this film. We get a skinny dip in the local pond, a bit of sexing, some blood-soaked gore, and a whole lot of racism. The film tries to be on the right side of history for that last part. There is a native American character, Jason (Don Shanks). He is repeatedly harassed by some local rednecks. The film clearly depicts them as racist, but it still seems to delight in those scenes. He’s also a little too stereotypical for my tastes.

Most of the men in this film, including some of the “good guys,” do an awful lot of leering at Melissa. Jason practically wags his tongue at her.

If you can overlook those things (and admittedly it is quite a lot to overlook), there is a pretty good film underneath. Seriously, I would have loved a whole series of films with the Sheriff and his daughter solving crimes.

31 Days of Horror: The Burning (1981)

John Carpenter’s Halloween is one of the most successful independent films of all time. Its budget ($300,000) to box-office results ($70,0000) made it the most profitable movie for a long time. It arguably started the slasher boom. It certainly helped create many of the tropes of the genre and spawned numerous imitators.

Friday the 13th was one of those imitators. Its massive success solidified the tropes, and it spawned its own imitators. The Burning is one.

I was far too young to have seen Halloween, Friday the 13th, or The Burning in theaters. But the success of the first two films meant I did see them years later on cable TV and home video. But The Burning was not so successful and thus didn’t get repeated on late-night TV. I don’t recall ever seeing it in the aisles of my local video stores. Which either means they didn’t carry it, or possibly that the VHS cover just wasn’t that memorable.

But lately it has been showing up in my feeds. I see it nearly every time I browse through my streaming services for something to watch, and it pops up regularly on my Bluesky and Reddit accounts. I don’t know why that is, except that we are probably all unknowingly led by the algorithm.

Presumably, The Burning is cheap to buy the rights to, which leads all the streaming services to put it on their services, presumably around this time of year. And then it adds that to the recommended lists of horror nerds like me. Some of us watch it, and then we talk about it on social media, which makes more people watch it, and that tells the algorithm to recommend it more, and the circle continues.

The Burning was also the first film credit for a young Jason Alexander, and Holly Hunter has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role. No doubt that adds fuel to the algorithmic fire.

I finally watched it, and it’s not bad.

Like Friday the 13th, this one is set at a summer camp with a bunch of horny teens. Unlike it The Burning’s camp doesn’t have a horrible past. That would be another camp not far from Camp Stonewater. In our opening scene, we see some campers play a prank at the other camp. This is five years before the events of our story really begin. Camp Blackfoot is run by Cropsey, an alcoholic arsehole whom the kids all detest. Their prank goes wrong, and Cropsey finds himself burned alive. He doesn’t die, but is grotesquely mutilated. Five years later, he gets out of the hospital and starts chopping up kids at Camp Stonewater (Blackfoot having been shut down after the incident).

At Camp Stonewater, we get the usual nonsense with the usual assortment of characters. There is the awkward nerd, the buff jerk trying to make it with the hot girl, the attractive counselor and his girl, and the jokester (Jason Alexander). Plus an assortment of others playing pranks, sports, and generally goofing around.

It is all more or less done well. There is nothing new here, but the characters are enjoyable enough. There is a lot of stalking by the killer in the first half. The now-common view of things from the killer’s POV from behind some bushes and the like happens quite a bit. That amuses me. The killer stalks these kids for like two days before he does any killing. Funny to think of this burned-up man standing around in the trees all that time just spying on them.

The older kids (who make up our main cast and get rid of most of the extras) go on a long canoe ride for a couple of days. That’s when the killings begin. The killings are pretty good (the effects were done by Tom Savini). Who lives and who dies is a little surprising. And the conclusion is pretty cool.

I’m using faint praise because this isn’t a great movie. It isn’t as good as Halloween or the original Friday the 13th, but it is better than a lot of slashers, and if you like the genre, then this is well worth watching.

31 Days of Horror: Alone in the Dark (1982)

Dr. Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence) is one of those wacky doctors who thinks the patients at a psychiatric ward shouldn’t be called crazy or locked up and heavily medicated. They need kindness and understanding. They should be more or less allowed to do what they want, and instead of correcting their delusions, you should just run with them. Except for the people on the third floor. Those guys are nuts. They have to be securely locked away.

Even then, they make the floor look rather cozy. Oh, there are big, strong doors that can swing shut and lock in an instant, and if anyone tries to open a window, barricades come down fast. But if everyone behaves, then the place looks like a nice place to live.

The film makes a big deal about the electric locks. Those doors open and shut electronically. The windows are the same. A guard says they are perfectly safe as long as the power doesn’t go out. So naturally, the power goes out.

The four guys on the third floor escape and wreak havoc. They will eventually find their way to Dr. Dan Potter’s (Dwight Schultz) house. He’s a new psychiatrist at the hospital, having just replaced a guy who moved to another town. But the third-floor guys think he must have killed that guy, and now they want revenge.

The back half of the film becomes a station-under-siege film. It’s pretty good.

It’s also pretty weird. The third-floor guys are played by Martin Landau (as a pyromaniac preacher), Jack Palance (and a disturbed former POW), Erland Van Lidth (as a child molester known as “fatty”), and a dude who only shows his face at the end and is only known as “Bleeder.”

Before they lay siege to Potter’s house, they go into town where everybody is looting because all that stands between society and chaos is a little power outage. They have some fun and get some weapons. It is a bit silly, really.

Our villains are having a lot of fun. Donald Pleasance isn’t really given enough to make his character interesting. Once the siege starts, things get interesting. I love a good base-under-siege story, and this one’s done well.

It is a film I’m happy to watch during Spooky season, but not one I’m likely to ever return to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Incubus (1981)

The Incubus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Primate (2026)

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I watched Her Private Hell, the new Nicolas Winding Refn film, expecting it to be tonight’s Friday Night Horror Movie, but it is a mess. I don’t know what it is, but I definitely wouldn’t call it horror, despite there being a serial killer called ” The Leatherman.” I like some of Refn’s films, but sometimes he can crawl so far up his arse that I have no desire to try to figure out what he’s up to.

So, instead of an impenetrable arthouse film, I went with a big, dumb monster movie.

Primate is really a slasher movie, a throwback to 1980s horror with an excellent score that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dario Argento film.

A bunch of dumb college kids travel to Hawaii to spend some time at Lucy Pinborough’s (Johnny Sequoyah) big, modern, and totally secluded house. Her dead mom was a linguist, and she kept a pet chimpanzee that she taught sign language to (and possibly lip-reading). Lucy’s Dad (Troy Kotsur) is deaf, so Lucy and her young sister both know sign language. Something that will sort of come in handy when the chimp goes crazy and they need to keep quiet. Except that concept is only used once, and that barely.

After some rather dull exposition, the chimp gets out and starts attacking our heroes (such that they are). This is where the film gets good. The violence is pretty thrilling (and blood-soaked – this film isn’t afraid of some good, old-fashioned gore). There is a long set piece with the kids inside a pool. The chimp can’t swim and is afraid to jump in the pool, so they are safe there. But the pool isn’t that big, and there is only one way out. This gives us plenty of thrills and scares, and some gnarly kills.

The characters are mostly unlikeable and not that interesting. And they make a lot of ridiculously stupid moves. It is a very dumb movie, but also a lot of fun. It does have that 1980s slasher vibe to it, and you know I am a fan of that.

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.