Repulsion (1965)

1965
Directed by Roman Polanski
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Yvonne Furneaux, Ian Hendry and John Fraser

This is it.  The final and slightly late-ish film in the 2017 Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular.  Released in 1965 well after color feature films had already become the norm, Repulsion is another one of those rarities that no doubt disqualifies me from writing for anything other than my own blog, because I wasn't into this one at all.  That 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes can suck eggs.

Well, alright, I didn't think this flick was THAT bad.  It's definitely a Roman Polanski film, that's for sure.  I have now seen all three movies in his "Apartment Trilogy," a non-connected series of horror flicks based around an apartment complex as its main setting comprising this, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant.  All of them are slow burns, and that might be the understatement of the century.  For those not in the know, Polanski is a pretty legendary director noted in film circles for his ability to create paranoia on celluloid.  However, you don't come to the Lick Ness Monster blog for details like that.  He's also a pretty legendary perv.  Now that's the kind of detail you come here for!  But if you want some analysis, paranoia as a theme often leads to lots and lots and lots of padding.  While all of that padding eventually does lead up to some kickass stuff, I can't say that it was an enjoyable experience.  Then again, it might just be that pesky glandular condition rearing its ugly head once more.  Introductory paragraphs completed.  Commence plot description.

Waxing about plots in a movie like this is a very challenging experience.  Advance warning - prepare for lots of padding in this review, just like there is lots of padding in this film's 105-minute running time.  I can't help but notice that my enjoyment of a lot of these older horror films has dipped as time has passed and directors have felt the need to expand the movies past the 75-minute mark.  To this day, I believe that horror is a genre best-suited to being right around 90 minutes, and this outlook will never change.  See the above rant?  That's one paragraph of my four-paragraph "plot" section of this review already killed, baby!

Your star character is Carol Ledoux, played by the impossibly hot Catherine Deneuve in a performance that deserves most of the praise it gets.  I say most because she definitely has a very thick French accent and it's a bit hard to make out what she's saying through some of the dialogue scenes.  But this is a fairly long film, and almost every shot focuses on her in some capacity, so it was no small feat that this character comes off as fairly three-dimensional.  She works as a manicurist, listening to the rantings of this one really bitchy customer in repeated scenes that has a pretty grisly payoff (and I'm not going to spoil that one).  If memory serves correct, the character doesn't have a WHOLE lot of dialogue, so it's more of a minor annoyance than anything.  Presence-wise, Deneuve has this nailed.

A good portion of the movie is spent simply living with the daily grind of Carol's life.  She lives with her older sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), but the real story here is watching her awkward interactions with men.  In particular, one man, Colin (John Fraser), who she has dinner with early in the film and promtply rebukes for the next five minutes.  And let me tell you something (brother), watching this guy try to beta-male his way into a second date during all of that time is one of the most pathetic things you've ever seen in your life, prompting an honest-to-goodness "oh, come on, give up, bro."  Knowing what is to come for Colin, my advice was rock solid.  Spoiler alert.

See, Carol has a real aversion to relationships and sexuality.  We watch her lie in bed listening to Helen and her boyfriend mackin' it in the adjacent room in addition to all of the ducking she does from creepy Colin.  Eventually, Helen and boyfriend guy head out of town on holiday, leaving Carol all by her lonesome in the apartment.  And then a whole bunch of stuff starts happening something like an hour into the movie, including one genuinely unexpected murder scene and this one really effective nightmare shot involving Carol walking down a hallway with hands stretching out trying to touch her.  The theme of this movie isn't hard to discern.

There are definitely movies of this type that I enjoy.  One of my favorite horror films of all time is Ringu, and that flick is the very definition of the slow burn and a big payoff.  That film had the benefit of a pair of truly awesome characters to ride along with, though, and this one doesn't.  Deneuve is definitely worth watching, both for her acting ability and ridiculous attractiveness.  Unfortunately, we also have to suffer through some bits of Colin whining to one of his friends about his inability to score with her, and those scenes...I'm not gonna lie, they almost made me bail on this movie.  But I don't dive into a movie these days without the intention of reviewing for this here blog, so I soldiered on like the pro I am.  Yeah.  A pro.  Some people might see details like this as enriching to the experience and falling into the mood of paranoia that Polanski was trying to replicate here, but I mostly just found it dull.

Which brings me to this movie's saving grace.  Namely, the third act.  Once everything becomes clear about the hallucinations that Carol dreams up throughout the humdrum existence of her weekend without her sister in the house, we actually get to see some pretty scary stuff.  The score by Chico Hamilton does a fantastic job adding to that mood in addition to the cinematography by Gilbert Taylor.  Everything builds up not to a murder scene or the police capturing Carol, but a reveal shown in a photograph that was no doubt a major inspiration on Stanley Kubrick in the finale of The Shining.  This whole thing was indeed chilling and left me a little disturbed walking away from the television.  Not quite enough to recommend this one, however, because there are just too many slow burn films that I deem as more worthy of your time.

Thus, I award this movie that currently ranks at #14 on Rotten Tomatoes' G.O.A.T. list ** out of ****.  Unless you're REALLY into movies that are big on theming and atmosphere over a satisfying story, I don't know if you'll want to watch this one a bunch.  And with that, I will be back next year with a series of exceedingly negative reviews.  Get ready.

Night of the Demon (1957)

1957
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins and Niall MacGinnis

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, a movie in the 2017 Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular that I can't quite recommend.  Night of the Demon isn't a bad flick by any stretch of the imagination, but I did find it to be a pretty damn tepid one.  A lot of the movies that I've watched this silly season have been great because they're all forward momentum with absolutely no time for bullshit.  The running time on this one pushes past 90 minutes, and it shows big time with how much shots there are of dudes sitting around in libraries talking about stuff.  Not terribly exciting.  Pretty much every critic alive disagrees with me.  I just thought I would throw that little factoid out there.

Without a doubt, director Jacques Tourneur had some grand plans for this movie.  It's shot with the kind of care and attention to detail that only directors pre-CGI could have.  There are also exactly three - count 'em, three - scenes that I absolutely LOVED, which we'll be getting to in due time.  So Tourneur knew what the hell he was doing; in my mind, it was just that the story wasn't big enough.  The plot comes from a 1911 M.R. James short story called "Casting the Runes," and with this, I now get another of the references in the "Science Fiction, Double Feature" Rocky Horror song.  With absolutely no knowledge of how long that story is, I can only surmise that the effort to stretch it to feature length was the undoing here.  With all of that said, let's go about unpacking said small plot in a big movie.

Within five minutes of the movie starting we get one of those aforementioned scenes that I loved.  Welcome to the house of Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), a man suspected of dabbling in Satanism.  Although, is Satanism really something that can be dabbled in?  It kind of seems like an all-or-nothing proposition.  That theory gets tested when rival Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham) threatens to expose him and getes reminded of the threat that hangs over his head.  Upon driving home, a bunch of creepy sound effects start playing on the soundtrack...and then a freakin' animated demon emerges from the forest and kills the ever-loving f**k out of him.  This whole bit is really chilling and effective, and I'll admit to being amped for everything to come.  But then we meet Dr. Holden.

Yes, folks, Dr. Holden.  John Holden, to be precise, played by Dana Andrews and unfortunately a very mopey, somewhat dislikable character who dominates the plot from here on out.  Weirdly enough, I don't even think it's the way that the character was constructed - Holden is there to be the skeptic of the movie, the guy who believes that nothing that happened or is happening is because of any kind of supernatural slant.  But...I don't know.  A lot of the other reviews I've read of this movie just heap praise on Andrews in this role, and I'm sure he was a fine actor in his time, but here he just kind of comes off as a sanctimonious prick.  Is this truth, or is this just another instance of that incredibly rare (to the point of affecting one person on Earth) glandular condition?  Only time will tell.

The plot device is this: Holden is an American professor who is now in England to attend the conference where Harrington intended on exposing Karswell's Satanic cult.  There's also a quasi-love interest in the form of Harrington's niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins) who promptly contributes nothing else to the movie other than some red-hot black-and-white sexual tension.  We get some delightful bickering as Holden and Karswell mock each other's beliefs (or lack thereof) before we get the real crux of the story: Karswell casually informing Holden that he has three days left to live.  Gulp.

I should also point out that there is this whole side plot involving a character named Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), another link between cult activity and Karswell.  Hobart has been cataonic since the death of his brother, and figuring out why takes up the bulk of the running time.  See, Karswell is able to cause anyone to be cursed by passing an unholy parchment onto their person - something that he did with both Hobart (who in turn passed the document back to his own brother) and now with Holden.  From here, the movie takes on the "race against time" format as Hobart figures out the mystery, eventually leading us to a final ten minutes that actually manages to redeem the movie somewhat in my own mind.  At least as much as a fantastic game of "pass the parchment" can be.  You'd be surprised how covert you have to be to get somebody to carry a paper around if they know it's coming back.

First, some good stuff.  The atmosphere of the film is fantastic, especially some of the stuff at Karswell's mansion.  In particular, there is one shot of Holden looing down what appears to be an endless hallway that glued me to the television screen.  On the acting end, MacGinnis turns in the best performance of the movie by far.  The character of Karswell really isn't some vile, nasty cult leader - at least in my own mind.  He's a guy trying to save his own skin, and the way that he does this is no doubt immoral, but weirdly enough the dude actually comes across as somewhat likable.  The music is also extremely well-done, granting all the shots of the English countryside and the jagged edges of the Karswell home its appropriate dreariness.

The problem that I had with Night of the Demon is that it's just a really boring film with a lot of padding.  How much padding?  There is a seance scene where various characters talk to Harrington, complete with a comedic gold traditional British song being sung beforehand.  It might not sound funny, but trust me...it is.  There's also a scene where Hobart is hypnotized into telling the audience the key piece of information about sacred parchments being responsible for all of the death.  Both of these take up something like five minutes of running time, and...slog.  For American release, it was trimmed down by roughly 13 minutes and re-titled as Curse of the Demon, and I can see why the change was made.  But I wanted to be legit - I watched this movie in its full, intended form, so that's what I'm reviewing.  Thus, the giant demon attack at the end of the movie can't quite pull it up to positive territory.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.

The time for judgment is upon us.  ** out of ****.  The flick is definitely worth checking out for historical purposes, but it's not one that you'll ever want to revisit.  At least I won't.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

1956

Directed by Don Siegel
Starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones

We've got another first here on the ol' blog, ladies and gentlemen.  This is the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers  I've ever seen, and that is some accomplishment considering just how many times this flick has been remade/readapted.  There's the late '70s version with Donald Sutherland's fantastic curly hair, there's the 1994 one with Meg Tilly and her retained ridiculous level of hotness after her even more ridiculous '80s prime, and then there's the Nicole Kidman version.  The less said about that one the better, because it looked boring as all get out.  They also seemed to take some words away from the title with each successive reboot.  George Orwell was right about language.  Now I've seen the O.G. version and have nothing else to compare it to, and I can report that this story is definitely worth the hype and the spot that it has in the NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY.  Suck it, anti-horror snobs.

Much like last week's film, Them!, this one was granted a big budget, a respected director and an accomplished cast by its studio and expected to be a big deal.  While a lot of people point to this period of history as a time when the studios relegated horror and thriller films to the summer teenage dead-time, I think they actually gave these flicks MORE respect then.  Universal had a whole wing of its library dedicated to heavily made-up monsters, after all.  Much like all of those Universal monsters, Warner Bros. had themselves a really strong piece of source material in the 1954 Jack Finney novel Body Snatchers, and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring snatched (/tomatoes) every last bit of tension that he could get from Finney's no-doubt tobacco-stained fingers.  How so?  Well, read up and find out.

The movie opens with Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) screaming his ears out at a team of psychologists demanding to know why he is acting like an insane person.  We flash from here to the fictional town of Santa Mira, California.  More specifically, Santa Mira, California, a scant few days earlier, as Miles is called back to town due to a rash of people reporting mysterious ailments that seem to clear up as quick as they arrive.  McCarthy quietly turns in a performance for the ages, doing the Jimmy Stewart "everyman against impossible odds" role to perfection.  He's got a love interest in the form of ex-girlfriend Becky Driscoll (the lovely Dana Wynter - so lovely that her arrival in the movie is accompanied by tender, tinkly music) back in town after going through a divorce, and this plot manages to hold your attention without once getting annoying.  So then...the matter of those patients?

It starts off innocently enough, with Becky's cousin believing that her uncle isn't quite who he seems to be.  He looks the same, but something is off.  The glassy state and complete emotionlessness should be enough of a giveaway, but we have another hour left to kill.  The plot then moves to the strange case of Bennell's friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) who has found a near carbon copy of himself in the closet.  Not soon thereafter, Bennell finds a similar copy of Becky in her father's basement.  Then, we get the dinner party, the trip to the greenhouse, and the discovery of the pods.

The term "Pod People" is definitely one that is familiar to horror fans.  Even I was more than aware of what they were many years ago, mainly due to the awesome level in the SNES masterpiece "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" and the host segments from the MST3K episode Giant Spider Invasion that pay homage to this film.  To a lot of people, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the "Pod People" movie, and that's where the plot leads us from this point on.  The exposition is spelled out to us in the form of a couple of helpful pod people, and it goes as follows: these alien seeds have been travelling through space for eons, finally finding Earth in the farmlands of Santa Mira.  They hatch, take on the form of a host, and fully inhabit said host's mind and memories when the host falls asleep.  And now that Bennell and Becky know about the plan, they're target #1 for assimilation.

In the final trimester, almost the entire town has been copied and taken over by the pods.  There are some admittedly tense sequences as the hero and the heroine try to escape the town with the denizens after them, trying to also run away from sleep all the while.  I know it might not sound like much, but it is.  The finale, with Bennell and Becky hiding away in an abandoned mine and spotting that gigantic farm full of farmers ready to deliver the pods all over the country is actually pretty dreadful.  And I mean that in the best way.

Throughout my Magellan-like travels watching a lot of these older horror films, I've noticed a recurring trend that the material is taken deadly serious.  There was no 1980s nostalgia to pull from in the 1950s, so that self-referential tone just isn't there, and thank the lord for the nighttime on that one.  More than anything else, though, this movie is carried by Kevin McCarthy.  While there's a large group of characters that we actually get to care about in this flick, this is his movie all the way and he delivers big time.  But it's not just him.  Wynter is also compelling in her own way, as is King Donovan as Jack and Carolyn Jones as his wife Teddy.  I recognized Jones right away, as she was Elvis Presley's costar in King Creole, easily the best movie that the King ever did throughout his long and nonillustrious film career.  But I digress.

I'm wracking my brain trying to think of a weakness this movie has, and the only area that I can think of where Invasion of the Body Snatchers even comes close to being weak is that some of the middle section drags.  The stretch that lasts from Jack finding his body double leading up to the big reveal of the discovery of the first pod doesn't move along quite as brisk as the rest of the film, but it seems like I say this sort of thing every week.  Everything else fires on all cylinders, from the music to the camera work to the script to the performances.  It even has an ending that wraps up nice and neatly in about 30 seconds flat, and I cannot tell you how grateful I was that this movie was made in 1956, because I was immediately struck by that sinking feeling that a modern movie would probably carry on for another 40 minutes of terminal boredom involving the military going back to Santa Mira to fight off the Podded-up locals.  Three cheers for simplicity and 80-minute running times!

*** 1/2 out of ****.  It's definitely worth a buy and a watch for all horror fans, whether or not you're all about the history of the genre or not.

Them! (1954)

1954

Directed by Gordon Douglas
Starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon and James Arness

Longtime readers of the blog know one unequivocal fact: I am f**king terrified of insects.  Seriously, the damn things are the stuff of nightmares for me.  I've had some incidents with them over the years going all the way back to my childhood fear of grasshoppers (yes, seriously), including being frozen in fear for something like five minutes one time when a winged grasshopper flew into my car.  I'm well aware of the irony.  Nerdy blog horror guy can watch people get sliced up and go right to sleep immediately afterward, but bugs?  Yeah, keep them away.

As such, I knew that Them! was going to be a damn scary movie for yours truly before I even hit the "play" button.  I heard of this flick many years ago, back when I used to read every book about classic horror that my middle school library had.  The page-long spread in one of them about...um...Them! stood out immediately.  Out of all insects, ants are truly some of the most amazing, aren't they?  They can lift 20 times their body weight, they have a complex social structure, and they just seem to possess this weird intelligence that makes them slightly unnerving.  Throw these critters into an O.G. 1950s-style creature feature complete with the always great "nuclear testing makes something grow to Brobdingnagian proportions" plot, and you've got a winner.  Watching the story unfold, I also noticed several things that were later ripped off in James Cameron's Aliens, which we'll get to...RIGHT NOW!

This is a film that got plenty of critical praise at the time it was released, and it's easy to see why since the script here wastes precious little time building this palpable sense of dread.  A helicopter pilot is out cruising a lonely beat in the Mexico desert when they spot a lone little girl wandering around.  Sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore, who is aces as the "everyman forced to be a hero" character) and his partner Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake) are on the scene to pick her up, and what they find is a child unable to speak, terrified into silence at whatever she has witnessed.  The girl is played by Sandy Descher, and while her role in this movie is brief, she makes an indelible impression - so much that it's easy to see why Cameron chose to ape this plot device with Newt in the aforementioned Aliens.  This sequence eventually leads to the discovery of two busted-up buildings, the latter of the two the site of a shootout between Ed and an unseen assailant that gives us our first offscreen screaming death.

Flash forward right along in our Screenwriting 101 lesson, as the film then introduces us to the rest of our main characters.  There's FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness of Gunsmoke and my dad's favorite actor of all time fame) who fills in the "somewhat officious nice guy" role.  But then there's the real stars of this shindig, the antologists - Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter Pat (Joan Weldon).  They give us some more dread as they share what their specialty is, and they are present when Ben and Robert go scouting the desert for whatever it is that's killing a whole bunch of seemingly random people for no reason.  Yeah, there's hints of romantic tension between Robert and Pat that pretty much goes nowhere, but just ignore that plot thread.  Eventually, Pat walks up that hill as she hears the curious sound that has been playing at various intervals throughout the film thus far and sees...it.  A giant freaking ant.

Amazingly enough, the creature effects still look pretty good more than sixty years later.  I'm a broken record when it comes to this subject, but here we go again: hand-made effects are 17 times as effective as CGI, because when it's done right it looks like it actually MIGHT be real, as compared to Michael Bay's goddamn crayola drawings, which just look like goddamn crayola drawings.  For its time period, Them! had a big budget to work with, and it's a good thing because the ants are onscreen quite a bit from this point in the movie forward.  Medford gives us the requisite science lessons that accompany the events and attack scenes, explaining that this desert was the site of the very first nuclear test a decade earlier.  Yup, we tampered in God's domain, or something.

The pace in this movie is brisk, and all of the big set pieces fire along in a slam-bang way.  We go from the ants' nesting site in the desert (and man, that sequence was nothing short of gut-wrenchingly tense for this guy) to an offshore ocean liner to the canals underneath Los Angeles.  There's a lot of yelling, a lot of politicians wondering how the hell they're going to keep 30-foot ants under wraps, and a lot of machine gun fire.  There's really a lot of that.  The finale takes place with the ants threatening to colonize L.A., and as I type this I'm actually feeling trepidation imagining such a thing happening under my small Minnesota town.  Ick.  And yes, folks, I was into the climactic scenes of this movie.

The writers here did a great job with both main things they set out to do.  First, they wanted to create a likable group of main characters, and this is a really memorable bunch.  Peterson has the emotional stakes of trying to avenge the death of his state trooper understudy, while both Medford and his daughter serve as the representatives of science doing their best to use their intellect to save mankind.  Because if these bugs manage to make a decent amount of colonies, it's the end of civilization.  Yet more nightmare fuel.  These likable characters lead us into goal #2, as we get more than a few truly cringe-worthy moments with these characters in peril.  The first reveal of the scout ant in the desert with Pat coming face-to-face with those mandibles...don't even get me started.  But then again, I don't know many other people besides myself who avoid knocking over anthills at all costs because they're worried that they'll sneak into your bedroom and kill you at night, so your mileage might vary.  And folks, I wish I was making that up.

While I greatly enjoyed pretty much everything this film had to offer, I will admit that it does lose some of its steam in the second half.  I think the movie would have been damn near perfect had they just confined the entire story to the remote New Mexico population and the vast desert, ending with the long, slow descent into the colony and coming face-to-face with the queen (a scene that we do get, and yet another thing that Cameron would later xerox).  Once the bugs start hitting different locations, the tension kind of dissipates, in no small part due to the fact that we are then introduced to a bunch of government officials that I couldn't have possibly cared less about.  I also think they should have kept the terrified mute girl around longer in the story than they did.  Hey, I never said that Cameron didn't do a GOOD job ripping this movie off!

Those flaws, though, are very minor.  If you like good 1950s-era acting and special effects and you're scared of bugs like I am, odds are you'll really enjoy this movie.  *** 1/2 out of ****.  And you can bet your ass I ain't watching this one again.

Dead of Night (1945)

1945
Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer and Basil Dearden
Starring Michael Redgrave, Mervyn Jones, Frederick Valk and Roland Culver

Now this one was a real unexpected bonus.  When I picked out the movies to be featured in the Black (And White) Christmas Spectacular, I knew that this one didn't have color, and it was pretty damn respected critically.  Lo and behold it's also an anthology film!  I friggin' love anthology horror films, to the point where I think one of these should be pretty much mandatory every October.  Couple that with the fact that we're dealing with a 1945 release date and almost every character in it compulsively lighting up cigarettes and I knew that this one was right up my alley.

Anthology flicks are really cool to me because you get forced - sometimes jarring - changes of pace at various intervals throughout your running time.  In GOOD movies of this nature, the stories are wildly different and give you a chance to get all of the gooey goodness that the horror genre has to offer.  I don't think this was ever done better than it was in the Stephen King-George Romero classic Creepshow, but I've seen enough of these things to know what I'm talking about.  Maybe.  You know, if they made some kind of Horror Movie University, odds are that I probably wouldn't even rank in the upper 50th percentile, so take that for what it's worth.  Nobody ever said I was good at selling my credibility when it comes to reading a blog.  But based on my somewhat limited knowledge, I can report that Dead of Night is definitely worth your while.  Let's get to the specifics.

Most movies of this nature have some kind of framing device, and this time we've got a doozy.  Meet Walter Craig (Mervyn Jones), incredulous guy who has been having a recurring dream about...well, pretty much what he's experiencing right now.  Namely, being called away to a countryside home to meet a group of strangers, all of whom he has also seen many times before.  Introductions are made, accents are established (this movie is very British, to the point that I actually had to turn on subtitles), and characterizations pop.  The most interesting characters are Eliot Foley (Roland Culver), the owner and host of the festivities, and Dr. van Straaten (Frederick Valk), psychologist in the vein of Sigmund Freud who goes about debunking all of the stories that are about to go down.  Stories, you say?

Well, it seems as if Walter's ravings about seeing all of this before inspires all of the house guests to share their own instances of paranormal phenomena from their past.  First up is racecar driver Hugh Grainger's (Anthony Baird) dalliance with premonition.  This is the shortest and weakest out of the five, so the less said about it the better.  Next up is teenager Sally O'Hara (Sally Ann Howes), who tells of her encounter with a ghost at a Christmas party.  Howes is a really good actress, and it's fun to watch her go between playful and frightened at the drop of a hat.

With that, the movie starts going a bit more in depth.  The third segment features the gorgeous Joan Cortland (played by the awesomely named Googie Withers) gracing us with the events that took place during her engagement and early-married days.  She once bought an antique mirror for her husband, one that only shows one background in its reflection.  Once the background of the mirror becomes known, the payoff is pretty predictable, but this is still a pretty effective little segment with some appropriately freaky-deaky music.  And Withers is a powerhouse.  Next up is a bit of levity courtesy of Eliot Foley himself involving an obsessed golfer who finds himself haunted by the ghost of a fellow golfer.  These guys are played by Basil Redford and Naunton Wayne, who portrayed similar characters in the Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes.  The act was so popular that they got to do it again in a few more films, this one included.  The segment is played for laughs, and it actually works on a few occasions.  Love that "I am about to vanish" series of gestures.

Last on the agenda is your classic "Ventriloquist's Dummy" story, and considering the time period that this flick came out, this one ranks up there.  Since this is Dr. van Straaten relaying the tale, we know that we're about to see a man go slowly insane, and that's just what we get in the form of ventriloquist Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave).  I can't help but think that the later British thriller Devil Doll was heavily inspired by this one - hell, it even features a dummy named Hugo.  Maxwell believes his dummy is alive, and while we've seen this plot roughly 17,471 times in films since then, the setup, build and payoff is done really well here.  Hugo's voice is also a thing of beauty.  This leads us up to the finale at the country house and a twist ending that manages to come off as both genuinely surprising and strange.  I don't know if "strange" is a good descriptor for something that I enjoyed, but fuck me if I didn't just type it.

According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, this was one of the very rare horror films released in Britain during the 1940s.  They were actually banned while World War II was going on!  Historical doodads like this always fascinate me.  Coming out of that, I can't imagine a better way for audiences at the time to get their feet wet than this film.  It was light, it was fun, you didn't have to think too deeply about it, and best of all, these were British people who didn't need subtitles to understand some of the dialogue.  By 1945 standards, no doubt this movie was fantastic.

I'll also be the first person to admit that there are some things that don't quite hold up.  There's a couple car crashes in the opening "Hearse Driver" segment that made me laugh out loud due to their extensive fakiness, but those things are always forgivable.  The other main complaint is that the movie is very "ghost story" heavy.  There is good variety WITHIN the ghost genre, but it would have been nice to see some other types of supernatural horror sprinkled in there.  Maybe something in there about psychic power, hellhounds, reincarnation...at least these are the subjects that come to mind for this reporter when thinking about things known to British film-makers in the 1940s.  In the end, it doesn't really matter.  The acting is fantastic all the way through, and the flick is overall just a damn fun time.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  In the realm of anthology films, there are definitely better ones, but it's hard to go wrong with a group of well-acted, atmospheric stories.  Give this one a watch.

Freaks (1932)

1932
Directed by Tod Browning
Starring Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova and Roscoe Ates

Here we go, my first ever viewing of Freaks.  I've been aware of this movie for what seems like forever.  Since seventh grade, in fact, when we used to get this amazing catalogue in the mail called the Johnson-Smith Catalogue of Things You Never Knew Existed.  Most of these things had the same items in just about every issue, but every once in a while they would get their hands on some rare item.  I remember getting an (at that time) ultra-scarce box of Star Trek: TNG trading cards.  And on their single page where they listed VHS tapes, they once had a copy of this film, describing it as a movie that managed to achieve unparalleled controversy in its day.  These days, it's pretty tame, but in 1932...I can see why.

Last Halloween, I remember taking note of the director of the original Universal Dracula movie and putting the 2 and 2 together when it came to Freaks.  According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, MGM Studios gave him tons of leeway when it came about crafting the story of this film, and what he chose to draw on was his experience in a traveling circus as a teen.  What Browning came up with was a movie that shocked audiences to the point that almost a third of the original cut was erased, and that footage has never been recovered.  When it comes to the world of traveling carnivals, I'm just a step below Austin Powers.  Back in my high school days, we used to have one every summer in the parking lot of the mall that housed the McDonald's I worked at, meaning that for the better part of a week all of these guys would come in for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.  It was an experience, I tell ya.  They smell like cabbage.  Freaky stuff.  With that, let's see how much we can get out of this amazingly lean 64 minutes.

The setup: We open up with a sideshow barker showing a group of tourists the person that he dubs the most grotesque thing that has ever graced the Earth.  And it doesn't disappoint, as said tourists immediately gasp in horror when he does the big unveiling.  The script immediately launches to a traveling circus where we meet Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), the trapeze artist who is eventually revealed to be an extremely dislikable character.  Actually, EVENTUALLY might be a bit of a misnomer, as the first ten minutes establishes the fact that she steals circus strongman Hercules (Henry Victor) away from his girlfriend, a sweet woman named Venus (Leila Hyams).  But Cleopatra also has another suitor, the pint-sized dwarf named Hans (played by the amazing Harry Earles).

At first, Cleopatra is merely humored by all of the attention and gifts that she gets from Hans and jokes about it behind the scenes with Hercules.  Both actors are great in their respective roles as a couple of knuckleheads who get their rocks off laughing at the circus freaks behind their backs, and boy, what a cast this movie has aside from Hans and his fiance Frieda (Daisy Earles, Harry's real-life wife).  There's Half-Boy, the Armless Girl, conjoined twins...and the microcephalics.  A big word that I had to look up just for this review because I'm one dedicated mofo.  If you've seen this movie, you'll know what I'm talking about.  The sideshow people aren't played for scares this early in the movie, but knowing what is to come, a lot of them are indeed unnerving.  But not in the way that they're ever portrayed as the villains.  Stick with me.

See, s**t gets real when Cleopatra finds out that Hans is due to inherit a whole lot of money.  Since we're already at about the halfway point of the movie, it doesn't take long for the nuptials to take place.  We get the classic wedding feast scene where the sideshow performers accept Cleopatra into their ranks with that creepy chant later made famous in the Ramones' "Pinhead" song.  We get a somewhat convoluted series of events where Cleopatra and Hercules try to poison Hans that goes wrong.  And then the finale as the circus travels to another location.  Yikes.

If it sounds like I'm simplifying this movie, I'm really not.  It's so short that it flies by, although it DOES make time for a couple of side plots.  For such a mean story, we get some much-needed levity in the form of Venus finding romance with Phrosio (Wallace Ford), the friendly circus clown.  There's also the owner of the circus proposing to one of the twins and one of the sideshow performers giving birth.  Yeah, all of these are character traits that are established in a scene or two, but they're much-needed little nuggets of humanity that, fortunately, are just enough to hold your attention until the credits roll.

Fun fact from the life of the Lick Ness Monster: this was one of the movies that I looked up on Amazon and found that the DVD was something like thirty bucks.  No thanks.  Amazon Video?  Something like a quarter of that.  Understand something, folks - if you choose to take the bold leap of buying this flick digitally, you're not going to be getting some big epic thing that is going to rock your world.  A lot of the movies featured in the Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular really do require some context of where the movie world was at the time they were released, and this is no different.  By modern standards, this movie is pretty dull.  If you're willing to look past that, though, there's definitely some enjoyment to be had.

How so?  Well, the characters.  There's a lot of characters in Freaks, and there's a lot of characters that you'll never forget.  Hans in particular is simply unforgettable.  Earles manages to pull some real emotion out of this material, and coupled with his stature and his unmistakable voice this guy is an instant classic.  Venus and Phrosio are both really likable, as well, and serve as a nice balance to show that not all of the big people in the world of this flick are bad.  Because of this, the movie actually manages to be touching despite its subject matter.  In addition to the people populating the landscape, there's also the landscape itself.  Browning managed to really amp up the atmosphere here just like he did with Dracula, which isn't surprising since this movie was budgeted at $316,000 - a fortune for the time period.

Rating time.  Freaks gets *** out of ****.  Don't go into it with sky-high expectations and you'll enjoy yourself, although maybe not in the way that you'd ever want to watch the movie again.

Nosferatu (1922)

1922
Directed by F.W. Murnau
Starring Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroder, Aleander Granach, Ruth Landshoff and Wolfgang Heinz

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for some Boring Life and Times of Jon Lickness.  Everybody is on the edge of their seats, I'm sure.  I found myself in the unenviable position of having to buy few movies for the upcoming weeks but figured it would be easy enough, just like it's always been.  I go through the usual routine that I've been on for, oh, 15 years or so of going on to Amazon and looking for the mountain of cheap DVDs from wholesalers.  And it was in this buying quest where I found out that DVDs...aren't so cheap anymore.  Seriously, the lowest price I saw for any of the films I was looking for was $25.  Yup, digital video has made the production of these things pretty much unnecessary, meaning less stuff in the market, meaning price up, boyo.  Lo and behold, I joined the dark side of Amazon Video for a lot of the films to be reviewed in the coming weeks.  My opening night Amazon Video splurge consisted of four old horror flicks and the Elvis Presley opus King Creole.  Yeah.  I'm cool.  Fortunately, the movie in question today is so crusty that it's in the public domain and it's part of my oft-mentioned and never-watched "50 Horror Classics" set.  Foreshadowing alert.

It's time for another marathon run.  Welcome...wait for it...to...the 2017 Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular!  A few people have complained recently that I don't review enough "old" movies, and when I looked back at all of my reviews from the last year, they've got a fair point.  You also can't get much "older" than glorious black and white.  We're going to be going through seven B & W classics in chroological order, and since it was already mentioned that this one is in the public domain and that it's the oldest, it should come as no surprise to those in the horror know that this week we're doing the O.G. 1922 Nosferatu. 

This movie is as no frills as it gets.  Hell, it doesn't even have sound!  Yes, kids, in the very early days of cinema, all movies used to be this way.  A musical soundtrack, brief bits showing the story, and title cards giving us essential dialogue.  I think I can count the number of silent movies I've seen on two hands (and one of 'em is the Mel Brooks spoof Silent Movie), but this flick is definitely one of the best known.  It's an unauthorized adaptation of the novel Dracula that hits a lot of the same beats with different character names, and it's wacky enough to be watchable for anyone.  If you've seen nothing else from this flick, you're definitely more than familiar with that famous shot of Count Orlok (this movie's version of Drac himself) and his shadow walking up the stairs.  Google it.

The opening bits of the story are actually pretty close to Bram Stoker's novel.  It goes from the present day of 1897 Victorian England to 1838 Germany, where we meet Thomas Hutter, this movie's version of Thomas Hutter.  He's on his way to Transylvania to meet Count Orlok with the familiar story device of assisting the Count buy up a new house in a new city.  Only in this film, said house is located directly across the street from Thomas Hutter himself.  Seems legit.  One thing about this movie that I would actually like to see brought back is the LOOK of Count Orlok himself.  With Twilight and everything that came in its wake, we've OD'd on vampires who look like Abercrombie and Fitch models.  We could definitely stand to see a nasty, ugly-looking S.O.B. again, and Max Schreck was definitely up for the role.  Well, action-wise, anyway, because it's not like we get to hear him talk.  When he dives for the blood after Thomas Hutter accidentally cuts himself...you buy that shit.

What's left of the plot is essentially Dracula, albeit with some minor differences.  Hutter has a wife named Ellen with whom Orlok becomes smitten (the title card reading "She has a lovely throat" is a favorite).  Van Helsing has been changed to Professor Bulwer, Renfield has been change to Knock (and what a name that is - he also gets a bonus sequence where he kills the warden of his psych hospital), and Lucy Westenra is now Annie, the sister of one of Harker's - I mean, Hutter's - good friends.  Unfortunately, a lot of the really interesting side characters are taken out.  No Dr. Seward, no Quincey Morris, no Arthur Holmwood, etc.  In a way, this is understandable.  I mean, we're dealing with a silent movie here.  Making an epic at this time must have been something of an epic in and of itself, so it's a flaw that I'll forgive.  And that might be the single best instance of film criticism of 2017.

However, there is one thing that I really have to give this movie props (do kids still say that?) for  - the finale.  It's definitely unique.  See, the novel has this big epic climax where all of the characters hunting Dracula down chase him down and he's eventually stabbed in the heart by Quincey Morris.  This one has this bittersweet climax involving Ellen (the aforementioned Mina equivalent) sacrificing herself so that...well, see for yourself.  As far as endings that stray from the Bram Stoker source material, this one is a close second only to the "Peter Cushing lays the epic smackdown on Christopher Lee" stuff from Horror of Dracula.

First things first.  Silent movies are a hard sell for modern audiences, but take my word for it, some of them are actually worth seeking out.  Buster Keaton's The General in particular is loads of fun.  If you can get past that barrier, there's some enjoyment to be had with Nosferatu, mainly due to the ungodly atmosphere that director Murnau manages to mine throughout the whole thing.  It goes without saying that black and white, in general, is more dreamlike and mysterious, and that's a big plus when you look at some of the sets on display here.  Even more impressive since it all probably cost something like 17 bucks in 1922 money. 

Since a silent movie is, well, silent, a HUGE part of the experience was the score.  Fortunately, that's also a part of this flick that works really well.  The full, original title of the film was Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and I think Murnau can rest in his grave knowing that he created just that.  The music is enjoyable, memorable, and at times perfectly creepy.  It can also get a little overbearing at times, sounding like a funeral dirge on crack.  But only briefly, I promise.  I'm not gonna lie, it's hard for me to get into the characters of a silent film (which is why The General is such a rarity), so details like this are important.  Fortunately, this is a movie that nails most of its little details.

*** out of ****.  I can't say that this flick is any kind of favorite, but everybody should check this movie out at least once for curiosity and historical value.  Recommended.

It (2017)

2017
Directed by Andy Muschietti
Starring Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgard, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer and Chosen Jacobs

Now that the Halloween projects are over, I can finally get to this little movie called It.  You may have heard of it.  It's grossed something like the GDP of a small country much to the surprise of a lot of industry professionals, but I've got to say that I wasn't surprised in the least bit by the success of this film.  Why?  I was one of the kids, baby.  If you were seven years old in 1990 like I was when the original miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's undisputed masterpiece, if you remember just HOW big of a deal those two nights on television were.  Two nights of kids, clowns, and crazy Tim Curry acting as nutty as Christopher Lloyd going full Doc Brown.  I also don't know if it was the first major thing in pop culture to portray a scary clown, but it's largely thanks to that film that we now have a whole army of weirdos dressed up as clowns wandering around the streets of America trying to creep people out. 

The miniseries was also my introduction to Stephen King.  It would be a few years before I took the plunge and read one of his books (the first was The Shining).  That miniseries never escaped me, and I looked at the book multiple times at the library, but it took a while to pull the trigger.  Why?  It's over a THOUSAND FREAKIN' PAGES LONG.  And that was my 1998 Fall and Winter reading project.  The book is substantially meaner than the miniseries and even the movie in question today, because it really, really delves into the whole bullying aspect of the story.  It's also far from Stephen King's scariest book.  But it's SO emotional.  We get the story of a group of bullied kids coming together to face off against their bullies, and then face off with the ULTIMATE bully - a nameles, faceless, ancient entity that does its best to scare all of the kids to death.  That is powerful, timeless stuff.  As a result, a whole lot of people from those in my age bracket all the way up to those young whipper-snappers today were excited for this movie.  $650 million later, here we are.  Get ready.

The novel, the 1990 miniseries, and this flick all have the same opening sequence, and it's a doozy.  We meet the main character Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher), a sensitive kid with a stuttering problem, as he builds a paper boat for his little brother Georgie.  Said little brother then takes the boat outside in the rain...and meets the creepy clown.  I was pleased as punch when I found out that this movie had the R rating, and it doesn't puss out here as we get Georgie biting it in very graphic detail.  We then warp forward to the beginning of the following summer, and since this movie takes place in 1989, it means that we also get some good nostalgic clothing choices and lines of dialogue.  Of course, Bill is still grieving for Georgie, and it's from this point that we meet the crop of characters.

Bill's group of friends include wisecracking Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard), straight-laced Rabbi's son Stan Uris (Wyatt Olef) and hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer).  At 135 minutes, we get plenty of time to know each of them - always a plus!  The four of them are at odds with bully Henry Bowers, and man, what a dick this guy is.  Rounding out the main group is um...overweight guy Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), the latter of whom an outcast due to rumors going around that she's the school bicycle.  The movie has an excellent group of child actors and everyone puts forth a worthwhile effort, but I think Lillis shines the brightest out of everybody.  She has a home life that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and as the lone female in Losers' Club (the name that they eventually come up with for themselves) she's the strong central point that holds the movie together.  For added drama, there's also the little love triangle plot between Beverly, Bill and Ben that gets repeated from both earlier iterations of this story, as well as the late addition of slaughterman's son Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs) to round out the group.

Whoa, this is a horror movie, right?  Most definitely.  Ladies and gentlemen, the premise of It: the town of Derry, Maine where this all takes place is home to an evil entity that no one can quantify.  It is always there, but every 27 years it re-emerges to feed - mostly on children.  In particular, the children who already have fear in their lives like the tormented youths of the Losers' Club.  It takes the form of whatever you're afraid of, scares the crap out of you, and eats, but since a lot of kids are frightened of clowns we get Pennywise the Dancing Clown as its Default Mode.  Bill Skarsgard takes the role here, and I'm not gonna lie, I thought he did his best but Tim Curry was much more memorable.  Not to mention funny.  Here, Pennywise himself is just kind of a Heath Ledger Joker-lite.  Also, for some reason the director decided to shaki-cam Pennywise up during some of the scenes where he attacks the kids.  Early on, he gets one of Henry Bowers' bully friends to establish that he's a menace, along with the movie's one disturbing bit involving the eerie woman in the painting that Stan is afraid of.  As was aforementioned, once I aged a little I didn't find It to be a particularly scary story but this movie didn't frighten me in the least bit.

A horror movie that doesn't scare the audience might sound like a pretty big complaint, and in most cases it is, but fortunately this movie has a lot more going for it.  Just like the book, we get to go on a ride with these characters we care about as they piece together what the ghost-like being stalking them at their most vulnerable moments is (or isn't, to be more accurate), find out where it lives, and then band together to beat it.  Pretty much every plot cog meets in the big epic finale located under the creepy old house on Neiboldt Street where It seems to reside.  All seven kids?  There.  Pennywise?  There.  Henry Bowers?  There.  Eddie telling off his mother and Beverly killing the d**k out of her abusive dad?  There.  Along with a trademark Richie Tozier one-liner or two.

The movie's biggest strength is its VERY welcome sense of humor.  I've gotta tell you, while I was excited that we were getting another film version of It, I was more than a little nervous about how it would portray its kids.  Call it the "emo-ization" of kids/teen-agers in media, but if I would have had to watch a group of mopey sourpusses for 135 minutes...I might have had to write a strongly-worded letter.  Fortunately, that's not the case.  You might not be scared by this movie, but the dialogue between the kids is legitimately funny stuff that gives the movie a surprising weight.  I know that a lot of people disagree, but this is why the Bond series is now dead to me - they've given the whole series a fatal humor-ectomy, and as a result he's not cool anymore, he's just an empty suit.  Not so here.  You'll remember these people by name when the movie is finished, although admittedly I didn't need any help in that regard.  I read all 1100 pages of this thing back in the day, dammit! 

That emotional investment made up for what I thought was the relative weakness of Pennywise here, and a big reason for that is that this flick exclusively chose to stick with the story involving the characters as children.   As a nerdy middle-school kid reading that book, I related to this story very strongly as a metaphor for facing life and fear head-on.  Spoiler alert for those who are extremely, extremely not in the know: the original novel and the miniseries tells its story over two timelines, one with the Losers' Club as kids and later on as they go back to Derry 27 years later to take It down once and for all.  Another spoiler alert: It ain't dead.  Which means that we're getting a sequel soon with Bill, Beverly, Ben etc. as adults.  I wish I could fake excitement, but I'm not, because I never found these characters anywhere near as interesting as boring grown-ups.  But maybe the upcoming film will surprise me.  For starters, I think they should stick with relatively unknown actors for the main roles, because the last thing I want to see is f**king Anne Hathaway as grown-up Beverly.  As the Internet Wrestling Community likes to say, let's just wait and see.

As for this movie, 2017 It gets a *** 1/2 out of ****.  You won't have any struggle getting to sleep after this one, but it's a damn entertaining flick with almost as much power as the legendary book it's based on.  Minus the child gang-bang scene.  Google it.

Cellar Dweller (1988)

1988
Directed by John Carl Buechler
Starring Debrah Farentino, Brian Robbins, Pamela Bellwood, Vince Edwards, Jeffrey Combs and Yvonne De Carlo

It has come to this.  The climax of the Halloween 2017 Empire-a-Thon, and it's a movie that I saw for the first time on some long ago Saturday afternoon on WGN of all places ('memba that?).  Of course, this was before they combined with UPN to form the current kinda-teen-oriented-but-not-really ultra-hip lineup that they sport now and aired mostly syndicated stuff and old movies.  I can't imagine that Cellar Dweller cost more than about 17 bucks to acquire the rights to, so their ineptitude was my gain as a bored 11-year-old.

All these years later, the flick definitely still has its moments.  Of course, this movie was in and out of theaters in roughly seven days and sat pretty much undiscovered until Scream Factory rescued it in 2013.  Kind of for good reason.  Out of all the Empire movies I've seen, this one is probably the one that qualifies as a "slow burn" the most.  It has a nice, long build up to the final 20 minutes or so, at which point the shit hits the fan and it suddenly becomes an insane movie.  Up until then, it's pretty mundane, including a couple details that admittedly had me laughing out loud.  But we'll get to those in due time.  Still, you've got Charles Band producing, you've got John Carl Buechler directing (and those of you who have read this whole series of reviews are definitely familiar with his name by now) and doing the awesome creature effects, and you've got Debrah Farentino playing a character that I'm possibly more attracted to than any female I know in real life (/skeevy).

Once again, we get one of those classic Empire prologues that probably goes on for a lot longer than it should.  But we have to pad out that 75-minute running time, baby.  This one is a real doozy, as comic book artist Colin Childress is busy at work creating his most horrifying creation to date.  The guy is meant to be an EC Comics-esque horrormeister, and since he's played by Jeffrey Combs you know that we're about to see some serious shit.  He completes his drawing of a huge, furry creature complete with the slightly cliche upside-down pentagram symbol on his chest killing a beautiful woman, and said scene soon plays out immediately behind him before Childress decides to destroy his creation by burning his own drawing, an act that also kills himself in the process because...reasons.  I don't know why.  But the movie has my attention.

Warp forward thirty years to the present day of 1988 after an amazing credits sequence featuring a whole bunch of horror comic art.  Meet your main character, Whitney Taylor, played by the aforementioned Debrah Farentino.  Now, I could look her up on IMDB to see what else she has been in, but the only other thing that I've seen her in is the 1993 thriller Malice...and good lord, one of her scenes in that movie got me through some lonely nights.  Man, this review is definitely turning out much more lascivious than anticipated.  Here, she's years younger, pluckier...and obsessed with the work of Colin Childress and horror comics in general.  I think I might be in love.  Even better, this means that we are introduced to the setting of this film.  Boy, it's something else.

See, Whitney is arriving at a COLLEGE.  Said college is located in what looks like a 19th century English cottage in the middle of f**king nowhere, and inside, it's essentially a six-room apartment complex lorded over by the standoffish Mrs. Briggs (Yvonne De Carlo).  If college was like this one, I might just go back.  Of course, it's totally unbelievable, but it doesn't matter when you've got denizens like the one this one has.  In addition to Whitney, there's also a dude who makes abstract finger paintings (seriously), a performance artist who does some truly unique stuff involving stabbing balloons and dolls (seriously), and some older guy who is some kind of actor and part-time private detective (seriously).  Oh, and the bitchy girl who once stole a job from Whitney, but she doesn't matter too much.  Three guesses as to who's the first one to die.

Well, Whitney eventually finds her way to the same cellar where Colin made all of his horror comic masterpieces.  She sets up a pretty sweet studio down there with some help from finger painting guy (for those keeping score, his name is Philip, and he's played by Brian Robbins, one of cinema's truly great "that guy" actors and a man who eventually wound up having a pretty respectable directing career).  Taking a cue from the Necronomincon-esque book that Colin left behind, she starts making drawings.  The creature comes back to life, and since we're already something like 45 minutes into the movie by this point, it's time for people to start dying.  Once it happens, we get some pretty damn cool stuff.

I'm not going to mince words.  There are portions of Cellar Dweller that are terminally slow.  In particular, a lot of the stuff with the bitchy girl and the private detective guy are moments that you'll probably spend desperately trying to think of other stuff to do.  Like, deep clean your refrigerator or dust off your ceiling.  That's the kind of stuff we're talking about here.  I should also report that after watching a whole bunch of Empire movies in a row, this one had a little bit of a "more of the same" feel.  Group of people all together in a small area, established past threat, slow build, occasional kill bits.  It was a go-to plot for a small production company putting together short movies on small budgets, but I found myself wondering during this movie if this was really the only thing they could think of.

Fortunately, there's a lot that this film has going for it.  You've probably heard me say it to the point of delirium in all of my reviews of Empire and Full Moon movies, but the tone of these films really can't be beat.  Yeah, they're dumb.  But they're dumb in such an honest way, completely free of pretense that you can't help but be caught in the infectious sense of fun.  And then there's all of the stuff you get from John Carl Buechler.  Every Empire regular director had their own trademark.  Stuart Gordon was known for pure insanity.  David Schmoeller did the more serious, heady movies.  Ted Nicolaou had an awesome handle on Gothic atmosphere.  And Buechler?  His forte is amazing hand-made special effects, and you get plenty of them here.  The scenes where the creature stalks, kills and eats (yes, eats) his victims aren't exactly scary, but they're fun to look at.  It all results in a final act that gives us some pretty kickass awesome stuff.  Trust me, guys, stick this one out.  Just like every Empire movie, it's worth watching until the very end, no matter how tepid some of the stuff leading up to it might be.

With that, the Halloween Empire-a-Thon is complete and I can resume my regular life.  This film isn't exactly a classic, but if you can find the double Blu-Ray with this and Catacombs, it's well worth a buy.  *** out of ****.

Catacombs (1988)

1988
Directed by David Schmoeller
Starring Tim Van Patten, Ian Abercrombie, Jeremy West and Laura Schaefer

We're up to movie #2 in this marathon run that I had never seen before, and so far we're definitely batting a thousand on the quality ratio of said films.  Catacombs is another rarity in the Empire catalogue in that it has no real camp value.  It's played completely straight and the death scenes are actually meant to be scary.  The same could also be said for Crawlspace, the OTHER movie that was entirely new to me when I watched it in preparation for reviewing it.  Both movies were also directed by David Schmoeller, and I'm mystified why this guy never got more of a look in Hollywood, because his talents are amazing.

I knew Schmoeller's name from a few different things before taking in this box set.  Mostly for the original Puppet Master and a bunch of episodes of Silk Stalkings (note: I may or may not have binge-watched this show on Hulu a few months back).  Now, he might be #1 on my list of underrated horror directors.  Before Blade and the rest of those guys came along, Schmoeller seemed to be Charles Band's go-to "serious movie" director, and I've gotta hand it to him because both Crawlspace and this flick did a number on me for vastly different reasons.  We'll be getting to them in due time, trust me.  The last thing that I should mention in this particular go-round of introductory stuff designed to make me sound like an actual writer is that, despite being damn near 30 years old, this movie still looks GREAT.  Nothing really dates it, with the possible exception of the main girl's choice of slacks.  Time to dive into the caves (/horrible segue)...

First things first: you know how I've mentioned the Rule of Ten when it comes to writing screenplays?  Like, to the point that you're probably all sick of hearing it?  Well, this film has a first ten minutes that's quite simply something else.  We start off in in a 17th century Italian monastery where a man has been possessed by a demon, signified by his freaky-deaky deathly white face.  He's chained up in the catacombs of said monastery, and the residing monks and church officials soon appear to perform an exorcism.  It fails, somewhat, but they manage to brick the demon up inside a wall with a holy seal.  It should also be noted that this follows the demon psychically using his mystic powers to kill the dick out of a few of his attackers.  Yeah, attention had.

Flash forward to the present day of 1988, where the monastery is now led by the wise old Brother Orsini (Ian Abercrombie) and his assistant Brother Marinus (Jeremy West).  I've seen Abercrombie in plenty of stuff in the past; he is something of an Empire/Full Moon regular as well as being the unquestionably awesome Mr. Pitt character from Seinfeld.  West was new to me, but as the yin to Abercrombie's yang he was fantastic.  See, Orsini is the Brother Superior of this place at the start of the film, a super-likable character that we immediately attach to, while Marinus is the much more serious and almost immediately dislikable second-in-command.  Both react in very different ways when they get a visitor in the form of American schoolteacher Elizabeth Magrino (Laura Schaefer).  To say nothing of the demon that' still dying to get out of its prison in the maze of tomb-like caverns underneath the place.

Just HOW the demon resurrects itself is never really explained, at least in the version of the film I saw.  Elizabeth shows up and from that point on weird stuff starts happening, complete with a bunch of creepy POV shots traveling through the catacombs complete with maniacal laughter being played over the sobering soundtrack.  Eventually, some of the monks start to die due to an unseen force...and eventually it becomes not-so-unseen.  While not a gory flick in the least bit, Catacombs plays up the psychology of death to near-perfection, as we get a buried alive death, psychic neck-breaking, stabbing...and how the monk who has a penchant for candy bites it is horrifying.  I'm not going to spoil what happens there.

One character that I completely forgot to mention is Father John Durham (Tim Van Patten), present at the monastery to preside over the death of his longtime mentor.  That's a side plot that I won't bother to spell out, because in truth I found it pretty boring.  I think this guy was undoubtedly the weakest link of the film, especially since he's the one who we're left rooting for when the movie reaches its final climax section with the same possessed albino (don't sue me, PC police - that's actually his name in the freakin' ending credits!) using his mystical mind powers to throw him all over the floor.  But +2 cool points for the final scene and ending fadeout that pretty much tells us that this story is wrapped up with no possibility of a sequel.  This alone almost always makes me add an extra half-star to any horror movie simply because I find it so minty-fresh.

To be sure, there is some stuff in Catacombs that doesn't quite work.  I think the biggest WTF this flick has is just how the demon operates.  Sometimes, it seems to be a kind of ghost.  Sometimes, it's a flesh-and-blood dude with a weird face.  And sometimes it's full-on William Peter Blatty possession, although the "black eyes" marker on this one is really disturbing.  Because of this, the movie seems to jump around in tone quite a bit.  I liked what we got to see of Laura Schaefer, but we also don't get to know her character that well.  Another ten minutes of development for her would have done wonders.  I also can't help but think that the climax wouldn't have been much better with one of the monks getting the final honor of being the demon-killing hero of the film instead of Father John.  That dude is just milquetoast to the core.

Fortunately, there's a lot that this movie does right.  Most of it has directly to do with Schmoeller.  The atmosphere here is just off the charts, mainly due to the fact that they filmed this movie at an actual monastery in Italy.  There are some things that just can't be replicated by any amount of CGI wizardry, and the world that this movie inhabits is one of them.  The camerawork is super unsettling during the various scenes where characters are walking around in the catacombs - there always seems to be something just around every corner, and when it's time for somebody to bite it, Schmoeller makes it count.  Lastly, the acting by everyone involved is top notch, especially Abercrombie and West.  If I wasn't into somebody's character, it was a script problem and not a flesh puppet problem.  And when I start reaching for alleged jokes like "flesh puppet problem," it's time to wrap up a review.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  This was actually the final Empire movie produced before the company capsized with the weight of its loan debt, and it was definitely a classy way to go out.  Check this one out, kids.

Dolls (1987)

1987
Directed by Stuart Gordon
Starring Stephen Lee, Guy Rolfe, Hilary Mason, Ian Patrick Williams, Carolyn Purdy Gordon, Cassie Stuart, Bunty Bailey and Carrie Lorraine

Killer dolls.  If there is one thing that Charles Band has made a living off of (like, to the point where the guy probably has enough cash stashed away from these low budget epics to buy his own solid gold island), it's killer doll movies.  You might think that the Child's Play franchise was the film that invented this little subgenre of horror, but you'd be wrong-'em, boyo.  Sure, there had been plenty of movies about this little villain ever since the dawn of man.  But the movie in question today actually predates Chucky by a solid year, and it's the one that most closely resembles everything that would follow, so I'm giving the nod to Charles Band on this one when it comes to who set off this wave of "toys come alive" flicks.

Dolls was yet another in the long, long list of Empire movies released between 1986 and 1988, and it was from yet another of Band's list of buddy directors.  Out of all the guys who worked with Band repeatedly over the years, I'd say that Stuart Gordon definitely has the biggest following, having also helmed the certifiable weirdo classic Re-Animator and later charging up Robot Jox during Empire's waning days and The Pit and the Pendulum for Full Moon Features.  While all of the Empire and Full Moon movies have a similar style, these different directors really do bring their own flair to what we get from these stories.  I think Gordon is probably the most polished of them; his movies feel bigger, flashier and sometimes just more insane.  In the good way.  I rented this movie back when I was in middle school and remember liking it quite a bit, although it has lost a little bit of its luster these days.  Film criticism like this simply cannot be found anywhere else on the internet.  On with the show.

Tell me if you've heard this one before: a group of characters find themselves trapped in a creepy old house while a thunderstorm rages outside, and while inside find themselves facing off with a powerful supernatural force.  It's a plot mechanism that has been used in something like 17,478 films, and it's the device that we get for this particular cinematic masterwork.  The first people we meet are the Bower family - father David (Ian Patrick Williams), stepmother Rosemary (Carolyn Purdy Gordon), and their young daughter Judy (Carrie Lorraine).  Longtime readers of the blog know how I feel about kids in horror movies, and I've got to tell ya...this kid pushes it at times with her overt adorableness.  Not QUITE to the point that I ever wanted to see her as doll fodder, but what the script does to this tyke's parents is the stuff of legend.  These two are just hateable to the max, with the classic "wicked stepmother" bit being played to perfection with a dad who just actively does not even give half of a shit about his own offspring.  What a douche.  In short, I give these two 1:4 odds of survival.

Alas, their car gets stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere Europe (indicated by the position of the steering wheel), and they quickly find their way to a nearby castle.  This place is lorded over by Gabriel Hartwicke (Guy Rolfe) and his wife Hilary (Hilary Mason), erstwhile old couple who seem way too nice to be living where they are.  They're soon joined by lovable oaf Ralph Wilson (Stephen Lee) and a pair of punk-rock hitch-hikers whom I'm not even going to bother naming, due to the fact that they might as well just have "CANNON FODDER" spray-painted on their heads from the moment they appear on screen.  The character of Ralph in particular is pretty well-done; I've seen Stephen Lee in a few other things, and he's a pretty damn good actor who dove right into this nice underdog guy who is a child at heart.  Which is perfect, considering that this house is filled with goddamned dolls.

I think you know where it's going from here.  Various characters are led away to their bedrooms, the punk chicks start talking about stealing things, Judy's father almost hits her (yes, really), a couple of characters are offed by the dolls coming alive...the usual.  See, the whole idea is that the dolls are possessed by the souls of various unsavory characters that the Hartwicke's have met over the years, and this is their punishment for being asshats.  Thus, everyone who gets killed in this film pretty much deserves it, and it's a crowd-pleaser all around.  It's also especially worth noting that one of the creators of the dolls is played by Guy Rolfe, since he's the same guy who would go on to play the ultimate doll-maker Andre Toulon in a few of the Puppet Master movies.  I swear to you that almost every Empire movie has a later counterpart in Full Moon, and folks, you can virtually see the blueprint for the PM franchise being formed before your very eyes in this flick's 77 minutes.

We actually do get a decent amount of kills here, and a couple of them are actually pretty horrific.  The movie uses its most disturbing bit within the first ten minutes as the wicked stepmother throws Judy's teddy bear into the forest, which is then followed by an honest-to-goodness fantasy sequence where the bear returns - now fully grown - and morphs into a real-life monster bear that rips the parents apart.  Not gonna lie, that one actually creeped me out.  The scene where David comes back to find Rosemary dead and mummified in bed (come on, did that really need a spoiler alert?) is also pretty cringe-worthy.  The effects stuff is once again by John Carl Buechler with some stop-motion help from David Allen, and once again, they do a fantastic job.  Just one caveat: the dolls themselves aren't very memorable.  And I think Charles Band knew this, too.  The evidence is there in the Puppet Master films, where they decided to give each of the killer dolls a recognizable gimmick and weapon, and those films might just be awesomeness personified.

Dolls is a pretty predictable movie, all things considered.  Within the first twenty minutes, we know what's going to happen, who is going to survive, and most likely how it is going to end.  What the movie DOES spring on you is how likable the characters are that the script actually intended to make likable and how damn DETESTABLE the bad ones are, particularly Judy's parents.  Those people are some real assholes, and when they get what they have coming, they're stand-up-and-cheer moments.  The acting is also pretty good by and large.  Guy Rolfe is always amazing, but really, everyone here seemed to be giving it their all with the exception of the punkers. 

My only real complaint with this movie other than that it occasionally lags is that we get way, way, WAY too much of Judy onscreen in this one.  I wouldn't have a problem with this if she were doing things other than crying about what she sees to her parents in a really, really high-pitched voice for the standard-issue horror movie "parents don't believe me" plot device, but yeah, that stuff takes up something like 15 minutes of running time here.  Yeah, it makes the parents that much more worst people ever.  But it does get tedious.  Maybe I should check this movie out with the cast audio commentary, because it actually includes Carrie Lorraine.  Hearing her today could be a revelation.  Overall, however, you know what you're getting with Empire Pictures and Dolls delivers the goods fairly well.  Good effects, a solid, basic plot and instantly identifiable characters.  Color me there every time.

*** out of ****.  It might not be a great flick like the first few Puppet Master movies, but it's still worth a watch.  Eat it, Chucky.

Crawlspace (1986)

1986
Directed by David Schmoeller
Starring Klaus Kinski, Talia Balsam, Barbara Whinnery, Carole Francis, Tane McClure and Kenneth Robert Shippy

Now we're getting into the good stuff.  Crawlspace was yet another film released by Empire Pictures in that almighty year of 1986, and I've got to say that it is without a doubt the best.  David Schmoeller was one of Charles Band's loyal directors, and this flick was without a doubt his passion project in the whole Empire/Full Moon library.  For starters, he wrote the script himself.  Secondly, it's just really different.  I've seen enough of this guy's work to know his tone, and Crawlspace is a very strange animal.  It's dark, it's gritty, and it has Klaus Kinski diving right in to a truly evil, diabolical role with a vengeance, almost to the point that those making the film put together a plot to kill him for insurance money.  And that, my friends, is actually a true story.  Google it.

I suppose the other main thing that I need to share about this one is that I don't have any personal background with it.  I'd never even HEARD of it before I got my hands on the box set that all of these reviews are coming from.  For mysterious reasons, this film was a pretty rare find back in the video store days, and I had the greatest video store in the history of video stores right in my very own hometown.  In and out of theaters in something like 30 seconds, it followed the tried-and-true Charles Band formula of "aim for a respectable theatrical run, hook 'em in on video."  And that's just what this movie did.  More than that, this flick has a truly nasty little edge that's almost nonexistant in the rest of the Band film universe, and it definitely shocked the hell out of me.  It's no cinematic masterpiece or anything, but it's effective.  With all of that gushing out of the way, let's get to the movie.

Schmoeller's script for this movie follows the "first ten pages" rule to absolute perfection, quickly introducing us to the whole motif that will follow.  A woman is wandering around in an apartment complex and finds her way to to an attic where the door locks behind her.  Inside is a caged woman, and behind her is Karl Gunther (Kinski), super-creepy landlord who not soon thereafter presses a switch that impales the woman with a knife.  Attention had.  Right after that, we're clued in that this guy is the son of a former Nazi doctor, and all of what we're about to see is some sort of experiment on his part.  Yikes.

The film then spends the following 15 minutes or so introducing us to all of our side characters.  The one who stands out as the "final girl" is Lori Bancroft (Talia Balsam), friendly college student who is immediately taken in by Karl after he mystifyingly rejects somebody else.  There's also piano player Sophie (the ridiculously hot Tane McClure, who spends her character's first scene cutting the nipples out of her bra), nondescript Harriet (Barbara Whinnery) and gold-digging soap opera actress Jessica Marlow (Carole Francis).  All of them are decent enough in their roles, but the this is Kinski's movie all the way, baby.  He owns every scene he's in, and whenever he's not on screen you find yourself wanting to watch him more, despite just how despicable he is and how vile his actions are.  For an indication of what we're dealing with, the caged woman who I mentioned earlier (who has had her tongue cut out by Karl, no less) writes him a note stating "Please Kill Me," to which he replies "but then I wouldn't have anyone to talk to."  Screw you, buddy.

I think the movie has a bit of a weakness in that Karl's motivations are never really spelled out.  We see his METHODS plenty of times.  The title Crawlspace comes from the fact that he does most of his scouting my sliding around the building's air vents spying on all of the various female tenants, usually in various forms of undress.  He has the woman in the cage, and he also kills the dick out of two anciliary characters with plenty of aplomb.  But why?  There are little bits of narration as Karl gives us bits of his background, about studying what his father did and how he found them appalling yet did them anyway.  But I could just be looking too much into it.  When the end of the movie comes and this guy starts playing videos of Hitler speeches and putting on the official uniform, amazingly, you buy it.  But that's just the magic of Klaus Kinski.

The story definitely operates in starts and stops.  There are small bits of the cruelty that Karl displays toward the woman in the cage, which is then usually followed by him shuffling around in the air vents, then an unrelated murder, and then bits of Lori pensively walking around trying to piece things together.  It might not be the officially-licensed Lick Ness Monster A-B-C storytelling method, but it's still effective.  By the time the ending rolls around, you really, really, REALLY want Karl to get what he has coming to him.  Emotion like this can't be bought.

Now for the section where I spend a couple paragraphs summing things up.  It's kind of a difficult task with this movie, because it's unapologetically basic.  This is the case for almost all Empire and Full Moon movies, and this one is exactly the same.  Shoot me if you've heard this one before: it's only something like 75 minutes long.  Thus, there's no time for bullshit, but unlike some of the stuff in the earlier Empire movies I've reviewed there is not a single boring moment in Crawlspace.  Every minute is spent either being repulsed by Kinski or actually kind of fearing that he might be around somewhere.  Call this movie the anti-Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy (/intentional flame baiting comment).

There is also something that I wish to pontificate on (what a great vocabulary word that is) that usually doesn't get much ink here on the ol' blog: the score.  Good music can really up the ante for a movie that already has some decent things going for it, and I was really impressed with what composer Pino Donaggio.  I found myself humming the menacing tune of this flick a few times after I finished watching it, and it fits the movie's slow-build/fast chase stuff fantastically.  And now you see why I don't talk much about musical scores in my reviews.  It kind of takes away from the normal nostalgia masturbation and bad jokes.  So allow me to conclude this review by stating once again that Tane McClure's nipples are amazing.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  Crawlspace is a damn fun time with a really, really good performance from Kinski.  And trust me, guys, type "Please Kill Mr. Kinski" into Google and be prepared to be amused.

TerrorVision (1986)

1986
Directed by Ted Nicolaou
Starring Diane Franklin, Gerrit Graham, Mary Woronov, Chad Allen, Jonathan Gries, Jennifer Richards, Aleandro Rey and Bert Remsen

Ahhh, TerrorVision.  A precious flick from my childhood for a wholly unexpected reason.  See, when I was in fifth grade there was this one-month stretch where my brother would pick out a movie for me to watch on Saturday nights.  To this day, I still remember those four movies.  Schwarzeneggar's Commando, They Still Call Me Bruce, and Spaceballs were the first three, and I'll never forget informing all of my grade-school bros about the glories of those flicks.  The last one was the movie in question today, and while I fully acknowledge that it isn't a good flick by any traditional standard, it's loads of fun.  Needless to say, 11-year-old me loved it with a vengeance.

Released in theaters just a few weeks after Troll, the movie was directed by Ted Nicolaou, a long-time Charles Band collaborator who would later go on to helm the Subspecies franchise for Full Moon Features.  Again, this film kind of has a Full Moon counterpart in Bad Channels, which had a similar concept and was also directed by Nicolaou.  I'm sure I'll be getting to that one in due time.  There were a lot of directors who repeatedly worked with Band, but Nicolaou has a pretty unmistakable style.  He starts off with a singular idea without a whole lot of substance and stretches it out as far as it can go.  TerrorVision is no different.  He timed this one out like a boss.  Hell, there are long stretches where nothing of note happens, and while the stuffy dude that I am today was a little annoyed by it, it's the good kind of annoy.  It also has some pretty impressive makeup effects stuff from John Carl Buechler, a name that everyone who read last week's review should be more than familiar with, along with an atmosphere that I can only describe as Pee Wee's Playhouse on crack if it wasn't already on crack.  Now, time for the almighty plot description.

The action kicks off with what is pretty much an Empire Pictures staple - a long credits sequence to pad out the already lean 85 minute running time, this time with the added bonus of the Fibonaccis' amazing "TerrorVision" theme song.  From here, we flash cut to a house unlike just about anything I've seen in any horror film before or since.  There's overly sexualized Picasso-style paintings on the walls, lots of jarring colors, weird decorations...and then there's the people.  Kids, it's time to meet the Puttermans, the movie's exaggerated-to-the-hilt nuclear family.  The dad kinda looks like Jeffrey Jones if you hit his face with a mallet, and his wife starts the movie off in workout gear.  The teenage daughter is the most wildly stereotypical "'80s rocker chick" your mind can possibly conjure up, complete with big hair and lots and lots of leather.  That leaves the kid, Sherman, your star character who gives the movie its emotional Tootsie center (/MST3K joke).  Oh, and there's also a live-in grandfather who is a gung-ho survivalist in the vein of Burt Gummer.  I shit you not, all of this happens.

So how is this a horror movie?  Well, I'll tell you.  It seems that the dad (named Stanley) is all kinds of stoked about the brand-new satellite TV that he has just installed for their house.  Somewhere off in space, an alien tasked with taking care of dangerous specimens has just royally fucked up and sent a dangerous creature out into the opens of space.  Guess where it lands when the Putterman family has a fight with the movie's comically huge remote control.  We see this beast in the first trimester of the movie, and I rank it slightly ahead of the Trolls from Troll and a good five yards behind Dream Master Freddy Krueger on John Carl Buechler's makeup effects list.  It's big, it's fat, it's definitely disgusting and it has a tongue that acts like a vacuum.  This thing likes to eat.  Be prepared for lots of scenes of said creature eating stuff throughout the movie.

Remember how I said that this movie was weird?  Well, as little kid Sherman and the grandfather kill time with a midnight monster movie show featuring a big-titted host wearing a Medusa hat (really), we get more victims in the form of the elder Puttermans and their honest-to-goodness swinger's party that they're throwing that night.  Unfortunately, this introduces us to Spiro, a way-over-the-top (just like everything else in this cinematic masterpiece) Ricardo Montalban-style dude who's way more into Stanley than his hot wife.  Hey, I thought she was hot in that workout gear, alright?  The creature shows up and kills off all of the unimportant characters until we are eventually down to Sherman, his sister and her Heavy Metal Dude boyfriend.  And lemme tell you something about Heavy Metal Dude - he is the best part of the movie.  Creatively named O.D., I LOVED this guy when I first saw this movie, especially with what followed as the younger characters actually manage to BEFRIEND the monster and spend 10 minutes of your life attempting to teach it the meaning of life on Earth.  Again, Nicolaou...he was something else when it came to stretching a basic concept.

I vividly remember that even as a kid I didn't find this movie's epic finale to be all that epic, but still, at least it's better than the final 10 minutes of Troll.  See, while all of this has been going on, the alien who accidentally sent the monstrous beast to Earth has sporadically been popping up during the Medusa chick's show to warn the people of Earth about what they are facing.  He eventually shows up to relay this message in person.  So many complicated, layered plot threads going on at once, I tell you.  I won't spoil exactly how this movie ends, but suffice to say it's kind of a downer on par with the Sword of Damocles (/obligatory reference).  Although we at least get to hear that awesome song again as the ending credits roll.

To be sure, this movie isn't good by pretty much any definition that someone can objectively look at movies and quantify such things.  The external reviews seem to concur, being as this movie has one of those amazing 0% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.  But does anyone else besides me think that number is becoming more bullshit with each passing day?  It seems that every decent movie these days gets an 80% or above.  Some kind of deal between the studios and the critics since box office numbers are down?  (/conspiracy theory)  Anyway, TerrorVision was in and out of theaters in the blink of an eye in 1986, but it's become a big-time cult hit in the years since because it's just so out there. 

I don't know exactly what the budget of this movie was, but whatever they were dealing with they managed to get their money's worth.  In addition to the creature itself, there's plenty of laser blasts, electrocutions and even one scene where a somebody's face gets sucked off.  Yeah, I know that I didn't mention any actors by name in this review.  It's a complete roster of no-names, very different from the surprisingly star-studded lineup that we had in Troll.  I can't say that this isn't without merit, considering that I just watched this movie and was blown away for all the wrong reasons by the acting ability put on display.  Amazingly enough, though, it works to the movie's advantage.  Fans of cheesy horror flicks will find plenty to like here, especially in the form of those characters.  Every bad '80s stereotype isn't just on display, it's celebrated, and with how mean-spirited most modern movies are this is always a welcome change of pace.

Rating time.  *** out of ****.  This one DEFINITELY ain't gonna win any awards, but it brought me right back to childhood, and it looked great in HD.  Check it out.