A museum tour guide finds himself incapable of financially supporting his family
in the 1950s suburban middle-class lifestyle to which they had become accustomed.
Their furniture was repossessed,
but at least nobody suggested the other family members find paid employment.
Luckily the Pater Familias inherits a mansion from his crazy uncle.
The good news is the house comes with a housekeeper, Elaine (
Margaret Hamilton
). The bad news is that it has twelve ghosts ...
This is a low-tier William Castle effort, with a basic storyline which has no real surprises. The original spin he put on the movie was the use of 3-d, which he used for the appearance of the ghosts.
This concerns a family with a
Happy Days style living arrangement.
The nerdy son lives with his parents,
while they have a leather-wearing biker guy
living as tenant above the garage.
One day the nerd calls a magical fortune-telling
telephone number of the kind that was popular
in the pre-Internet days.
As Rumplestiltskin always says in
Once Upon A Time
,
Magic always comes at a price, dearie!
.
The cursed phone line is run by the mysterious Mark Darke (Robert Picardo - Star Trek: Vgr ). He claims to be an unwilling victim ...
This is the directorial debut of the actor Robert Englund , best known for his starring role in the horror series Nightmare on Elm Street and his comic relief role in the SciFi TV show V . The script was co-written by Brian Helgeland , who hit the big time a decade later.
A young boy with a visual impairment
investigates when a maniac starts attacking blind women with a razor.
His father (Edward Fox -
) is the chief of police, but the boy makes far more progress.
There are a number of suspects, including David Thewlis (
Dragonheart
) and Paul McGann (
Dr Who
).
The storyline flips at the midpoint, like Mulholland Drive . It turns out that the story is a lot more complicated.
A meteorite crashes to Earth near Baltimore in Maryland, USA.
Almost immediately, local people are being killed off
in a few different ways.
They have such paper-thin characterisation
that they make the never-ending stream of victims in the
Friday the Thirteenth
series look like fully-rounded people.
Luckily, a man called Ben Zachary turns up. He claims to be an astronomer, and provides the necessary exposition for the audience. The victims are killed in three different ways because there are three different monsters on the loose. They are all aliens, escaped from a spaceship that was taking them to a zoo on an alien planet.
The company that made this specialised in cheap special effects, so this may have been intended as a sort of showreel. However, the lighting is attrocious - on a par with The Demon (1981) .
Moll Flanders (
Kim Novak
) is raised in an orphanage,
and seems destined to be nothing more than a servant girl.
The good news is that she marries a rich man.
The bad news is that her husband (Derren Nesbitt -
The Prisoner
) is a drunken fool who leaves her nothing in his will.
Finally, she becomes servant to a lady (
Angela Lansbury
) - and takes full advantage of the situation.
Just as Moll is a con-woman who exaggerates her social status in order to trap a rich husband, so a highwayman poses as a rich sea-captain in order to seduce her. This comedy of errors is the heart of the story, which is based on Daniel Defoe's parody of the good-girl memoirs of the time. Especially memorable is Leo Mckern ( The Omen ) as the highwayman's comic-relief sidekick.
Eddie Kagel (Paul Muni -
), a gangster, is murdered by his friend Smiley.
When Eddie ends up in Hell,
he has to make a deal with the Devil.
Old Nick sends Eddie back to Earth in the body of his doppelganger,
Judge Parker, a godly man who is running for Governor in a US State.
Nick's plan is for Eddie to ruin Parker's reputation. However, things do not go according to plan. Parker's enemies are the same crooks that ripped off Eddie. As a result, Eddie's vengeful attitude towards his old enemies just reinforces the public's view of Parker as a strong law-and-order man.
Eddie himself starts to redeem himself. At first he is an idiot with no internal monologue, who says every thought aloud. However, as he settles into the life of a rich and powerful man he begins to get used to it. His relationship with the Judge's fiance Barbara ( ) in particular sets him on the right track. Ths thing is, he had the potential to be a good man but was never given the opportunity. Therefore he was basically condemned to Heck for reasons untimately beyond his control. To make things even more unfair, there is no chance of a do-over or a re-trial. In other words, there is no incentive for him to actually change for the better.
This is a comedy-thriller set in the Edwardian era.
The story starts with exposition by Sonya Winter (
Diana Rigg
), who wants to be a journalist like Nelly Bly.
She has spotted a trend in a series of recent political assassinations,
and she pitches her story to a major newspaper.
With the paper's backing,
she goes undercover as a prospective client for the assassins.
Then, in a cunning move that seems to have inspired Arya in
Game of Thrones
, she hires chairman Ivan Dragunovich (Oliver Reed -
Gladiator
) to assassinate himself.
Ivan accepts the contract, because it gives him an excuse to hunt down and kill his own members. He is a moralist, who believes in only assassinating those who deserve it. Sonya also claims to be a moralist, and is nominally against killing people, but she is certainly happy enough to involve herself by instigating the killings. Yes, they are both a pair of hypocrites.
Ivan's rival for leadership of the bureau, Telly Savalas ( On Her Majesty's Secret Service ), plots with his sidekick Curd Jurgens ( The Spy Who Loved Me ) to start the First World War - like in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen . As the casting illustrates, a Bond girl is facing off against a couple of Bond villains. A pity that Oliver Reed never got the role of James Bond, because this movie shows what a good job he could have done.
A pair of American snow-surfers visit the Alps
in order to secure a sponsorship deal.
Unfortunately one of them plays a practical joke,
which backfires badly and leaves them stranded.
The ski resort is in trouble thanks to Global Warming. The snow season is much shorter than it should be, which means the resort will not be able to stay open long enough to be financially viable. The good news is that someone has invented a formula for artificial snow. The bad news is that it is so toxic that it turns humans - and deer - into bloodthirsty zombies.
Since this is played for laughs, the movie subverts a few zombie tropes. For example, instead of being agravated by sounds the zombies actually seem placated by music. They are also virtually indestructible, except when the script demands otherwise. That said, as it is a comedy this movie can get away with a lot.
The climax is the survivors wiping out lots of slow-moving zombies in a lot of creatively humourous and over-the-top ways. This seems to be where most of the budget went.
This is introduced by the Devil (Sir Cecil Hardwicke -
), who is an unseen presence throughout the film.
This is basically a medieval morality tale,
made for the 1950s Film Noir audience.
A young man gets hired to help Marko (Hugo Haas - ) find his missing gold mine. Well, it is high in the mountains where the camp had to be abandoned to the winter snows. When Marko returned after the spring melt, the mine was buried under a landlide or overgrown by brush. As a result, Marko spent the next decade looking for the mine. The story has shades of Treasure of Sierra Madre , with undertones of the madness that gold fever brings on.
The good news is that the young man finds the lost gold mine. The bad news is that Marko wants it all for himself. In order to kill the young man legally, Marko sets a trap for him. Since the young man has taken a liking to a local woman, Marko marries the woman and uses her as bait. If the youngster makes his move on Marko's new wife. the cockolded husband can legally kill him. Well, that is the theory. Of course, it works out different in real life.
Hugo Haas, who plays the main antagonist, also produced and directed the film - and wrote part of the script. Yes, a real auteur of the classic era. The fact that he is not as well-known as Orson Welles should indicate his relative level of success (or lack thereof).
This starts with a voice-over narration,
a typical device in 1950s movies
that was used to deliver exposition ... and foreshadowing.
We learn from a character reading a newspaper article that a serial killer has been murdering young women in the town. Those characters apparently had nothing to do with the main plot, so this is probably just more foreshadowing, but it could be the killer's plan to copy The ABC Murders and slip a targeted killing among a series of random ones. This is never explained, but it does not matter. The killer, nicknamed the Bat, makes his appearance quickly enough. His face is covered, perhaps because it was burnt off in a fire, while he wears a fedora hat and a glove with claw-tipped fingers. Yes, he has all the trappings of Freddy Kreuger. The big difference is that he is human rather than a vengeful ghost. Or is he?
The main storyline is laid out very succinctly at the start. Someone embezzeled a million dollars (1950s money) from the small town's bank. A bank-teller is in jail on suspicion of the crime, but the cash has never been located. The logical hiding place is somewhere in the mansion that used to belong to the bank manager ... who died in a mysterious fire. The house has been rented by a lady who writes crime thrillers, and like Murder She Wrote she is always at the centre of murder sprees.
It seems that the Bat wants to find the cash in the house. The thing is that there are only three suspects. Since one of them is the town doctor (Vincent Price - The Raven ), it is a wonder that the movie runs as long as it does.
A bunch of tweenagers spend every evening
hanging out on the beach,
partying like characters in a 1960s bikini-girl movie
aimed at the drive-in movie theatre crowd.
Unfortunately a murderous fish-man is living in a nearby cave,
and kills anyone who walks alone on that part of the beach.
Luckily one of the tweenage boys
is the son of a biologist who is expert in mutant fish.
This means that the cast of characters can be kept to a minimum,
as one family provides both exposition and intrigue.
The police suspect that Mark, the group's person-with-a-disability, is the killer. After all, they can hardly believe that a man-sized bipedal fish is stalking the beach for victims. Somehow, despite his damaged leg he manages to out-run (well, out-limp) the cops.
The scientist's son starts to put two and two together. Although the monster's attacks have been very limited in scale and scope, there is actually an in-story reason for this. Yes, the film is deceptively smart because the characters give a logical reason to explain away questionable aspects of the story.
This is a very dated-looking 1970s movie,
with a backstory set in the Second World War.
That said, it is certainly worth a watch.
A monster is stalking the woods in a remote English village. Strangely, instead of targeting young women - as per the usual stalk-and-slash killer - the preferred victims are young men. Specifically, they are uniformed soldiers from the local British Army base. The victims are not stabbed or strangled, but ripped apart as if by some wild beast.
The story focuses on two elderly sisters who live together in a remote house. They seem to know something about the beast. Finally, in the end they have to reveal what they know.
This was made by Tigon productions, one of the British horror studios set up in the wake of Hammer's success. The movie is part of the slasher sub-genre that came out before Halloween codified the tropes that make up the post-70s slasher genre.
This is the strangest post-Apocalyptic movie this reviewer has yet seen.
Even something like
Gas-s-s-s-s
has its own logic, while this is just weird.
It is clearly done for laughs,
as illustrated by the vast number of cameos by 1970s UK comedy actors.
This is set a few years after the Cold War boiled over into nuclear war. London was nuked into oblivion, and England now looks like a disused quarry. The survivors are famous faces like Arthur Lowe (Dad's Army) and his daughter ( Rita Tushingham ), who trek across the wilderness and have pointless conversations.
The title comes from Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson - Time Bandits ), who thinks he is becoming a bed-sitting room. He tells his doctor, Bules Martin (Sir Michael Hordern - Theatre of Blood ), who unfortunately cannot help. It turns out that the radiation has indeed caused a lot of mutation, which means that characters find themselves changed into unlikely objects.
There are a couple of references that might seem predictive of the movie Time Bandits . One involves a reference to a gang of midgets standing on each other shoulders. The other is a scene when a glowing light is seen through a bank of fog, accompanied by the voice of the actor Ralph Richardson, which everyone assumes is the voice of their god.
Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen -
Project ALF
) lives with his wife and young son,
until their domestic bliss turns into a scene from
Final Destination
. Nine months later, the widower and his son move into a new house.
Their landlady (
Helen Shaver
) helps them move in, and is very accommodating to the father.
Cal's new job is as police psychiatric consultant for detectives like Lieutenant McTaggart (Robert Loggia - Lost Highway ). Detective Tom Lopez (Jimmy Smitts - Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith ) has been implicated in a series of murders that resemble human sacrifices.
The trail leads back to Donald Calder (Harris Yulin - Buffy the Vampire Slayer ), a millionaire who has been funding the religious fringe. Meanwhile, a Voodoo witch-doctor enters the USA ... and uses the the Jedi mind trick to get his luggage past Customs.
Directed by John Schlesinger , this feels like an updated version of Rosemary's Baby . Well, the heyday of the witchcraft thriller was the 1970s so this was made about a decare too late. Although it is set in New York City, and even has a shot from the wheat-field near the World Trade Centre, apparently most of it was filmed in Toronto.
The other thing about this film is how there are multiple different yet apparently unrelated ways in which the witchcraft enters the family's life. The father's work introduces him to Lopez, while the boy discovers a Brujeria altar in the park. Even the home help, who came with the new apartment, is a practitioner of Santoria. Not to mention other persons with no apparent connections to the others ...
This is a sequel to
Willard (1971)
, and starts with the climax of that film.
Afterwards, Ben and his army of rats need a new home.
Luckily, across the road there lives a young boy
who is more than happy to befriend the furry little killers.
Danny Garrison is a boy with a chronic medical condition. His mother keeps him indoors most of the time, but he is able to amuse himself with his musical talent. In fact, he even writes a song about his new friend Ben the rat. This is the movie's theme song, and gets sung by Michael Jackson himself.
Cliff Kirkland (Joseph Campanella - ) is the police detective in charge of sorting out the plague of rats which is tearing through the local businesses and turning the neighbourhood into a food desert. In the final act, he sends teams of workers with flamethrowers backed by cops with shotguns into the storm drains. This is all a bit like Aliens , and although it lacks the visual flair that James Cameroon delivered it is still quite effective. To make things even more tense, Danny goes in to warn Ben - and Danny's sister Eve ( Meredith Birney Baxter ) goes in to save her brother.
This is a 1960s hagsploitation movie, starring
Joan Crawford
as Monica Rivers, the ringmaster of an English circus.
The circus tight-rope walker dies in a very cinematic and completely unlikely accident. The other employees start dying in cinematic ways, and it looks like there might be a killer on the loose. The magician's assistant ( Diana Dors ) tries to create a revolt among the staff, accusing Monica of being behind the killings. After all, the notoriety creates a boom of interest and a massive increase of ticket sales. Of course, Durando (Michael Gough - ) the manager is also a good suspect.
The plot thickens with the arrival of Angela ( Judy Geeson ), Monica's teenage daughter. This role was apparently intended for Christina, Crawford's real-life daughter. Yes, the one who wrote the biographical book Mommy, Dearest .
In the 1800s, an Aristocrat returns to his mansion
accompanied by his new bride.
Unfortunately the local peasants who work his land
have been beset by a tragedy.
A farm-worker's daughter was murdered,
and the Aristocrat himself has been named as a suspect.
This is all linked to stories about the ghost of his previous wife,
who died years previously under mysterious circumstances.
The supernatural element of the story, along with the historical setting, makes this film a generic horror in the mould of all Hammer films of the period. Without it, the movie is a very simple whodunnit with the prime suspects blatantly obvious.
This is a low-budget attempt to cash in on the success of Hammer Horror.
It is a Gothic horror that seems the poorer
because of the lack of familiar faces like Lee and Cushing.
The producers hired Jimmy Sangster as screenwriter,
which is the closest this gets to being the real thing.
In Transylvania, 1874, a vampire is staked and buried. However, his disfigured henchman retrieves the body and gets an alcoholic doctor to revive him.
Decades later, a young doctor is convicted of killing a patient by using an experimental method called blood transfusion. The Judge, John Le Mesurier, sentences the doctor to be imprisoned with normal convicts like Bernard Breslaw ( Krull ). However, the doctor is reassigned to a lunatic asylum.
The bad news is that the asylum is a repurposed fortress staffed with guards who have a tendency towards cruelty. This is not the only reason the place has a massive death toll. The man in charge is the mysterious Dr Callistratus (Donald Wolfit - ), whose sidekick is the Transylvanian hunchback. Yes, the doctor was handpicked because of his research into blood transfusion.
The doctor's fiance, Madeline ( Barbara Shelley ), tries to get him released through official channels. When Callistratus blocks this, she plays a more active role in the plot. This movie may not pass the Bechdel test, but it at least allows the female lead to be proactive.
This is a black&white horror movie filmed in the Philipines,
made on the cheap for the US grindhouse circuit.
The result is shot like a 1950s Film Noir,
which seems like an old-fashioned movie
for something that was released in the early 1970s.
A young woman is murdered while walking home from her job in a nightclub. The police are baffled, especially since this is only the most recent in a string of killings. The chief detective calls in his old friend, an American who literally wrote the book on sex crimes. That said, the murders are not sexually motivated. Instead, the victims are drained of all blood.
The American investigator fixes his attention on the nightclub that the most recent victim worked at. Up until this point, there has been no commonality between the victims. However, from now on the new victims are all employees of the same nightclub!
This starts in a hotel in 1959,
with black and white footage of a bunch of tweens
at a New Year's party.
Of course, something spooky happens
that sets an unnerving tone for the story.
Forty years later, some tweens visit a funfair. After a run-in with some of the carnies running one of the rides, the tweenagers make their escape by boat. Unfortunately the boat sinks, and the tweens wade ashore on an island. The good news is there is shelter there. The bad news is, it is in the hotel that was featured in the prologue.
The hotel has apparently been uninhabited since 1959, and that is the least creepy thing about it. Luckily the TV keeps playing a 1959 TV broadcast about a scientific project, like a Philadelphia Experiment with a plane instead of a ship. This would be excellent exposition, but the tweens do not bother watching it so the audience is also kept in the dark as to what exactly is wrong.
Before long, monsters start to attack the tweens. Different monsters, with no distinct cause. This is all a bit reminiscent of Lost - an apparently abandoned island where strange things happen for no appatent reason. JJ Abrams should have watched this decades ago, so he would never have created his patented Mystery Box writing system.
This is set in Paris during the 1800s.
Not the real Paris, but the Hollywood version inspired by the works of
Edgar Allan Poe
. This movie came out the same year as the US military liberated France,
just as Casablanca (1942) came out when the US Army liberated Morocco,
so we must view the setting in the same context.
A serial killer is stalking the streets of Paris, leaving a series of young women's corpses in the river. He is nicknamed Bluebeard because he targets young women, after the fairy tale about the man who killed his many wives. Since this was filmed during the Hayes Code era, the killer is a strangler instead of a slasher. Of course, since this is a Film Noir rather than a Police Procedural we know who the killer is from the start.
The killer is Gaston Morrell (John Carradine - House of the Long Shadows ), a puppeteer who has a sideline in portrait painting. Of course, to keep his artistic vision unsullied he kills the women who model for his paintings. Until he meets his perfect woman, that is.
By incredible coincidence, the puppeteer's new must has a sister who is dating the Police detective in charge of the case. The sister volunteers herself as bait in a honeytrap to catch the killer.
A mad scientist (Boris Karloff -
Frankenstein
) tries to sell his house,
which has a reputation as being haunted.
In the basement is his laboratory,
where he is conducting experiments to create a super-soldier.
After all, the USA had just entered the Second World War
so there was a lot of government funding for such things.
However, this is not as successful as in
Captain America: The First Avenger
. Karloff keeps messing up and killing the subjects.
Luckily they are just travelling salesmen,
so nobody notices them missing.
Peter Lorre ( M ) is the town's Justice of the Peace, along with all other municipal functions, so he is in charge of local law enforcement. When a murder is reported, he turns up to investigate.
In 1960 a young boy in Massachussets, USA,
discovers an old bottle on the beach.
As he opens it, he wishes that he were on Blackbeard's pirate ship.
Unfortunately the bottle contains a genie ...
Once the wish is granted and the boy is stuck on the ship in 1717, the genie explains the rules. The boy only gets one wish, which has already been used. The bottle must be returned to the beach within three days, or the boy will replace the genie as the bottle's occupant. The genie will remain invisible to everyone except the boy ...
The boy manages to trick Blackbeard with a forged treasure map. However, the pirates' greed drives them to turn against each other.
This is a black and white B-movie from 1962.
It features a surgeon who tries experimental surgeries,
and while he is shown as a dangerous maverick
with a dubious concept of medical ethics
the truth is that he gets results.
This was made fifteen years before the first successful heart transplant,
so the characters' limited concept of medical science
looks very old-fashioned by modern standards.
A beautiful woman is decapitated in a car crash. Luckily, her boyfriend is the mad scientist so he keeps her severed head alive while he searches for a replacement body. The girlfriend is increasingly unhappy about this, and steadily goes more and more insane.
The concept is quite silly - without lungs for oxygen or a heart for blood, or even vocal cords ... how would the head live? As a result, this movie is probably best known because it was adapted by Mystery Science Theatre 3000 .
This has a similar title to
Outbreak
, and was made a couple of years later,
so presumably the title was chosen as an attempt to cash in.
This is strange in itself,
because this was made for broadcast on the BBC TV network
so the producers should not have bothered themselves
with a cheap and nasty mock-buster tactic.
A burglar breaks into a science laboratory and tampers with a specimen in a sample jar. When discovered, the intruder makes it look like an Animal Liberation Front attack.
The lead scientist ( Samantha Bond ) investigates a series of instances of a local person falling ill. Since this is a small town in England, it is not exactly high stakes. However, as the hospital starts to fill up it becomes apparent that this might turn into a situation like 28 Days Later . Of course, this looks and feels like what it is - ultra-cheap English TV from the 1990s - so there is little or notrhing for the audience to engage with.
The most interesting thing about this film is the appearance of the young Benedict Wong ( Dr Strange ) as a lab assistant. He is only in one scene, but he certainly stands out.
Anne (
Emilia Fox
) is a schoolgirl who lives in a small town
where a woman is murdered.
This is the first in a string of killings.
Later on, Anne becomes obsessed with her schoolteacher (James Purefoy - Solomon Kane ). Not a good idea, especially when they are both potential serial killers.
Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage -
Face/Off
) and Larry (John Goodman -
King Ralph
) are paramedics on the night shift in New York City,
in the Pre-Guliani days of the early 1990s.
A combination of stress and sleep deprivation
seem to have left Frank seeing the ghosts of patients he lost,
although this is not the focus of the storyline.
Frank spends the night interacting with fellow paramedics Tom Sizemore ( Red Planet ) and Marcus (Ving Rhames - ). The main focus is on a patient's daughter, Mary Burke, played by Cage's then-wife Patricia Arquette .
This was directed by Martin Scorsese , best known for his crime dramas. As a result, there is a subplot about Red Death, a new strain of heroin that has caused a series of overdoses in the neighbourhood. A rival dealer, Cy Coates (Cliff Curtis - Fear The Walking Dead ), is wiping out the Red Death dealers. Cy's front-woman ( Sonja Sohn ) and a Red Death dealer (Michael K. Williams - Flashforward ) are both recognisable faces from The Wire, although as very different characters. In contrast, the ICU nurse ( Judy Reyes ) is literally Carla from Scrubs.
Burke (Derren Nesbitt -
The Prisoner
) and Hare (Glynn Edwards - Get Carter (1971))
are a pair of down-on-their-luck Irishmen
living in Edinburgh in the 1700s.
They earn a living by robbing graves
and selling the corpses to the surgeon, Dr Knox (Harry Andrews -
Equus
), for teaching purposes in his school of anatomy.
The movie is about very grim subject matter, especially since the protagonists decide that robbing graves is too hard and they will instead just murder people. However, their incompetence borders on slapstick. This comedic undertone is at complete juxtapositions with the theme of the movie. If the film-makers had decided to make it a full-on comedy, like the Simon Pegg version circa 2012, the result would have been better. Instead we get a racist stereotype of the Irish as getting drunk, starting fights and murdering people.
While the bodysnatchers live in poverty, the medical students have the time and money to attend the local brothel. This leads on to a parallel storyline involving high-class prostitutes like Janet ( Yutte Stensgaard ). Of course, despite the inappropriate slapstick this will all eventually end in tragedy when the two storylines cross over.
Ben Rolf (Oliver Reed -
Gladiator
), his wife Marion (
Karen Black
) and Aunt Elizabeth (
Bette Davis
) are looking to rent a self-catering house for their summer holidays.
They are offered a huge mansion,
which is so nice that there is a obviously a catch.
The owner, Mr Allerdyce (Burgess Meredith -
Foul Play
), seems eccentric but likeable enough they agree to rent the place.
The mansion is nice enough at first, but the family start to be affected by it. Marion is obsessed with the owner's mother, the mysterious Mrs Allerdyce, who Marion is the only one to actually interact with. Ben starts to have flashbacks to his mother's funeral - and he thinks he is being stalked by the creepy chauffeur (Anthony James - Buck Rogers ). Slowly, they start to go insane.
This film has a very strong cast, but Haunted House is an obscure sub-genre and as a result the film is relatively unknown.
A young woman (
) is driving on a country road when her car breaks down.
She seeks help at a nearby house,
and accepts an invitation to spend the night.
This is such a cliche it was later used in
Rocky Horror Picture Show
.
The house is run by Dr Caligari (Dan O'Herlihy - Halloween 3 ). He offers her a bed for the night, since he is already catering for a bunch of guests. She ends up staying for a few days while her car is being fixed, but eventually she realises she is not allowed to leave.
A woman (
Madolyn Smith
) lives alone in a
Cabin in the Woods
. One night a creepy man (Malcolm MacDowell -
Clockwork Orange
) visits, asking to use her telephone landline.
After all, it is the Eighties ...
The two seem perfectly evenly matched. MacDowell is a rent-a-villain, best known for playing bad guys. He makes reference to Jack the Ripper, although in the movie Time after Time he played the hero rather than the Ripper. In contrast, the woman has a backstory that is consistent with her having some blood on her hands ...
The movie proceeds like a two-person stage-play, with the minimum amount of exterior location shots. It seems reminiscent of certain 1950s movies, and toys with the audience's preconceptions as to which character is the real victim. As a result, we do not really feel attached to either one.
The third act has the strangest twist, one which is barely foreshadowed and seems to come almost from nowhere. The only apparent reason is to set this movie apart from all the others that have such a similar setup.
Although this was made in the late 1940s,
it is set several years earlier during the Second World War.
The necessary exposition is provided by a briefing session,
provided by a senior officer to a security man
sent to solve a murder in a Scottish castle.
The castle is meant to be a secure building,
used for military secrets.
Now it is being stalked by a murderous phantom.
Is it a serial killer, or a ghost?
Compared to American movies of the time, this seems incredibly dated in terms of shot composition. It seems more like a silent film from the 1920s, shot like a theatrical stage-play.
This is a remake of the original black and white movie from the 1920s.
Whereas that film was set in its own present day,
this one is a historical effort set fifty years in the past.
As a result, anachronisms pop up every now and again.
A group of rich Americans, including Honor Blackman , meet up in a creepy old mansion. They have come to attend the reading of the will of their ancestor (Wilfred Hyde-White - Buck Rogers (Season 2 ), who died twenty years previously. He has recorded his will by synchronising motion picture film with a sound recording. Ironically, this technology was not perfected when the original movie was made, so it was a silent movie with live musical accompaniment.
A stranger (Edward Fox - Day of the Jackal ) arrives, and warns the people that a mass murderer has escaped from the local lunatic asylum. Yes, the movie switches from the cosy Agatha Christie setup into a far more sinister stalk-and-slash scenario.
This story is about a family
who have a mystical psychic bond with a leopard.
The bond will be passed on to the heir at a ceremony
held in the family's ancestoral home.
Since the current incumbant is childless,
the heir is his younger brother's only child.
The heir, Leonora Johnson ( Barbara Shelley ), has brought her husband and a couple of friends. The bad news is that her husband is a philanderer. The good news is that when she inherits the family super-power, the leopard can read her mind and eat anyone that she is angry at.
As the protagonist gets more comfortable with the power, she starts to target her female love-rivals. Not only is this storyline stolen from Cat People (1942) , but the climactic Third Act completely rips off that film.
In 1955, during the
Tales from the Crypt
era before the Comics Code Authority became a thing,
basement-dwelling comic-book creator Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs -
The Re-Animator
) sketches out a horrifying monster.
Unfortunately he seems to take his inspiration directly
(and literally) from the Necronomicon,
and the beast materialises in his workspace.
Thirty years later, the building has become Throckmorton Institute for the Arts: an art school run by Mrs Briggs ( Yvonne DeCarlo ). They have no phones or television, although one of the students specialises in video-camera work. The basement is locked and strictly off-limits. All prerequisites for a horror movie story-line.
Female cartoonist Whitney Taylor ( Debrah Mullowney/Farentino ) comes to stay there - not in spite of its gruesome history, but apparently because of it. She was a childhood fan of the original horror comics, and intends to revive it. She even wants to find out what really happened to Childress. Be careful what you wish for.
Whitney transgresses by entering the forbidden cellar and drawing her version of the monster, thus summoning it. However, since she is cast in the role of Final Girl it is the other inhabitants who get eaten first. Since this is a classic example of 1980s straight-to-video schlock, shot on the cheap in Italy, the hot blonde babe gets a topless shower scene.
John Russell (George C. Scott -
) rents a large empty mansion after the death of his wife (
Jean Marsh
) and daughter in a horrific car crash.
He quickly realises that the house is haunted,
so he consults a parapsychologist (Barry Morse -
Space: 1999
).
The ghost inspires Russell to do some research, and he uncovers a plot involving Senator Carmichael. In retaliation, Carmichael sends in Captain Dewitt (John Colicos - Star Trek: TOS ) - a corrupt if high-ranking policeman.
This an early Seacouver movie - set in Seattle, filmed in Vancouver. It has a few other signs of its limited budget. There is minimal use of special effects - except for a couple of pyrotechnics shots in the final episode, the ghostly scenes are generally a mix of camera angles and edits. That said, this approach is remarkably effective.
Vincent Price (
Theatre of Blood
) is an impoverished undertaker, living with his assistant (Peter Lorre -
The Raven
) and his elderly father-in-law (Boris Karloff -
Frankenstein
). Since business is going badly, Price decides to increase demand
by killing off the oldest and richest men in the town.
He sets his eyes on his arch-enemy, the landlord (Basil Rathbone -
). Unfortunately the landlord has a tendency towards catatonic episodes,
like in
The Premature Burial
.
The main three actors worked together previously in The Raven , although Karloff was too infirm to play the antagonist again and was given the smaller supporting role instead. There are a few other in-jokes. There is a subplot involving Price's wife ( Joyce Jameson ) who has an affair with Lorre. This is a reference to The Black Cat , in which the same actress played Lorre's wife having an affair with Price.
A rich little girl has a dream.
Her bossy older sister is wandering alone in the woods,
when she gets cornered and savaged by a pack of wolves.
Well, dogs that are acting like wolves are meant to act.
The girl, living in the 1700s, goes to live with Grandma ( Angela Lansbury ). The good news is that the old lady gives good advice.
Grandma tells a few stories, nested inside the dream like something from The Zaragosa Manuscript . One is about a woman who married a travelling man (Stephen Rea - ). Another features the Devil himself (Terence Stamp - Star Wars: Phantom Menace . It all ends badly. Each one is a cautionary tale with a moral in the ending, basically a medieval morality tale.
This is basically Director Neil Jordan delivering his take on Red Riding Hood .
Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing -
Star Wars: ANH
), a middle-aged surgeon,
is married to Lynn Nolan (
Sue Lloyd
). A professional model,
she is much younger and more attractive than him.
Presumably they met through her sister, Val Nolan (
Kate O'Mara
), who is the doctor's surgical assistant.
When Lynn is facially disfigured in an accident that is partly the fault of her husband's insecurities, he does whatever it takes to fix the damage. At first, he steals brain tissue from a dead body. Later, he has to kill fresh victims to harvest their brains.
On its surface, this is just basically one of the trend of late Sixties/early Seventies slasher movies. The main storyline, that of a surgeon killing for access to body parts, has certainly been done many times. However, a few things set it apart from the others. To start with, the casting of Cushing was a great move. More importantly, the sub-plots and supporting characters are also impressive. The doctor's wife is far more ruthless than him, a cold-blooded career-woman whose obsession with her looks is more about power than mere vanity. Perhaps a more modern film would have allowed the sisters a scene together, giving character development with a discussion on their careers and allowing the movie to pass the Bechdel test.
This was shot by
Roger Corman
, master of the B-Movie genre,
who made it back-to-back with
The Last Woman on Earth
using the same cast and crew.
Some people think it is deliberately bad, as a parody of
Creature From The Black Lagoon
. After all, the narration is definitely tongue-in-cheek.
Lines like It was dusk: I could tell because the sun was going down
cannot be taken seriously.
After the Cuban revolution succeeds, a group of right-wing refugees tries to smuggle themselves and their wealth out of the country on a boat. They hire an American gambler and gangster to help them. A US Intelligence Agent has secreted himself among the crew, and narrates the story.
The gangster plans to get the loot for himself, so he has his crew hoax an attack by a monster. When the Cuban General agrees to change course to Puerto Rico, the gangster deliberately runs the boat onto the rocks. This leaves the survivors trapped on an island, so whoever survives will be able to retrieve the loot. Unfortunately, there happens to be a real monster on the loose.
A gangster is killed off by an unkillable man.
The killer turns out to be a remote-control zombie,
whose brain tissue has been reanimated by radium.
Now the zombie, and others like him,
are on the loose in the city.
Yes, this is like
Plan Nine From Outer Space
, in the Film Noir genre rather than Alien Invasion.
The man controlling the zombies is a gangster named Buchanan. Despite his Irish-sounding name, he was previously deported to Italy. Presumably like Frank Costello, he was really an Italian-American trying to pass for Irish. His henchman, the brains of the operation so to speak, is a German scientist who was short of funds. Despite the German being implied to be a Nazi war criminal, he actually has an aversion to unnecessary killing. That said, he is happy enough to obey orders ...
Buchanan uses the zombies for revenge against a hit-list of men who did him wrong. Later, when he thinks the authorities are closing in on him, he uses the zombies to hold the city to ransom. Not literally, because that would be a great way for him to have extorted large amounts of money out of the State Governor. Instead the criminal mastermind focuses on vengeance. We do get a brief montage that is reminiscent of a much longer sequence in Telefon (1977) , showing a zombie blow up a factory. This film could have been a lot more impressive if it were better thought out.
Circa 1692, a group of teenage girls from Salem Massachussetts
have a midnight meeting in the woods.
A young African-American woman leads them in a voodoo ritual.
The town preacher (Bruce Davison -
X-Men
) uncovers this harmless party,
and is less than happy about it.
Not because it is interracial cultural assimilation,
which would have been a big deal in the Southern colonies both then and now.
No, he thinks voodoo is real.
Winona Ryder cast her love spell on a farmer (Daniel Day Lewis - ). Her problem is that he already has a wife ( Joan Allen ). This rivalry and jealousy leads on to something far worse, as domestic drama boils over into the hands of religious oppression.
The government, such as it is, acts hand-in-glove with the religious authorities. They persecute anyone denounced as a witch.
The script was written by Arthur Miller , based on his stage-play inspired by the McCarthyite witch-trials of the 1950s.
Michael Gough (
) is happily married with a wife and two grown children.
Yes, this is the image of traditional 1960s married bliss.
Unfortunately he is a violent abusive asshole,
so his wife and daughter make a plan to be rid of him.
They wait until he is alone in his
Cabin in the Woods
, when the rest of the family will have an alibi,
and then confront him with an ultimatum.
Of course, it all goes violently wrong.
Now the women are in a terrible mess. They have to dispose of the body, establish an alibi and avoid a nosy neighbour. But worst of all, like Les Diaboliques they have to deal with signs that he might be returned from the dead.
Unfortunately, this is let down by the tacked-on ending. It seems that the writers just did not know how to write a conclusion.
This starts with a quote from
Edgar Allan Poe
. It is obviously intended to fit in with the AIP Corman/Poe films,
although the story was heavily altered from the original script.
The story is set in England in the Sixteenth Century. A landowner, Edward Whitman (Vincent Price - The Raven ), considers himself a witch-finder so he persecutes and murders a sect of pagans. Their chief priestess, Una, curses him and his entire bloodline. This leads the Whitman family to get bumped off one at a time.
Whitman's sons, the Irish-named Sean and Burke (Michael Elphick), are a pair of brutes who enjoy torturing the village women. Their brother Henry returns from his studies at Cambridge, to play a more heroic role in the story. Whitman's new young wife is an innocent bystander. However, the pagans do not care.
The title makes reference to the Banshee, a keltic death-omen. Una the sorceress uses voodoo dolls, which actually did originate with European witchcraft. In contrast, the Xian priest uses a strange blend of Catholic and Episcopalian traditions. He seems to be High Church Anglican, which befits the period between the Catholic Dissolution and the final development of the Anglican Episcopalian church..
This is set in New Orleans,
in a small museum based around the legend of a resident named Marie Latour
who disappeared when she was discovered to be a werewolf.
Museum Curator Charles Morris is obsessed with her,
and has written a book about her story.
It turns out that the legend is true,
and she will kill anyone who tries to out her as a werewolf.
This takes a police procedural approach as the police investigate the killing and associated crimes, using techniques such as fingerprinting. However, the main investigation is done by Dr Morris's son Bob. He becomes obsessed with the mystery, and links the killer with a local gypsy tribe.
The werewolf transformations happen off-screen, due to the limitations of 1940s technology, and the lupine state is shown as a trained dog in makeup. However, this leads to a lot of suspense. The nearest comparison would be with Cat People (1941) , with one scene in particular a direct lift. However, due to the Hayes Code censorship the transformation takes place with the werewolf fully clothed.
This is a Columbia Pictures attempt to cash in on the success of Universal Studio's horror movies. It was directed by Henry Levin , who went on to direct a couple of the Matt Helm movies. He certainly adds an element of humour to a movie with rather grim subject material.
A body is discovered, well-preserved after thousands of years.
However, it was preserved by magical means ...
and now rises from its undead slumber every night
in order to punish those who stand between it and its treasure.
Now it becomes romantically obsessed with a modern-day woman
who may be the reincarnation of a woman it once knew personally.
Yes, this is basically a retelling of
The Mummy
, which has had so many other retellings
that this version seems refreshingly original.
After a brief explanation of the destruction of Pompeii by a volcano in the year 89CE, we switch to the main storyline. A modern-day (well, 1958CE) excavator digs up human remains at Pompeii. In reality, the so-called bodies on display at Pompeii are plaster casts of voids found in the thick layers of ash - voids created when the original bodies decayed down to bones.
The Italians call in an American, Dr Paul Allen ( The Six Million Dollar Man ), to help them investigate. By incredible coincidence, his fiance has a telepathic connection with the mumified man. Before long, the faceless man starts shuffling around and murdering anyone who gets in his way.
This starts with a beautiful woman, Patricia Stanley (
Carole Gray
) breaking out of a mental asylum wearing nothing but her underwear.
She hitches a lift with a friendly stranger,
Martin Delamore (George Baker -
), and ends up marrying him.
All in all, this seems like a bog-standard setup
in the mould of early-1960s B-movies like
Dementia 13
which set out to rip off
Psycho
. A beautiful woman on the run, a doomed romance,
the spectre of mental instability hanging over the lovers ...
Martin takes his bride to his family mansion, run by a couple of Chinese servants - Burt Kwouk ( ) and his wife (a white woman with unconvincing yellowface makeup). This is the base for George and his father to conduct experiments that they have somehow self-funded.
Delamore Senior (Brian Donlevy - ) is not around to greet the happy couple because he has secretly teleported to England. Well, the movie is shot in Shepperton Studios, but for some reason is actually set in Canada. Anyway, the reason for keeping the secret - that the family have managed to create workable teleportation on a shoestring budget in a basement - is that it is illegal to travel between Canada and England without having your passport stamped. Yes, this is even in spite of the fact that Canada was still part of the British Empire at the time. Anyway, the problem is exacerbated when the police arrive and start asking questions about the runaway mental patient. Worse, the supposedly Chinese woman starts to gaslight the afore-mentioned mental patient. The whole family starts to fall apart, and things quickly escalate to murder. Yes, instead of making things better they just get worse.
This starts in Egypt in the year 1900.
A group of Egyptologists has uncovered a tomb.
However, a band of bloodthirsty arabs has vowed to stop them.
The Egyptologists get the mummy to their steamship, and set sail for England. Their financier, an American showman, wants to treat the mummy as a high-class carnival sideshow. His flambuoyant schemes for money-making are impressive, if exploitative.
Someone starts killing off people associated with the expedition. It seems someone has managed to revive the mummy, and is using it to enact the ancient curse.
This is a typical low-budget black and white British effort from the 1940s.
Lots of historical costumes, grand guignol subject matter,
and the presence of the infamous rent-a-villain Tod Slaughter ...
The story is set in 1805, when Napoleon has conquered the continent. The Bow Street Runners are tasked with finding traitors who are plotting to help the French invade England. Yes, this was clearly written as World War Two propaganda but was released too late - probably because it is not very good.
Spring-Heeled Jack is mentioned ... and a killer is on the loose, strangling beautiful women.
This starts with an expository screen-scroll,
with the voiceover by William Shatner (
Star Trek: The Original Series
). This is all meant to set the tone as science fiction,
so this slasher movie can cash in
on the late-1970s SciFi boom that started with
Star Wars
.
A young woman is murdered while walking home, so LAPD detective Richard Jaekel ( ) investigates. The victim's father (William Devane - ) is an ex-convict turned best-selling author, so while he targets the police for their incompetence he is himself targeted by TV news reporter Cathy Lee Crosby .
By day, we see the Black and Gay communities complain about the police's incorrect priorities - oppressing minorities instead of trying to catch the killer. Corn Rows (Philip Michael Thomas - Miami Voice) is a recognisable complainant. By night, we see a series of incredibly suspenseful scenes as characters may or may not be getting stalked by the killer. A lot of this is down to the music and sound effects, which really complements the visuals.
As well as the fact the killer is an alien, a werewolf that shoots laser beams from its eyes, there is also a subplot involving a psychic. The filmmakers certainly tried to amp up the speculative fiction element. If we ignore the sci-fi elements and the decent budget, the film this most resembles is the nasty low-budget South African slasher The Demon (1982) .
Vlad (Rudolf Martin -
Swordfish
) narrates his backstory to a priest, Father Stefan (Peter Weller -
Robocop
). He starts with exposition for the audience,
explaining how Orthodox Romania was invaded
by the Islamic Ottoman Empire from the south,
and had to make alliance with Catholic Hungary to the North.
This all encapsulates Vlad's dilemma,
which underlies all his decisions and problems.
Vlad and his younger brother were taken as hostages by the Ottoman Sultan, to ensure the compliance of their father. Unfortunately their father, the Prince of Romania, was assassinated - making Vlad worthless as a hostage. Once out of the Sultan's clutches, Vlad made an alliance with Hungarian King Jonas (Roger Daltry - Highlander: The Series ). He also married the beautiful Eloise ( Jane March ), who was about to enter a convent and become a nun.
Vlad's problems are mostly political. Like Ivan the Terrible a century later, he bears a murderous hatred towards the aristocracy because he blames them for the death of his father. He resorts to brutal executions for the most trivial transgressions, because he is afraid of appearing weak. However, the movie succeeds at weaving the tales of his brutality into the storyline naturally, so it flows evenly.
This movie came out around the same time as the big-budget Wes Craven production set in contemporary New Orleans. To save budget, this one was shot on location in Romania - which also added a certain authenticity. Ironically, the Craven version's two sequels were shot back-to-back on the cheap in Romania too.
A window-cleaner dies mysteriously while working on a high-rose building.
Michael Moriarty (
) is called in to investigate.
Yes, this has all the hallmarks of
Q: The Winged Serpent
. However, it takes the story in a completely different direction.
The killings seem to target people who come into contact with the architect ( Jenny Agutter ). It turns out the ghost has a grudge against her.
It is the 1970s, and Tom Selleck (
High Road to China
) drives around a tropical island in a red convertible sports car
while trying to solve a mystery.
No, this is not Magnum: PI - but it seems to have inspired it.
Selleck is living in the Philipines, a former Spanish colony in the South Pacific. He buys a painting which features a woman who looks just like his wife. The painting depicts a historical event, a witch-burning conducted by the Spanish Inquisition in 1594. It turns out that Selleck's ancestor was the Inquisitor responsible, and the witches' reincarnations want to take revenge on him.
This starts with a meteor traveling into the solar system,
as depicted by some very dated-looking 1990s CGI.
It crashes to Earth as a meteorite,
landing outside a Girls' College somewhere near Boston in the USA.
A young brunette woman (
Kadamba Simmons
) emerges from the crater, clad in a black leather bikini.
Some kind of monster is apparently stalking her, like the Outsider in
The Watchers
.
The movie focuses on Louise ( Samantha Janus ), one of the college students. She is a confident young woman who knows what she wants, and that includes seducing Ashley (Todd Jensen - ) - her college professor. Meanwhile, some kind of monster in the college basement starts picking off the supporting characters.
After a couple of people have been reported missing, Police detective Moore (Oliver Tobias - ) starts to investigate. Unfortunately he focuses on Ashley, who was connected to all the victims. Well, it is a small college where everyone knows everone else - so they are all connected to each other.
The Police eventually send in their SWAT team to clear the basement. This works out as expected, like a low-budget version of Aliens .
The British cast and locations are the giveaway. This was not filmed in the USA, it was actually shot on the Isle of Man.
This starts at the funeral of a man who died under mysterious circumstances.
It is assumed that he fell to his death,
but it turns out that he was pushed by his twin brother.
Their falling out was because the dead brother was obsessed with the occult,
while the supposedly good one is opposed to the supernatural.
Not content with killing the man,
the victor burns his victim's library of rare occult books.
Luckily, the dead man used witchcraft to turn himself into a vampire. The vampire has his hunchbacked servant hide his coffin. Then the vamp sets out to frame his twin brother for a series of killings. Meanwhile, the dead man's hot tweenage daughter gets mysteriously weaker - and the only thing that can help her is a blood transfusion. Has this got anything to do with the two puncture marks on her neck? Yes, this owes a lot to Dracula - well, the Universal Studios version anyway.
The villagers band together in a torch-wielding lynch mob. However, they do not believe in vampires. Instead, their target is the supposed good guy. Ironic, since the only murder he committed was that of the vampire now framing him for the other murders!
A realtor joins a gathering at a country house in a rural part of England.
He explains to the others that,
although he has never met them before,
that he has dreamed about the gathering many times.
Dr Von Stetten, a central European-accented psychiatrist,
tries to debunk him - but to no avail.
The others begin to recite their own brushes with the supernatural. The race-car driver survived a crash, and while in recovery he experienced a death-omen about another crash. The tweenage girl was once at a birthday party in a different house, where the rich children played hide-and-seek, and she encountered a ghost. Joan the widow bought her husband Peter a wall-mirror for his birthday, but it shows the reflection of a different room. Elliott the gentleman's tale is about two friends at the golf-club who became rivals for a woman named Mary.
The tales seem to alternate in seriousness, with some of them more light-hearted than others. Things take a turn towards horror with the psychiatrist's tale about a ventriloquist who claims his dummy came alive. Eventually the bookend story is all tied up in a classic ending.
Kaz Oshay (David Carradine -
Kill Bill
) rides around a post-apocalyptic wilderness on horseback,
bringing law and order to the lawless and disordered.
His arch-enemy, Ankar Moor (Richard Lynch -
Battlestar Galactica
), organises an ambush.
A group of hirelings attack the horseman,
but he fights them off with his ... crystal saber?
Like a lightsaber, but made of glass-like crystal or something.
Ankar Moor works for the Big City, an autocratic dystopia that placates its populations by showing them gladiatorial games known as Deathsport. The inmates are usually criminals, including political dissidents, but Kaz Oshay is a valued target.
After the blockbuster success of
Jaws
, Hollywood snapped up the next novel by
Peter Benchley
. This was directed by
Peter Yates
, and features a supporting role from a certain veteran of that shark movie.
Gail Berke ( Jacqueline Bisset ) and David Sanders (Nick Nolte - Hulk ) are freelance SCUBA divers living in Bermuda. While they are exploring a sunken wreck they find some artefacts, so they take the stuff to local expert Romer Treece (Robert Shaw - Jaws ). It looks like they may have found a treasure ship that was part of a Spanish fleet in 1715.
A Haitian gangster, Henri Cloche (Louis Gossett - Jaws 3-D ), is after another kind of sunken treasure. There is a stash of morphine ampoules, which he can sell on the black market for heroin. Unfortunately the ampoules are aboard the rusting hulk of a sunken munitions ship named the Goliath. The good news is that Treece knows the Goliath's sole survivor - Adam Coffin (Eli Wallach - ). The bad news is that Coffin's loyalties are for sale.
There are a few perfunctory references to dangerous sea creatures. A massive eel is nesting inside the Goliath, and the Haitian gangsters chum the waters to attract sharks. However, the real danger for the divers is that Haitians themselves. This gangster plot is a padded-out version of the one that Spielberg cut from the shark movie. Did you ever wonder why the Mayor was so insistent that the beaches stayed open? He was seriously in debt to loan sharks ...
This is a
Roger Corman
production, written and directed by a very young
Francis Ford Coppola
. While intended as a
Psycho (1960)
pastiche, it ticks all the boxes that
City of the Dead (1960)
did not.
When a man dies of a heart attack, his widow conceals his body and then visits his family home. Although she is an American, her in-laws are the Haloran family living in Castle Howard, County Cork, Ireland. They are about to conduct their annual ceremony to commemorate the death of their sister, Kathleen. However, more deaths start to happen.
A mysterious axe-murderer starts to terrorise the family and the rest of the cast. That said, this is not exactly a Hitchcock movie.
Boris Karloff, the star, plays the main character -
a scientist working at a university in New England, USA.
However, the story is narrated by the character's daughter Anna.
This adds a layer of menace to the story,
as her narration includes lots of not-so-subtle foreshadowing
so the audience is always left knowing that something worse will happen.
The good news is that the scientist devises a theory of how to receive communications from the souls of people who have died. The bad news is that his wife then dies. The good news is ...
He sets up home in a rented mansion on the cliffs above a fishing village in New England. Yes, this is all a bit Lovecraftian.
After a couple of years, the local sheriff pays a visit. This is not a social call, it is official business. For the fifth time since the scientist first moved in, grave-robbers have stolen a freshly-buried corpse. Since the sheriff has no grounds for a search warrant, no further action can be taken. However, the folk in the village are about one pint of cheap beer away from become a classic torch-wielding mob.
This is set in Paris during the 1800s.
Not the real Paris, but the Hollywood version inspired by the works of
Edgar Allan Poe
. A magistrate (Vincent Price -
The Raven
) is buried, and after his funeral in accordance with his will
a group of the mourners are invited to attend another ceremony.
This is a reading of his diary ...
The diary leads on to an extended flashback, in which the magistrate explains how he visited a convicted killer who was on Death Row. The convicted killer claimed he was possessed by a hostile spirit. Later, the magistrate starts to notice strange things. He even begins to doubt his own sanity.
It turns out that the hostile spirit is a demonic entity, which has lived for centuries and can physically possess a person's body. If this sounds familiar, it is because this was used in the Star Trek: TOS episode A Wolf In The Fold, which explains that Jack the Ripper was possessed by a bloodthirsty body-hopping alien spirit.
A young woman (
Stephanie Powers
) visits the home of her dead fiance's mother (
Tallulah Bankhead
). The old woman is a biblical fundamentalist
who is so puritanical she will not even put salt on her food.
When Stephanie offends the old lady,
there are consequences.
The place is guarded by the gamekeeper (Peter Vaughn - Eyewitness (1970) ) and the village idiot (Donald Sutherland - Don't Look Now ). This makes it a perfect prison.
A young man, an American named Steve Rheinhardt - (Nick Adams -
Invasion of the Astro-Monsters (1965)
) arrives at a small town in rural England.
The taxi driver refuses to take him
once his destination is revealed ...
Yes, this kind of red flag is prevalent in the genre -
and as always it is ignored.
The local men either hurry away or laugh in his face,
but the protagonist still does not take the hint.
Even when he walks to his destination,
and discovers strange signs of destruction along the way.
The lord of the manor, Mr Whitley (Boris Karloff - Frankenstein ), is less than welcoming towards the newcomer. He is aided by a sinister manservant, Mervyn, who looks like a thirty-year-old Charles Hawtrey ( Carry On Spying ) made up to look like a seventy-year-old. They spend their time hanging out in a basement that is so creepy it must have been designed that way on purpose.
However, the women of the house are different. The lord's daughter, Susan ( Suzan Farmer ), is very young compared to her octogenerian father. Her mother provides some exposition - just enough to make the slow-witted protagonist suspicious.
Dialogue between Susan's parents implies it has something to do with a family curse that killed her grandfather. Steve uncovers a book that mentions the Old Gods. Yes, this could be either a supernatural threat or cosmic horror from the works of HP Lovecraft . Then Steve discovers Mr Whitley has been experimenting with a radioactive rock. Yes, this seems an unnecessary kludge of three different setups. And since Susan not only knows her house and her family history, but also studied science on the University course where she met Steve, why does she not work any of this out for herself? Steve could still play a useful role in the storyline, because he has a set of combat skills that would do well in a swashbuckler!
Harry Hamlin (
Clash of the Titans
) and
Susan Dey
were a couple in L.A. Law in the 1980s,
and now they are a married couple.
Their blended family means she has a son by a previous marriage,
and he has one of each.
They take the family on a road trip through the Nevada desert,
like in the Kurt Russell/JT Walsh movie
a few years earlier ...
After a stop-off in a creepy diner, the family go looking for a ghost town. They find it, apparently abandoned after a neutron bomb test in the 1940s. Then they get trapped there, stalked by a mysterious entity that lives in the mine tunnels under the town.
The problem seems to be that it is all setup and no pay-off. One character suggests there is a family of mutants, like in The Hills Have Eyes . Another idea is that the town was built on an ancient Native American burial ground, like in the works of Stephen King . However, this appears to be like Picnic at Hanging Rock ... a mystery that is deliberately never resolved. Perhaps the victims are being brainwashed and made to work in the local food service industry!
A plane crashes near a remote laboratory,
and the group of scientists recover a dead body from the wreckage.
Rather than hand all of it over to the authorities,
they save the brain for their experiments.
Once plugged into scientists' elecronic machinery, the brain starts to telepathically control people. Unfortunately it be longed to a corrupt billionaire who seeks to control his fortune from beyond the grave. This story has shades of Traitor to the Living by Philip Jose Farmer .
This was made by the makers of the original
Last House On The Left
. It certainly has the poor lighting
that marks it as a product of the early 1970s.
In all fairness, it was shot in only 12 days.
The story is set in the Stephens Sanatorium. The top man, Dr Stephens, tests his revolutionary therapies such as letting an angry man chop wood with an axe. What could possibly go wrong?
A new nurse turns up to start work. Unfortunately the new Doctor is reluctant to hire her. This seems unlikely, since the place is horribly understaffed. However, all is explained as the story progresses.
Writer/Producer
Dan Curtis
delivers a version of the story
which is relatively close to the original novel.
The main differences seem to be budgetary,
since it has a made-for-TV feel about it.
Dracula (Jack Palance - Hawk The Slayer ) summons an estate agent, Jonathan Harker (Murray Brown - ), to his transylvanian castle. It quickly becomes evident that Drac has evil plans, and Harker finds himself trapped with Drac's three wives (including Sarah Douglas ).
Dracula travels alone to England, where he obsesses over Lucy Westenra ( Fiona Lewis ). Her fiance, Arthur (Simon Ward - ), seeks help from the fabled Van Helsing (Nigel Davenport - ). Arthur seems to be the protagonist - in the book Lucy had three potential suitors, but here she has only one man in her life. Well, two if you count the bloodsucker.
Drac later turns his attention to Mina ( Penelope Horner ), friend of Lucy and fiance of the unfortunate Harker. She does not have much success in her love life, but there is worse to come. Although her name is short for Wilhelmina, everyone pronounces it Minnow - like the fish.
A doctor works in a small village in Cornwall, England.
He is assisted by Linda (
Hazel Court
), the village nurse.
People start to go missing. The doctor has a secret sideline - he is abducting people and experimenting on them. This movie was made almost two decades before the first successful heart transplant, so the topic may seem like science fiction. However, this story puts a horror twist on it. The mad scientist thinks that if he Frankensteins up a corpse he can revive it and bring it back from the dead.
Faustus (Richard Burton -
1984
), a 16th Century academic, makes a deal with the devil.
In exchange for his soul, in 24 years time,
Faustus will receive everything he desires.
He is taunted with visions of Helen of Troy (
Elizabeth Taylor
).
The script is from the Elizabethan stage-play by Christopher Marlowe. For creativity and originality, the film-makers are left with the visuals. Rather than provide spectacle, such as wide open spaces so different from the stage-plays origins, they use camera trickery.
A test-pilot takes a pressurised plane up to altitude,
but when he returns to land he discovers everyone is dead.
He later discovers other survivors,
who were also in airtight circumstances
when the mysterious apocalyptic event took place.
As well as the human survivors, there are some humanoids walking around in EVA suits. It seems they are the ones who killed the human race, using a gas that has now disappated. They have a second truck up their sleeve. Just like in Plan 9 from Outer Space , they can raise the human dead and use them as an army of zombies. Well, if one or two at a time counts as an army. To do this, they use a local radio transmitter. The human survivors loot a Territorial Army base, and set out to destroy the transmitter.
This was directed by Terence Fisher , best known for his work with Hammer, House of Horror.
A corrupt businesswoman (
Joan Collins
) takes a group of middle-class, middle-aged Americans (and
Pamela Susan Shoop
) on a boat trip to an island.
She is basically trying to sell them real-estate in Florida.
The land she wants to sell them is infested with ants. Not the regular-sized ones, either. These ants have been exposed to nuclear waste that was illegally dumped in the ocean and washed up on a nearby beach. Now the ants have mutated to gigantic size, so they can hunt down and eat the humans.
Some of the people survive, and take a boat up the river. They get to the nearest town, which is full of strangely-acting people. This makes the people from Deliverance seem normal in comparison. And like all good 1970s films, there is the compulsory car chase.
Psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Richard Burton -
Medusa Syndrome
) takes on a new patient - a young man named Alan Strang (Peter Firth -
Chill Factor
) who committed a monsterous crime.
Dysart investigates, discovering that the youngster worked for stable-owner Harry Dalton (Harry Andrews - Burke and Hare (1972) ) and spent time with co-worker Jill Mason ( Jenny Agutter ).
This is not a psychological thriller, but rather a drama that sees the protagonist examine his own soul. Burton hoped it would reboot his fading career, and insisted on the casting of Firth (who had spent years in the role on the stage play). Unfortunately it failed to get the critical or financial success it deserved, and Burton's performance - probably the best of his career - never got the acclaim it deserved.
This is another American Crime-Horror effort by
Charles B. Pierce
, most famous for
The Town That Dreaded Sundown
. This is in a similar vein,
although it is unique insofar as the killer does not wear a mask.
The story starts with a shootout in 1928, when some rednecks refuse to be evicted from their home in Louisiana. Sixteen years later, Michael Parks ( From Dusk Til Dawn ) and his wife ( ) move into the house. Unfortunately it turns out that the previous residents of the house all met with brutal and untimely deaths. Later, a mysterious redneck starts murdering the supporting cast.
Laura Mars (
Faye Dunaway
) is a successful fashion photographer.
Unfortunately she is struck with psychic visions of murders,
from the perspective of the serial killer responsible for them.
Our heroine is surrounded by familiar faces, any of whom could be the serial killer. Donald the agent (Rene Auberjonois - Star Trek: DS9 ), Tommy the driver (Brad Douriff - Alien: Resurrection ), Lulu the model ( Darlanne Fleugel ) and the ex-husband (Raul Julia - Addams Family ). Luckily the investigating Police Detective (Tommy Lee Jones - Space Cowboys ) becomes Laura's love interest.
The result is a whodunnit with a twist. The protagonist, and thus the audience, see the killings from the killer's perspective ... an old staple of the slasher movie genre. This might be the most famous movie in the horror-dunnit genre! It was written by John Carpenter , but got mainstream acclaim because it avoided association with the horror genre.
Ziggy (Mark Lester -
Who Slew Aunt Roo?
) lives with his grandpa (Lionel Jeffries -
Revenge of Frankenstein
) on an unnamed sovereign Mediterranean island.
Well, this was filmed on location in Malta
so we can easily work out where it is meant to be.
Ziggy has an incredibly overactive imagination,
and Grandpa is sick of hearing about his daydreams and wild tales.
One day Ziggy's sister Pippa ( Susan George ) takes him into town, when a foreign VIP is arriving. Ziggy wanders off, and sees a police officer (Peter Vaughn - Die! Die! My Darling ) and his partner (Peter Bowles - ) assassinate this political dignitary. The assassins see the boy, but when he tells his family what he saw they dismiss this as another tall tale.
As the killers start to cover their tracks, they have to kill a series of innocent bystanders in order to get to the eyewitness. This all climaxes in a siege and a car chase.
The problem with the film is its uneven tone. It opens with a daydreaming boy, reminiscent of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang even down to the casting of Lionel Jeffries. However, the killers' ever-growing body-count is expanded with a ruthlessness that gives this movie a somewhat bitter undercurrent.
A well-mannered lock-maker (Peter Lorre -
) arrives in New York, USA.
He befriends a police detective,
who recommends a place he can rent lodgings.
Unfortunately the immigrant -
as absent-minded as he is friendly -
accidentally burns the place to the ground.
The immigrant, hideously disfigured by the inferno, turns to crime so he can raise enough money to pay a surgeon to repair his damaged face. With his locksmithing skills, he is an excellent criminal. Before long he is running an entire gang. Strangely, as his friendliness and humanity disappear so does his absentmindedness. The more coldly criminal he becomes, the greater his professionalism.
The gang's former leader is jealous of his replacement. When the immigrant chooses to retire, the former leader gets his old position back. However, the ingrate still holds a grudge. No good will come of this.
This starts with a news broadcast about a nuclear test by the US military.
Of course, it all goes horribly wrong.
This connects with the zeitgeist of the era this was made in,
when the big fear was nuclear oblivion,
like natural disasters were in the 1970s
and terrorism was after 9/11.
A pregnant woman wanders the empty roads and highways of California, USA. She meets a man who came from New York City, three thousand miles away. They seem to be the only living things in the continental United States, if not the entire world. There are not even any animals available for hunting, so their food supply is limited.
Eventually, they discover a couple of other survivors. Two men were locked in a bank vault, while the fifth member of their group is a French mountaineer who was snowed in at the top of Mount Everest. However, there is an air of suspense and tension. After all, there is only one woman - and she is obsessed with finding her husband rather than seeking life with one of her new companions.
This is a straightforward little story, made in black and white during an era when colour was taking over. One man served as writer, director and producer - never a good sign, in this reviewer's opinion. The visuals are more impressive than the story, but there are several names listed in the camera-related section of the credits.
Francois (Vincent Price -
) is a Montreal factory-owner whose premises are used in a brutal killing.
His brother Andre (David Hedison -
Live and Let Die
) is found dead, his head crushed by a fifty-ton press.
The only suspect is the dead man’s wife,
who is obsessed with finding a strange white-headed fly.
Eventually, Francois manages to get the truth from her.
The main story is told in flashback. Andre had put aside projects like the permanent battery and the portable nuclear reactor, and instead invented teleportation. Of course, it all went horribly wrong. Parts of the story take place when only Andre is present, so the wife must have put it all together later.
An American football player named Morgan (Marjoe Gortner -
Starcrash
) and his buddies go camping on a remote island.
Instead of rest and relaxation, they get attacked by massive insects.
The local farmer's wife, Mrs Skinner (
Ida Lupino
), provides the necessary exposition.
She and her husband discovered a mysterious substance on their land.
Being profoundly Xian, they think this a gift from their gods.
Now a greedy businessman wants to buy the stuff. The businessman calls in a female scientist ( Pamela Franklin ) who doubles as a sort of love-interest for the male lead.
The humans end up besieged in the farmhouse. Not unlike the movie The Birds , but with giant rats instead of wildfowl. At least they have shotguns and improvised explosive devices this time.
HG Wells based his original short story in Kent, England, while director Bert I. Gordon moved the story's setting to Canada. The next year, Empire Of The Ants (1977) was made on a similar premise - with ants instead of wasps, and set in Florida rather than Canada.
At the risk of spoiling the endings of two movies, this film has the premise that the substance contaminates cows' milk and thus ends up in the human food chain. A decade later the movie Impulse (1986) began with a similar premise, making it perhaps an unofficial sequel.
This is one of the first Hammer sci-fi movies,
written and directed by
Terence Fisher
himself.
It is set in a small town in England,
and starts with an introduction narrated by the town's Doctor.
All a bit reminiscent of Went The Day Well,
the classic piece of violent propaganda from the Second World War.
Two young men and their female friend ( Barbara Payton ) work on a science project together. They build what they call a reproducer. Anyone familiar with Star Trek: TNG would nowadays call this a matter replicator. The debate begins - should they keep it secret son that only the UK can use it, or should they share it with the entire world? After all, it will be easily weaponised. Although it might seem to create a post-scarcity civilisation, the truth is that it will still be limited to the amount of electricity that the civilisation itself can generate.
The real storyline, the one that the title refers to, is a love triangle. The token girl marries one of the scientists, Robin. His cow-orker, Bill, is secretly in love with the girl. He modifies the replicator so it can reproduce living things, and then duplicates the woman of his dreams. Of course, the duplicate is too precise a copy ...
Despite the fictionalised science of the main storyline, there are also references to then-groundbreaking methods that are now much better-understood medical techniques - defibulation to start the heart beating, and electro-convulsive therapy to delete human memories.
Tim Brett (David Hemmings -
Deep Red
) is a recovering drug addict.
He joins his aunt (Flora Robson) on a tour of Pompeii, Italy.
Unfortunately she is murdered ...
In the hands of Dario Argento this could be a classic Giallo slasher. In fact, Hemmings returned to the Italian setting in Argento's Profundo Rosso a few years later. However, director Richard Serafian returns the characters to boring dreary old England. Instead of being a spectacular slasher, this is more of a psychological thriller.
Brett investigates his aunt's murder. It turns out she was a blackmailer, and her victims have worked together to rid themselves of her. Now they turn their attention on the nephew, seeking to discredit him or drive him back to his mental instability. Brett has a lot to lose, since he is about to marry his fiance Juliet ( Gayle Hunnicutt ).
A mad scientist, Dr Mulder (Donald Pleasance -
You Only Live Twice
), delivers a lecture to his class of biology students.
One of the girls takes a shortcut home through the park,
and gets stalked in a well-shot sequence shot by director
Jack cardiff
.
Mulder the scientist has teamed up with a deformed circus ringmaster, Mr Lynch (Tom Baker - Dr Who ). They are abducting human subjects in order to conduct illegal experiments. Lynch hopes a cure for genetic deformities can be discovered. Mulder just seems to love his work.
Lynch the ringmaster is not well-liked by the other circus folk, which leads up to an original take on the ending of Freaks (1932) . Ironic, since both films were accused of exploiting actors who had actual genetic disabilities. Should people with disabilities be allowed respresentation on-screen?
Smith (Sam Elliott -
The Legacy
) is a wildlife photographer working on a project in a Dixieland swamp.
After a boating accident,
he is invited to stay at the local plantation house.
The patriarch (Ray Milland -
Man With The X-Ray Eyes
) takes a liking to him,
since he is a plain-speaking man
unlike the family of sychophants.
The plantation island is becoming overrun by enormous frogs. Well, not man-sized but definitely larger than usual. The humans wander into the swamp to investigate, one at a time, and get picked off by the local wildlife. It is not the frogs who rack up the bodycount, but the venomous snakes.
As the situation gets worse, the servants decide to flee. This scene is reminiscent of The Birds , but with reptiles instead of avians.
This is an early example of the animals-gone-wild subgenre, but there is nothing to really set it apart. There is one scene which stands out, even though it is not related to the main plot. The grandson's girlfriend is a Black woman, and she has a brief conversation with the Black housekeeper. In other words, this not only passes the Bechdel test but it even passes the BLACK Bechdel test! Very progressive, especially since the test was not created until the 1990s.
An American journalist
and his English photographer (Leslie Philips -
The Jackal (1998)
) are on a train ride through central Europe.
Their carriage is somehow detached from the rest of the train,
and they end up on a siding in a remote valley.
The place is a small monarchy,
something along the lines of Ruritania.
The two westerners suspect something terrible is going on. It turns out that the small city-state is run by a dictator, who has been running experiments on human beings. His plan is to create super-soldiers.
This is one of the last movies by producer/director
Roger Corman
. It was severely re-cut by the studio,
AIP, and the experience caused Corman to quit directing
for the next two decades.
The story starts with an animated sequence. A US Army General, parodying John Wayne, oversees a catastrophic error at a US chemical warfare facility. The result is the release of a nerve gas that causes death by old age for anyone over the age of twenty-five. In other words, an apocalyptic scenario.
The main storyline starts in Dallas, Texas. The protagonist is a hippy, on the run from the police. He meets up with Cilla ( Elaine Giftos ), who provides exposition that duplicates what the audience already learned in the animated sequence. Then the two of them go on a road trip together, along with a group of their friends, in search of a safe place in New Mexico.
This is very much a product of its time. Anti-war sentiment, and the mixed title itself, are reminiscent of Dr Strangelove . The idea of the hippy road-trip comes after Easy Rider, which came out only a year earlier.
So what about the cut-off age of twenty-five for the survivors? Well, most of the main cast are about that age anyway, and some of the guest-stars seem to be a lot older, but the extras all seem to be in their late teens. Should the cut-off age have been different? Planet of the Apes has Charlton Heston say never trust anyone over the age of thirty, which was also the cut-off date for the citizens in the movie of Logan's Run . That said, the original age was twenty-one in the book ... While the later TV show Jeremiah (2002) had the population reduced to everyone pre-pubescent, which meant the virtual destruction of civilisation. In comparison, this movie has twenty-somethings acting like teenage hooligans.
Nelson Orion (Martin Landau -
Space: 1999
) is a ghost-hunter - oops, paranormal investigator -
who lives in a fancy Frank Lloyd Wright house built on a clifftop overlooking a beach.
His full-time job is as an architect,
persuading the LA city council to preserve historic buildings.
In his spare time he tries to save people
who feel haunted by the spectre of guilt, futility or alienation.
Joseph Stefano write and directed this made-for-TV movie as the pilot episode for a failed TV show, an anthology to be called The Haunting. The plot is an example of the story-of-the-week formula that the intended show would have followed.
An heiress, Viva Mandore, thinks she is being haunted. She and her blind husband are getting phone-calls from a phone inside the dead mother-in-law's sealed crypt.
Orion refers repeatedly to a previous investigation, when he was summoned to the town of Sierra de Cobre in Mexico. Yes, the title of the movie refers to something that happened off-screen and is not shown - even in flashback.
This was shot in black and white, perhaps a money-saving measure at a time when full-colour TV shows were becoming a thing. However, this noirish look certainly adds to the suspense ... and covers for the limited quality of special effects.
An Archaeology Professor (Boris Karloff -
Frankenstein
) discovers a gemstone that might give him eternal life.
However, he is an elderly man at death's door.
The best he can hope for is to be resurrected from the tomb.
After the old man dies, a group of greedy acquaintances and relatives attend his house in the hope of getting something for themselves. This is a bit reminiscent of The Cat and the Canary , although the supernatural aspect of praying to a Pagan statue from ancient Egypt seems inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray .
This is set in a remote area of southwestern USA,
in the dusty deserts of Arizona.
It seems that, unbeknownst to the human population,
that a gila lizard has grown to incredible size.
Not as a result of atomic testing, however,
just as a fluke of nature.
The local sheriff investigates a series of mysterious car crashes, happening late at night on a deserted stretch of highway. Since he has to police ten thousand square miles, including a thousand miles of road, he has his work cut out for him. Worst of all, any survivors tend to be extremely drunk.
Luckily the local tow-truck driver is a sharp-eyed tweenager who strips wrecked cars so he can upgrade 1930s cars into 1950s dragster racing cars. He treads the line between helping the sheriff and being a leading light of the tweenage counter-culture.
A male scientist and his female assistant are killed
in a mysterious lab accident at a secret US base.
The Pentagon sends a Secret Agent to investigate.
After all, this was made at the height of the Cold War.
The base is several levels of underground labs in the middle of a desert. Yes, it is all a bit reminiscent of The Andromeda Strain , which came a decade later but seems to have been influenced by this.
The Secret Agent suspects sabotage. After all, there could be Reds under the bed. The base's defensive radar also detects an unidentified radar signal flying at an unusually high altitude. Could this be the start of an alien invasion?
The title character, Gog, is a robot that works inside the base. Yes, the whole movie was sold on the concept of a robot going on a kill-crazy rampage.
Welles (Michael Sarrazin -
), a scientist in a secret US research base,
is a traitor who steals secrets and blows up the base.
However, in the process of doing this he gets massive head trauma,
resulting in facial disfiguration and amnesia.
Tuxan (George Peppard - Battle Beyond The Stars ), a hard-nosed security officer, is put in charge. He knows that one of VIPS, including Gossage (Tim O'Connor - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century ), must be conspiring with Welles. It is simply a case of working out who the real traitor is.
The story of the amnesiac scientist interrogated by the hard-nosed security officer was also done in another early 1970s film, Who? . This version takes the story in a different direction.
An American scientist (John Carradine -
Bluebeard
) has returned home after working in Japan.
He talks to a couple of his colleagues,
and narrates the events of a few months ago.
The flashbacks are set in Japan, with an all-Japanese cast and no English dialogue. Hence Carradine's narration, and dialogue with his American colleagues to emphasise certain plot points. In other words, this was originally a Japanese film by Toho Studios which had extra bookend scenes added for the American release. Like how Battle of the Planets was manufactured by modifying episodes of the Gatchaman Anime show.
Some skiers get caught in a snowstorm, and shelter in a Cabin in the Woods . Days later, the rescue team discover the skiers are dead or dying. Giant footprints are found nearby, so it looks like the Abominable Snowman is responsible. A team of explorers go hunting for Bigfoot.
The explorers assumed that because the area was uncharted, it was also uninhabited. Instead there was an undiscovered tribe there. They turn out to be the Burakumin, who are portrayed as inbred mutant savages. Because this is a derogatory portrayal of a real-life marginalised group, the original Japanese movie has not been available for many decades. Since half an hours worth of Japanese footage was cut from the American version, presumably the offensive section was removed too.
While the scientists take the expedition the long way, on foot through the unexplored mountains, someone beats them to their destination. A circus manager finds out where the scientists are going. He and his crew of thugs take a couple of trucks up the unpaved mountain roads towards the snowman's cave. Yes, while the explorers are walking cross-country there happens to be a convenient road nearby. The circus crew find and capture the snowman, with the hope of exhibiting it in a carnival sideshow, long before the scientist arrives there.
This starts at a performance art show,
a strange 1960s event.
The protagonist has been summoned there to meet a contact,
an art-lover who acts as a middle-man in an illicit deal.
Sue (
Judy Geeson
), one of the show's bikini girls,
decides to become the protagonist's stalker.
He is obviously the strangest person she has met,
since he is a straight-laced 1950s type
somehow trapped at the centre of the Swinging Sixties.
This is a crime thriller of sorts, what might have been a film noir if it were made a decade earlier. The protagonist is an undercover operative, posing as a black market dealer in order to entrap a crooked businessman. But since this is the 1960s, the villain is a globe-trotting megalomaniac with a penchant for erotic art.
Finally, in Lisbon, the hero - and the audience - finally get to meet the mysterious Mr Hammerhead (Peter Vaughn - 10th Kingdom ). He is basically a low-rent James Bond villain. Since his yacht does not have a helipad, perhaps because his Wessex helicopter is too large, he instead gets winched aboard in a box. Hammerhead's henchman is Dave Prowse ( Star Wars ), although how he fitted in the box is not explained.
Carver (William Sylvester -
2001: A Space Odyssey
), a widowed British archaeologist, goes for a job in Morocco.
One night he meets Marisa (
Alizia Gur
), a beautiful woman with aristocratic bearing.
However, the next morning he can find no trace of her
or of her entire entourage.
This is all a bit reminiscent of
The Zaragoza Manuscript
.
This is one of the few British vampire-related movies of this era that is not linked to Hammer House of Horror or one of its imitators.
A gangster type is killed by a couple of other crooks.
His body is taken to the local hospital,
where a musician has been brought in after a car crash.
The surgeon takes the opportunity to replace the musician's hands,
shattered by the crash, with the gangster's pristine pair.
This is the fourth adaptation of Hands of Orlac. However, the killer is not possessed. These particular hands do not have supernatural powers, and their original owner is never identified. No, this time the killer is driven by pure old-fashioned revenge.
A serial killer is on the loose in Victorian London.
As per usual in Hayes-Code Era movies,
he is a strangler rather than a slasher.
However, the movie gets brownie points
for mentioning the killer's use of the Thugee knot.
Like all good slasher films,
this starts with a stalk-and-slash scene to set the tone.
It also gives some exposition,
although the film becomes a lot more convoluted the longer it goes on.
Among other things,
the girls in this film do not scream and run like real girls would.
This leads to a lack of suspension of disbelief.
Virginia ( Melissa Sue Anderson ) is one of the Top Ten, an elite group of students at a small US college. They are a bunch of rascals who love playing practical jokes, which means they are good suspects ... and victims. Since this was made before Revenge of the Nerds there is not a segregation of Jocks and Nerds. Instead, we get a mix of both. That said, they are all CIS-het white Canadians so we have to tell them apart by their personalities.
Virginia's backstory plays into the main plot. She is being stalked by a guy who wears black giallo-style gloves. Also, Doctor Faraday (Glen Ford - Superman (1978) ) provides exposition about her mental state. The car crash that killed her mother also gave Virginia brain damage. Now she has halucinations, so she does not know what is real.
The killer does not use a signature weapon, so we get a series of original and relatively creative kills.
Director J. Lee Thompson is best known for The Guns of Navarone. This entry in the slasher genre may stand out, being memorable when compared to the two hundred efforts that were released around that time. However, it marks his career downturn as his next movies were low-budget Charles Bronson efforts.
This story follows a group of LAPD detectives
as they investigate a series of high-end burglaries.
The thief ups his game to include murder,
as he shoots his way out of a trap they set for him.
Eventually the cops work out how the killer is evading their dragnet. They corner him in the storm drains under the city. Yes, this movie came out a year before The Third Man, so it may have been an influence on it.
This movie is notable as an early example of the police procedural. The LAPD forensic technician is played by Jack Webb ( Sunset Boulevard ), who wrote a classic non-fiction book entitled The Badge. A conversation he had with this movie's technical advisor, a real-life LAPD detective, inspired Webb to create a TV show entitled Dragnet. Based on real-life LAPD cases, it was the first of the Copaganda genre that is still dominant on television in the English-speaking world.
A group of English children are aboard a ship
when it is captured by pirates.
The Captain (Anthony Quinn -
) tries to look after the kids as best he can.
Meanwhile, the First Mate (James Coburn -
) tries to stop the crew from mutinying.
The story may be set up for adventure, but it seems to be more of a tragedy. It all ends up as a courtroom drama, when one of the children has to testify.
This is one of the first films directed by
Ida Lupino
. She had previously shot several dramas
about contemporary social issues.
Not only was this her first directorial credit on a thriller,
but it is the first Hollywood Film Noir directed by a woman.
A couple of friends go on a road trip together to Baja California, the Mexican peninsula near the US state of California. They pick up a hitch-hiker, a revolver-wielding psycho who is on the run from the police.
This is a classic black and white
William Castle
effort from the early Sixties,
made to cash in on the success of
Psycho
.
A young woman pays a man to marry her. However, it turns out that her real interest is not matrimony. Instead, she wanted to get access to the Justice of the Peace who was intended to perform the ceremony.
The woman makes her getaway, and hides out in a house inhabited by a wheelchair-bound woman and an effeminate-looking young man. This is all part of a countdown to something terrible.
The climax has one of Producer Castle's gimmicks. The action freezes for thirty seconds, and the audience is allowed to leave before the final scare. Yes, this certainly builds up towards the final reveal.
This deals with Feminist themes
but in a pre-feminist context.
It could be a Film Noir,
but for the supernatural aspect it includes.
A woman inherits a mansion, so she and her husband move into it. They do not have much choice, since the husband is a struggling writer so they both have to survive on the wife's income. Of course, the man is a spend-thrift with an eye for the ladies. When his wife refuses to give him money so he can continue an affair with his typist, he decides that murder would be cheaper than a divorce.
The twist is that the mansion is haunted, and the resident poltergeist decides to protect the wife. After all, she is a descendant of the family.
This story is about a troubled young woman, Jenny Welsh (
Susan Penhaligon
), who is friends with a man of her own age
who joined the Catholic priesthood.
She visits his church in order to see him,
and meets the middle-aged priest Father Meldrum (Anthony Sharp).
That night, a black-gloved Giallo killer starts stalking the protagonist - and killing people she associates with. The killer is dressed as a priest, so there are only a couple of characters it could be. Since this is not a standard Giallo horror-dunnit, the killer's identity is revealed earlier rather than later.
The protagonist does not bother going to the police, because she thinks nobody will take her word against the word of a priest. This was made decades before the paedophile scandals, after all. Her sister Vanessa ( Stephanie Beacham ) certainly prefers to follow the party line.
This is certainly not the bog-standard slasher film. Rather than use a signature weapon to cause interchangeable kills, the killer uses improvised weapons that create visually impressive kill scenes.
It is also peopled with a strange cast of characters. There is no detective, trying to solve the killings. However, for some reason the middle-aged priest lives with his invalid mother ... and a one-eyed housekeeper who is reminiscent of Frau Farbissenau in Austin Powers .
The director, Pete Walker , is a lapsed catholic who used this film to attack religious repression, hypocrisy and fanaticism.
This is set in the fictional Central European town of Carlstadt,
one of many references to the Hammer Horror films,
circa the year 1900.
It starts with Father Lewellyn (Christopher Neame -
Ghostbusters 2
) about to conduct a heteronormative wedding.
He pops out for a moment, and returns to find ...
Isobel Banning ( Georgina Dugdale ), along with her mother Anna ( Veronica Carlson ) and friend Christina ( Jamie Trevino ), take a train ride to Carlstadt. They are to meet Isobel's fiance, the town Doctor.
The three women meet the doctor, who lives in the mansion of his aunt - the Baroness ( Caroline Munro ). She keeps her sister Euryale ( Martine Beswick ) hidden, so the audience can work out what is going on. Yes, they must have some connection to the Gorgon that is preying on the villagers.
This was written and directed by one person, who also cast himself as the male lead. He shot it on a limited budget, since it was crowdfunded on Indiegogo. It was filmed in Tarrytown, New York, which accounts for the unusual feel to the setting. It is meant to be gothic horror - but instead of the familiar sets and back-lots of the Hammer studios, it is all a bit small-scale and amateurish. Perhaps they would have been better off using a modern-day setting, with a bit more gore and even a topless scene. The movie spends too much time making on-screen references to the 1960s classics and not enough actually pushing the same boundaries that the old movies did. This basically accepts the Hayes code rules in a way that a real classic horror movie would have skirted around.
An American novelist (Dezi Arnaz Jr -
) visits London, and enters a bet with his publisher.
If the writer can produce a publishable novel
written in a twenty-four hour period,
he will win twenty thousand dollars (in 1983 money).
The venue of the writing will be
a remote mansion somewhere in Wales.
The novelist is confronted by a beautiful woman who seems to have wandered in from a different genre. She warns him about OPIT - the Organisation for the Promotion of International Terrorism. Of course, this is deliberate deception.
The mansion is meant to be uninhabited, but a caretaker (John Carradine - Bluebeard ) and his wife are staying there. Before long they are joined by a visitor (Peter Cushing - Frankenstein ), who claims his car has broken down. Then Lionel Brisbane (Vincent Price - Witchfinder General ), former inhabitant and owner, arrives. The old folk assure the novelist that this is all coincidental, but there is clearly more at work.
Finally, Mr Corrigan (Christopher Lee - Dracula ) arrives and gives everyone a hard time. He is buying the mansion, and plans to knock it down. However, now the four big legacy actors have arrived the storyline really takes off. It turns out that the house has a terrible secret, and the cast start to get picked off one at a time.
The movie seems a lot like The Cat and the Canary . Perhaps that is because this is based on a novel that came out around the same time as the first movie, and thus shares a lot of the same tropes.
This starts in 1961,
when a rich woman who lives in a big mansion
undergoes an experimental medical procedure to get pregnant.
Something goes wrong with the birth ...
Twenty years later, the traumatised mother has rented her house out to a sorority. Yes, there is a house full of college girls with a nasty family secret in the attic - like in Black Christmas . The girls play a practical joke on the old lady, and it goes badly wrong. That night they hold a party, but someone starts bumping the girls off one at a time using the old lady's walking stick.
The writer-director, Mark Rosman , intended to make a movie where the girls were fully-fledged characters rather than just a parade of victims. In some ways he succeeds, but not entirely. Other movies achieved his goal far better than he did. Although this story is centred around the sorority, the girls themselves are almost entirely interchangeable. One of them is Harley Jane Kozak , but she is hardly recognisable. It would have been better to have a more diverse cast, a rainbow of different ethnicities, if only so the characters could be told apart.
With a couple of exceptions, the movie is a bit light on gore. This is not an attempt to be artsy, or a way to censor itself. Instead, the filmmakers did not have a SPFX genius like Rob Bottin available for prosthetics so they just did the best they could on their relatively limited budget.
The first movie was made in the USA,
while the second one took place in Eastern Europe.
The third movie was made on the cheap in Australia,
a late addition to the early 1980s Oz-Sploitation subgenre.
Some US scientists are researching the werewolf phenomenon. They discover links to the extinct Tasmanian wolf, and set off to investigate in Australia.
The main storyline involves Jerboa, a young woman who looks like Peta Wilson . Raised in a remote trailer-park community of redneck werewolves, she goes on the run and winds up in the big city. The good news is that she falls in love with a young man working on a horror movie. The bad news is that everyone is looking for her.
Part of the problem with this film is its lack of adherence to the Three Act Structure. The film has no main protagonist or antagonist, and thus lacks focus. It just chronicles the lives of a few characters, rather than focusing on an actual plot.
In 1929, Charlotte (
Bette Davis
) planned to elope with a married man (Bruce Dern -
Once upon A Time In Hollywood
). Unfortunately someone butchered him with a meat cleaver.
Decades later, Charlotte's home is about to be bulldozed by construction foreman George Kennedy ( Just Before Dawn ). Charlotte is visited by an old friend (Joseph Cotton - ), who tries to talk her into leaving. However, she is mentally unhinged. How long will it be before the killings start again?
This is a prime piece of Hagsploitation, as it is Davis' follow-up to the subgenre's first entry Whatever Happened To Baby Jane . In fact, her co-star Joan Crawford was originally supposed to have a role in this film too.
Dr Harvey Langston (Patrick McGoohan -
Scanners
) is a psychiatrist who wants to reduce aggression among humans.
He runs an institute at a remote location in Canada,
along with his wheelchair-bound sidekick Myrna Molloy (
Amanda Plummer
). The introductary sequence shows he has somehow weaponised the inmates,
controlling them as an army rather than a mere cult.
The protagonist is Dr Samuel Frye, who wants to quit the for-profit healthcare sector and do some good at the Free Clinic. His favourite patient, Veronika Bloom ( Emanuelle Vaugier ), is about to be kicked out of hospital due to her poverty. The good news is that she is a hot-looking twenty-year-old, so she will not be short of work opportunities. The bad news is that she needs medication to surpress the voices in her head.
Fry takes Veronica to the only place she can get the treatment she needs for free - Langston's institute. To add a bit of depth to the plot, the protagonist is an unwitting pawn in a conspiracy against Langston. The hospital's rich donor wants his son rescued from Langston's clinic, while the head administrator wants his hands on Langston's research.
Langston's secret is that he is surgically inserting microchips in the patients' brains. This means that they automatically network and share emotional states. Sort of like a cross between a flash-mob and a twitter-mob. They can be weaponised, as per the opening sequence. However, most of the time they are just used for orgies. The film's director was a protege of the infamous Russ Meyer , and since this is Vaugier's first big-screen role she is more than happy to get naked and do sex scenes.
The protagonist is the manager of a suburban cemetary in the USA.
He keeps track of which grave plots are available
by using a paper map on his office wall.
Plots that have been purchased but are empty have a white pin,
and those which are full have a black pin.
The protagonist discovers that if he inserts a black pin on a person that is still alive, by midnight that night they will be dead. The police investigate, and conclude that every death is of different cause. Some are natural, some are accidental, but there is no sign of foul play in any case.
The protagonist descends into insanity, in a wonderfully suspenseful piece. It also pushes the concept to the next level. One of the detectives compares the map to a voodoo doll. The protagonist tries replacing the black pins with white ones, to see if he can raise the dead ...
A childrens' author, Cathryn (
Susannah York
), is working on her next bestseller.
A woman she does not know telephones her,
and implies that Cathryn's husband Hugh (Rene Auberjonais -
Eyes of Laura Mars
) is having an affair.
When Hugh returns home, Cathryn starts to halucinate.
At Cathryn's request, she and her husband return to their country getaway home. However, things get even more uncanny. After all, the place is basically a Cabin in the Woods . However, this is no mere stalk-and-slash. The story deepens as we discover more about Cathryn. It seems she is being stalked by the ghost of her first husband. He was unfaithful to her, which explains her paranoia about Hugh, but it turns out that she had an affair herself. So which of the men will she choose?
The twist is that she works out a way to rid herself of the ghosts - she just murders them. However, will she eventually kill a real person?
This was written and directed by Robert Altman . He takes what could have been a generic suspense thriller to the next level, with some impressive cinematography of the natural scenery. This prevents it from seeming too stagey, which could easily have happened since this is mostly set in one location like a stage-play.
The complex story is also a bit meta-textual. The book that Cathryn is writing is in fact a real book, In Search of Unicorns, written by the actress Susannah York. And just as Susannah plays a character called Cathryn, the character named Susannah is played by an actress called Cathryn.
This is a rip-off of
Quatermass
, with gory SPFX by Rick Baker.
An American Astronaut returns to Earth, but it turns out be is badly contaminated with radiation. His body is melting, and his mind has gone as well. He stumbles around and violently attacks anyone who gets in his way.
Rather than risk panicking the public, the Authorities stage a coverup. The General and another astronaut go out to hunt down the Melting Man. And when dismembered bodies start turning up, even the local sheriff is kept out of the loop.
This is narrated by the investigator, a police detective,
in the manner of classic Police procedural show
Dragnet
. In fact, that trope - and the climax set in the sewers -
is taken from classic 1940s Film Noir He Walked By Night.
Butcher Benton (Lon Chaney Jnr - ) is on Death Row for robbery-turned-homicide. His last wish is to get revenge on his accomplices, who put the blame on him so they could help themselves to the loot. He does not bother to donate his body to science, but an enterprising scientist steals it anyway and experiments on it with electricity - like in Frankenstein .
The dead man comes back for revenge. A modern-day equivalent would be Shocker , although that movie's villain moved using electricity itself - courtesy of vastly updated SPFX technology - rather than the city's sewer system.
The detective spends his time pursuing Butcher's girlfriend, Eva the burlesque dancer. She is not a suspect in the criminal case, but she is a burlesque dancer. This is an old-fashioned equivalent of the modern cop movie trope every investigation must involve a trip to a trip club.
All in all, an interesting mix of tropes - both old and new.
This is a black and white version of Turn of the Screw by
Henry James
. Despite its old-fashioned look,
the camera-work has a strangely modern feel to it.
A Governess ( Deborah Kerr ) is put in charge of two young children that live in a lonely old countryside mansion. She begins to suspect that the children, who appear wise beyond their years, are possessed by the spirits of her predecessor and her lover. However, the Governess is the only one who can see the ghosts. Is she herself simply going insane?
Adam Kramer (William Shatner -
Star Trek: TMP
) arrives in a small town in Dixieland, USA.
The old lady who runs the boarding house uses the N-Word frequently,
and is unhappy about desegregation,
but accepts it as the law of the land.
It turns out that Kramer is a rabble-rouser.
He has come all the way from Los Angeles, California,
in order to undo the social reforms that have begun to take place.
This was made by Roger Corman , best known for low-budget speculative fiction efforts.
Peter Lorre (
The Boogieman Will get You
) claims to be helping ex-convicts become useful members of society.
He is under investigation by the US government
on suspicion of using the ex-cons as slave labour
in his illicit diamond mine on a mysterious island.
A US Government agent goes undercover. He ends up a prisoner on the island - which was filmed in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. The overseer (Charles Middleton) was Emperor Ming in the 1930s version of Flash Gordon .
A Jack-the-Ripper copycat is stalking the streets of 1980s Los Angeles.
He has killed four victims so far,
each one exactly a hundred years after the original kill,
and only needs one more to complete the set.
Of course, the police are baffled.
They get psychiatrist Dr Carlos Battera (Robert Picardo -
Star Trek: Vgr
) to do a psychological profile on the killer.
Doctors James Spader ( Stargate ) and Chris Moscari ( Cynthia Gibb ) work in a clinic in a low-rent area of Los Angeles, where the killer's victims lived. The fifth victim is Spader's High School sweetheart - while he became a doctor, she became a hooker. This means he is the obvious suspect. To complicate things, he has a twin brother.
The killer is known to be a left-handed man with a doctor's medical knowledge. By incredible coincidence, there are three such characters in this story - four, if you include the ambidextrous man who was a medic in the US military. Yes, the police have plenty of suspects yet do not bother to treat them as suspects until it is too late.
This movie has fallen down the memory hole, and in all fairness it has little to recomend it. However, the cast is first class. Spader is a great troubled loner, while Gibb is a gorgeous damsel in distress. Picardo keeps getting dragged into scenes, almost as if the director is shoe-horning him in. All in all, the result is a watchable mess.
This is an attack on the Youth Culture of the 1950s.
It features Frankie (Richard Meade),
a protagonist who is a young man of 21 years old.
Unfortunately his girlfriend,
despite having paid employment until 10pm,
turns out to be under the age of sixteen.
The District Attorney prosecutes him, and he gets sent to the largest prison in the USA - Jacktown. The bad news is that the other inmates are a bunch of bullies, and they look down on sex offenders as weaklings. The good news is that the Governor takes pity on him, and gets him an easy job as a gardener. The bad news is that the Governor's hot (but age-appropriate) daughter takes a liking to him.
Frankie gets the chance to get away. However, he has no resources and nowhere to go. How long will it be before he ends up dead or back in prison?
This is the kind of subject covered by Ed Wood Jr , but it was in fact written/produced/directed by William Martin . Instead of being shot on Hollywood sets it was shot on location in Michigan, and in an added piece of realism Michigan's Oakland County Prosecutor (George F. Taylor) appears as himself.
Don Gregor is a young man who falls in with bad company.
His sister, Marilyn Gregor (
Dolores Fuller
), and his father - the world's top plastic surgeon -
try to keep him on the straight and narrow.
However, like in most Film Noirs he ends up getting out of his depth.
A robbery goes wrong,
but worse than killing one witness is failing to kill the other.
Yes, the team in
Heat
had logic on their side when they killed the only known witness.
The robbery took place at a theatre, and this is what makes the movie womewhat controversial. No, it does not end in the same bloody fashion as Reservoir Dogs . Instead, there is an establishing scene in the theatre which shows a Minstrel show. Not just singing and dancing, either, but a full-on stand-up comedy routine. This is not even necessary to the plot, it is just padding to increase the run time.
The police detectives, Inspector Johns and Lieutenant Bob Lawrence (Steve Reeves - Sandokan ), are a typically square-jawed and heroic pair. They do not do much detective work, however - they end up sitting around and waiting for the case to solve itself.
The career criminal behind the robbery orders Don's father to perform a face-change operation on him. His theory is that if his face no longer matches his mugshot, the police will be unable to prove who he is. Strangely, no mention is made of altering his fingerprints.
This film was made by the infamous Ed Wood Jnr . He is best-known for his Sci-Fi schlock, but he also made a few of these copaganda movies. This one decries the idea of middle-class youth abandoning their roots and befriending lower-class people, while Woods' worst movies is propaganda against pornography.
Lasky (Lee Majors -
) and Kate (
Karen Black
) lead a team of burglars who break into an industrial facility
somewhere in a remote jungle in Brasil.
The facility is an emerald mining complex,
and contains a vault filled with valuable jewels produced by the mine.
The robbers take what they can,
then hide the loot by dropping into a nearby lake.
Paul Diller (James Franciscus -
Fathom
), the mastermind, orders them to lay low for the next sixty days
until the police call off the search.
A photoshoot team arrives at Lasky's hotel resort, including model Gabrielle ( Margaux Hemingway ), photographer Ollie (Roy Brocksmith - Total Recall ) and producer Ann ( Marisa Berenson ). This provides a welcome distraction. However, some of the robbers cannot be bothered to wait until the coast is literally clear. Then they discover the hard way that Diller has secretly stocked the lake with man-eating piranha!
A storm comes in, trapping the photoshoot crew on a boat. Not only are the three surviving crooks aboard, with their loot, but the water is thick with piranha and the boat is sinking.
This is one of the late-Seventies post- Jaws efforts that focuses of the underwater aspect of the animals-gone-crazy theme. It was shot on location in South America by an Italian production company, so it has more professionalism than American B-movies but more grit than the Hollywood blockbusters. All in all, an enjoyable effort.
This is an amazingly low-budget sci-fi film, part of the post-
Star Wars
glut that came out after 1977.
That said, for all its limitations it actually makes a bit of an effort.
If it had a bigger budget, if could have been a lot more successful.
The result is that it features a cast of unknowns,
wandering around cheap-looking movie sets.
Due to the limited budget,
the filmmakers had to forget the maxim show, don't tell.
Yes, there is lots of clunky exposition through dialogue.
In all fairness, it is nowhere near as clunky
as television shows of the era, such as
V: The Series
.
In the far future, humans are sending colony ships to colonise other planets. One such planet is Outpost Zeta. Unfortunately the six-man recon team failed to report back. So did the two rescue teams. Starfleet cannot abandon the mission altogether, because colonising that planet is essential to colonising that entire sector of the galaxy. Instead they send out another six-person mixed-gender team. They select the best crew they can find, even though this is a suicide mission. Except for the new faces, they are not doing anything different from the three previous failed missions.
Once they get to the planet, the explorers wander around in their spacesuits. Their faces are all covered by opaque visors, and unlike the Power Rangers the space suits are all uniformly coloured orange. However, we can tell them apart because their names are written on the front of their helmets. Anyway, they arrive at the settlement and find the bodies of most of their predecessors. As they explore further, they get bumped off one at a time.
The basic premise is a lot like Event Horizon , down to a message being recovered from the missing explorers and use of an ominous phrase in Latin that warns of Hell. Later, a space marine goes exploring while the female scientist watches the display from his helmet-camera, and warns him to get out because a hostile presence is detected nearby. Yes, this sequence was done so much better a few years later in Aliens (1986) ... but we can certainly see what the director was aiming for. The truth is that this is a lot more like Carpenter's Dark Star (1974) than Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) , so it might have worked better with a more light-hearted touch. The truth is that it is just a bit too grim for a mass-market audience.
This starts with some footage of Monument Valley, USA -
the part of Arizona where so many Western movies were shot.
The storyline starts on a farm owned by Woody Strode,
a face familiar from Westerns like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
His prize cow comes down with a strange ailment,
so he involves the local vet (William Shatner -
Star Trek: TOS
.
The beginning of this film is reminiscent of Jaws , to the extent that the town Mayor does not want to cause a panic because the county fayre will be disrupted. However, as the story progresses it becomes more like The Birds - the small town's entire human population being driven out by a massive population of aggressive creatures. In all fairness, this movie is part of a 1970s sub-genre of wild species going on the rampage - most famously in Day of the Animals .
A US Navy admiral's plane has gone missing in the Carribean.
A US pilot with couple of passengers flies the same course a week later,
and crash-land on a mysterious island.
Right in the middle of a cemetary, in fact.
A cemetary where some of the graves have been recently disturbed ...
The Americans take shelter in the plantation house owned by Dr Sangre - a White man who owes his allegience to Germany. One of the passengers is Jeff, a Black man who makes friends with the German's servants. Although this approach seems dated and racist today, it does allow Black people to talk about something other than a White person - thus letting it pass the Black Bechdel test, something that many modern films fail to do.
This is a low-budget B-movie by Monogram Pictures, originally intended to star Bela Lugosi as the villain. It came out a year after Ghost Breakers (1940 , which started the horror-comedy genre. The result is a horror-comedy with a level of sophistication as there is a wartime espionage storyline.
This is set in medieval France,
when the Church of Rome was in control
rather than any secular King or Lord.
Phillipe Gaston (Matthew Broderick -
Godzilla
), a boy thief, escapes from the dungeons of the Bishop (John Wood -
). Pursued by the Bishop's guardsmen,
he blunders into Etienne Navarre (Rutger Hauer -
Blade Runner
) - the one man who has both the ability and the motive
to defy the cruel Bishop.
The plot thickens when Phillipe discovers that every night they are stalked by a monsterous wolf. Even more mysterious, a woman named Isabeau ( Michelle Pfeiffer ) appears when Navarre is not around. She is very upset when the Bishop's wolf-hunter, Cezar (Alfred Molina - Spider-Man: No Way Home ), makes an appearance.
Luckily, an old monk named Imperius (Leo McKern - The Omen ) provides the necessary exposition. The Bishop made a satanic pact to curse the couple. The knight becomes a wolf by night, while the lady becomes a hawk by day, so they can never truly be together. However, it turns out that there may be a way to end the curse.
Richard Donner made this foray into the Fantasy genre, before he went into the Contemporary Romp genre with the Lethal Weapon series. Even his Western, the feature-length Maverick remake, shares the same comedy-thriller tone.
Perhaps because of the Director's inexperience with Fantasy, with the element of keeping the budget low, the transformation scenes are non-existent. The most we get are a few camera transitions, the kind of post-production editing work used in The Changeling .
This is a documentary about paganism and witchcraft in England,
although the footage includes images of Sheila-na-gig sculptures
that are best known in Ireland.
We get a history of Pagan traditions in the British Isles,
along with statements like William the Conquerer's mother was a witch
and the cross on his men's shields was a pagan image of the sun.
Yes, this certainly presents as facts
a series of theories that are outside of mainstream history.
A lot of focus is placed on modern-day pagan ceremonies. Since these ceremonies are generally performed in the nude, this comes across a bit like a 1960s exploitation movie. However, this was shot in black and white so it seems to be aiming for the artistic market rather than the low-budget grindhouse audience.
Viewers might also enjoy the similarly-themed Secret Rites (1971) .
Director
Tobe Hooper
delivers yet another big-budget horror movie
that fails to live up to its pulpy Sci-Fi roots.
Despite being a Cannon/Golan-Globus production,
the filmmakers chose to change the original title
to something more pretentious.
Written by
Dan O'Bannon
, this is not as good as it could have been
although nowhere near as bad as its reputation.
It has dated quite a bit,
in part because it heavily features Halley's Comet
which was approaching Earth for the first time in 76 years.
A team of astronauts, led by Carlsen (Steve Railsback - X-Files ), approach Halley's Comet and discover an alien spaceship in its orbit. They board the alien ship, where they discover the mysterious naked Space Girl ( Mathilda May ) and two males in suspended animation. Carlsen decides to take these three coffin-dwellers back to Earth ...
A month later, the shuttle arrives back at Earth. There has been a fire aboard, and all records were destroyed. Dr Fallada (Frank Finlay - ) investigates the Space Girl and her comrades who turn out to be space vampires. When she escapes, SAS Colonel Caine (Peter Firth - Equus ) takes charge of the case. Sir Percy (Aubrey Morris - Night Caller (1965) ) rubber-stamps their decisions.
The girl's trail leads to a hospital for the criminally insane, run by Dr Armstrong (Patrick Stewart - Star Trek: TNG ). The good news is that Stewart gets his first on-screen kiss.
A twenty-something scientist uses strange green goo
to make ugly little monsters.
It has been said that
Ghoulies
makes
Critters
look like
Gremlins
, but these monsters are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The real protagonist is the scientist's neighbour, who teams up with his friend Doc (Russ Tamblyn - Twin Peaks ) to fight the monsters.
Set in Australia,
this sees a bickering couple take a weekend vacation on a remote beach.
However, they have wandered into a 1970s nature-takes-revenge movie.
The female lead is Briony Behets , best known as Doreen in Prisoner: Cell Block H. She does some topless sunbathing and reads her romantic literature while her husband messes around with his rifle. He discovers an abandoned vehicle, left there by the previous humans who visited the beach.
There is no supernatural monster that attacks the humans. Rather, it is a bit like Picnic At Hanging Rock - the location has an air of unease and suspense.
Don Gallico (Vincent Price -
masque of the Red Death
) is a stage magician in the late Victorian era,
AKA the American Gilded Age.
His tricks, and his wife Claire (
Eva Gabor
), are stolen by a rival.
Now Gallico uses his deadly traps,
and his skills as a master of disguise,
to take revenge on those who wronged him.
This is a follow-up to House of Wax (1953) , Price's 3-D film the year before. This effort may have been shot in black and white instead of colour, but the filmmakers still included the 3-D effects which add an extra dimension to the stage tricks.
The opening credits, as with
Dead Again
, provide exposition in the form of newspaper articles.
The protagonist, Ellen Hardy,
witnessed her younger brother George and sister kill their parents.
The siblings are incarcerated in a Toronto mental hospital.
A big thing is made of the fact that nobody is certain
which of the children actually committed the murders.
A dozen years later, Ellen ( Stella Stevens ) is in Vancouver working as housekeeper for a wealthy widow named Gladys Armstrong ( Shelley Winters ). Her siblings are released by the hospital, so she flies them across Canada to live with her. Gladys pretends to be welcoming at first, but is nosy and paranoid about the newcomers. They are staying in her house, after all. The real point of contention is the siblings need for a Mad Room, a safe space they can hang out in while working out their frustrations.
George is a real problem. He has just turned eighteen, and has been incarcerated since the age of six. Now he is turned loose on a world filled with young women in mini-skirts. Gladys' secretary Chris ( Carol Cole ) does not object to the distraction.
Someone turns up dead, and Ellen has to cover it up. This is a lot more difficult than it seems, because the house is a very busy place with lots of comings and goings.
This is a little-known suspense thriller from the late 1970s,
before horror movies became a clichéd bunch of supernatural slashers.
Anthony Hopkins (
Silence of the Lambs
) is a ventriloquist, being groomed for the big time by top agent Burgess Meredith (
Santa Claus: The Movie
).
Before his big tour, the ventriloquist rents a remote cottage and rekindles a romance with an old flame. But things come crashing down with brutal suddeness.
College Professor Bill Pullman (
Independence Day
) is happily married to
Nicole Kidman
.
This was written by Aaron Sorkin , and that is the only thing that really makes it special.
Victorian London, and Jack the Ripper is on the loose.
The mysterious Mr Slade (Jack Palance -
Spy With The Green Hat
) moves into the attic room of a boarding house.
The other occupants of the boarding house quickly become suspicious of him,
even though there seems to be a relatively innocent explanation
for everything suspicious about him.
The young lady in the boarding house is a beautiful actress who would be a prime target for the Ripper - especially considering her risque song-and-dance routines. By incredible coincidence, she is dating one of the detectives investigating the murders.
There is a suspiciously high death toll among the inmates of a female prison.
A young psychiatric student who is working there
draws attention to this at the inquest of the most recent death.
Of course, her opinion does not carry much weight.
Not because she is female in the 1950s,
but because she has no evidence to back up her suspicions.
Her youth and lack of experience also count against her.
A male doctor who specialises in the field is posted at the prison. The senior staff are a suspicious bunch, a sinister conspiracy aided by a tall zombie-like man who never speaks. Together they perform unauthorised procedures on the inmates. Not experiments, since the outcome is never in doubt - their motive is entirely selfish, with no pretence of scientific discovery.
Eventually the protagonist discovers what the conspiracy is about. This exposition is not through flashback, but though him reading a diary. This leads to the Third Act climax, where he must race to save the next damsel in distress.
Dr James Xavier (Ray Milland -
The Premature Burial
) is a scientist experimenting with a serum
that can enhance eyes to allow them to see through solid objects.
To get his funding continued he must show results,
so he experiments on himself.
However, this backfires.
With his funding gone, Dr Xavier returns from experimentation to mainstream medicine. This gives him a moral quandry. If he allows a senior doctor to perform unnecessary surgery, he will be breaching the hippocratic oath. However, when he intervenes and saves the patient's life he is technically acting in an unethical manner and loses his medical licence.
To up the ante a bit, Xavier loses more than his medical licence. The old Film Noir trope is invoked that someone dies and the protagonist is implicated. He joins a carnival under an assumed name, and reluctantly teams up with Don Rickles (playing the same character as in Kelly's Heroes). They set up a faith-healer operation, which would make sense if they bothered to move to a different city. When Xavier's gal-pal tracks him down, which only takes a few weeks, he elopes with her to Las Vegas in order to swindle the casinos. Perhaps he should have done this with Rickles instead. For a smart man, he seems very stupid when the plot demands it. After all, he observes that the serum's effect is cumulative ... yet he keeps taking it!
The lead character's surname is pronounced Ecks-Saviour, to go with the X-ray eyes of the title. When he runs away to join the circus, Xavier poses as a mind-reader named Mentallo. This seems to have inspired the leader of the X-Men, a mind-reader named Professor Charles Xavier, who does not pronounce his surname in the normal way.
This starts with a brutal murder.
Instead of using a garotte,
since this is still the Hayes Code era,
or even a knife ... the killer uses an acetylene torch.
Well, this takes place in a small town in France,
so presumably the English-speaking censors
held the Francophones to a lower standard.
That is strange, because this is a Hammer movie -
written by Jimmy Sangster and directed by Michael Carreras,
with distribution by Columbia Studios.
Four years after the murder, American artist Jeff Farrell (Kerwin Matthews - Seventh Voyage of Sinbad ) visits the small town. He breaks up with his girlfriend, Grace ( Justine Lord ), then gets interested in a young local woman, but gets seduced by her stepmother. The stepmother, an unlikely femme fatale, offers to marry Jeff the American ... if her husband agrees to divorce her. Since her husband is currently in a lunatic asylum, after being convicted of the acetylene murder, Jeff the American must help the killer to escape.
Naturally, this is all a very bad idea. There is now a homicidal maniac on the loose, with the means and motivation to attack his ex-wife and her new lover.
There are a couple of apparent plot-holes that are filled in by plot twists. This all ends with the biggest plot twist of all. Yes, this is so convoluted that it all makes no sense.
The climactic chase seems to have inspired the opening scene of Caravan to Vacarres.
A young woman has suffered head trauma in a car crash.
Her father, an eminent surgeon,
performs illegal operations on unconsenting donors
in order to repair the damage to his darling.
If this all sounds familiar,
it is because the idea was previously done in the French film
Les Yeux Sans Visage
, AKA Eyes Without A Face.
This newer version has a twist, however.
The girl's face is fine -
it is her eyes that are the only problem.
Dr Chaney (Richard Basehart - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea ) realises that the eye tissue must be extracted with a blood supply, which means he can only use living donors instead of cadavers. Dr Dan Bryan (Lance Hendricksen - Aliens ), the daughter's fiance, has an interest in eye surgery. He would be the perfect collaborator ... but he ends up contributing something else to the project.
The doctor lives in a massive mansion with a swimming pool. It even has a basement, where he stores all the victims of his botched surgeries. The cage begins to fill up with mutilated victims, and they are slowly driven insane by their need to escape.
Craig Wasson (
Nightmare on Elm Street 3
) breaks his mentally unbalanced brother out of an asylum.
They go on the run together,
but this is the kind of film where it is only a
matter of time before this escalates into a crime
spree of the type which involves a trail of bodies.
A tweenage girl is left in charge of a remote ranch. The only person she has for company is a creepy colleague who sexually harrasses her. Then the brothers drop by, looking for a place to hide out from the law.
David Carradine ( Kill Bill ) is the local lawman. He is investigating the murder of a young woman. The runaway brothers are the obvious suspects.
This starts in contemporary England,
in an antique shop where the paw is a display item not for sale.
It was apparently bought from a house in Ireland.
A spiv, AKA a dodgy salesman of second-hand or stolen goods,
talks the antiquarian into selling the paw.
Later he tries to sell it to a pub landlord.
A drunken Irishman narrates a tale of his own encounter with the paw. He witnessed the previous owner make a wish on it, which ended in multiple fatalities. Yes, even the cliched greedy drunken Irishman wants nothing to do with it.
The publican buys the paw from the spiv. Well, he is desperate because he owes his bookie two hundred pounds (in 1948 money). This seems to be a commentary on how working class culture of the 1940s involved regular contact with spivs, bookies and so on.
Eventually, someone gives into temptation. They get their wish, but at a horrible cost. Then there is the temptation to use the second wish to remove the side-effects of the first wish. This seems to have inspired a certain memorable episode of Buffy .
R. Chetwynd-Hayes (John Carradine -
Bluebeard
), the horror writer who wrote many short stories used in portmanteau movies,
befriends a vampire named Erasmus (Vincent Price -
The Raven
). In gratitude, the vampire invites the writer to the Monster Club,
a venue with an exclusively supernatural membership.
This bookends the horror stories in this portmanteau,
interspersed with musical interludes from bands like UB40.
There is even a strip-tease sequence
that seems to have inspired the famous Robbie Williams music video.
Erasmus explains to his guest that there are three main types of monster - vampires, werewolves and ghouls. Yes, zombies are not a thing yet - well, this was made in 1980. There are other types of monsters, but they are half-breeds. To give an example, Erasmus tells about George (Simon Ward - ) - who is a catatonic patient in an asylum. If a flashback, we see how George got his girlfriend Angela ( Barbara Kellerman ) to attempt to rob a rich man who was secretly a half-breed monster called a Shadmock.
The second story is a movie-within-a-movie, when the Monster Club holds a screening of a Vampire's autobiographical film. It is about a boy who lives with his mother ( Britt Ekland ), while his father works all night an sleeps all day. Then a creepy priest (Donald Pleasance - Halloween ) and his henchman (Anthony Valentine - To The Devil A Daughter ) come nosing around.
The third story is another anecdote about half-breed monsters. A horror-movie director (Stuart Whitman - ) goes location-scouting by himself. He arrives at a remote village filled with creepy people, and finds himself besieged there. The villagers are ghouls - like zombies they eat the flesh of the dead, and can walk in the daylight - but they can breed with humans, and are afraid of the crucifix.
This starts with a scene of a man's death by drowning,
then introduces the main characters
and have one of them mysteriously disappear.
Well, it is not really a mystery for the audience.
While the protagonists suspect the death and disappearance are signs of foul play,
we the audience get to see the killings actually take place.
Of course, this really illustrates how incompetent the town sheriff is.
The drowned man is the father of the female lead, and the disappearance is of the boyfriend's comedy sidekick. Luckily their schoolmate Pete (Bill Paxton - Aliens ) is around to fill the vacant role. Pete's father is the town mortician, and the boyfriend's family run the florist's shop, so the main characters all know each other.
Although the first two kills take place in broad daylight, the movie takes a twist as the killer starts to stalk his victims at night. This is a step into the more mundane mainstream of horror, copying generic slashers rather than continuing to add something new.
This starts in the gaslight of Victorian London,
where a chorus girl dates the wealthy and aristocratic Mr Drego (Victor Mature -
Samson and Delilah
). She is found murdered,
and the killer seems to have left a bible
with a kind of flower known as the Moss Rose as a bookmark.
Police Inspector R. Clinner (Vincent Price - Theatre of Blood ) investigates, but the odds are against him. It seems odd to see Price in such a role - after all, later in his career he would be the obvious villain of the piece. However, in his early days he often had such supporting roles. This character, a seemingly absent-minded detective who is a font of obscure knowledge, has a hint of Peter Falk's Columbo about him.
However, the story is not about his investigation. Instead it focuses on the murder victim's friend, who saw Mr Drego and blackmails him. She does not want money - she wants social elevation, like the flower-girl in Pygmalion. To do this she uses the pseudonym Rose and accompanies Drego to his family estate in the countryside, so the movie changes tone accordingly. It is no longer a gritty murder-by-gaslight thriller, but more of a cosy country mansion suspense affair. There is even a reference to the local mire, which conjurs up images of Hound of the Baskervilles.
Rose bonds with Drego's widowed mother and his fiance, a rich woman he has been commited to an arranged marriage with. However, this movie can hardly pass the Bechdel test because the only thing the women have in common is the man at the centre of the story.
This starts with an introduction by the producer,
William Castle
. At the end, he has a second appearance in the closing bookend sequence.
This is key to the film's gimmick -
a piece of interactive theatre,
the kind of audience involvement that Castle was famed for.
The viewers are offered the chance to vote on the villain's fate.
Will they choose mercy or punishment?
Ironically, it seems that Castle never even filmed the merciful ending.
The film is set in the late Victorian era, in a time when the hypodermic needle is a new invention. The protagonist is a doctor, recently knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to medical science. He is summoned to a foreign country with a made-up name, presumably somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian sphere of influence.
The Baron narrates his backstory in a flashback.
The story itself is quite straightforward. A doctor is summoned to cure a patient of an unusual ailment.
This is the directorial debut of the actor Bob Balaban,
produced by slasher movie supremo
Sean S. Cunningham
. It is about an American High School boy
who dies ... and comes back as a Smart Zombie.
He wants to survive long enough to take his love interest,
the Sheriff's daughter, to Prom.
Unfortunately the only way to slow his decay
is for him to devour the flesh of the living.
The locals are a bunch of rednecks, and their anti-zombie prejudice is a parody of the segregationist sentiment from 1950s Dixieland. The school bullies are Buck Van Patten (Matthew Fox - Lost ) and Chuck Bronski (Philip Seymour Hoffman - Mission Impossible 3 ). Yes, not only did those actors go on to much bigger and better things, but their characters names rhyme. This is also Matthew McConaughey's first film, before he went on to work with Renee Zellweger on the infamous Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4 . Here he is recognisable as a tweenager in a movie theatre, and even gets to utter some forgettable line of dialogue.
There is also a subplot about the local doctor. He turns into a mad scientist, keen to turn zombie flesh into an eternal life serum. Partly for scientific kudos, but also partly to monetize it.
This starts in 1957.
President Eisenhower oversees the US Airforce
as it dismantles a captured UFO.
This would have made more sense in 1947,
after the Roswell crash,
but for some reason the President is Eisenhower instead of Truman.
In 1985, a High School science teacher (Dennis Hopper - Flashback ) orders his pupils to do a project. One of the boys, a car obsessive, breaks into the local disused Air Force base and scavenges a fancy-looking gadget he discovers. The bad news is that it turns out to be the engine of the UFO.
The UFO's space-drive works by warping time and space. The protagonist and his best friend (Fisher Stevens - Short Circuit ) must prevent it from tearing a hole in the fabric of space-time. To start with, they are assisted by a female nerd who is the protagonist's love interest. Unfortunately she is knocked unconscious, and becomes a damsel in distress for the final reel. Luckily there is a male nerd who can fill in for her.
The protagonist is a young woman who runs an old folks home
in a remote part of Australia.
She has inherited it from her mother,
who ran it as a family business since the 1950s.
Her boyfriend Barney (John Jarratt -
Wolf Creek
) is on-hand to provide moral support.
The heroine keeps seeing the silhouette of a stranger, watching her from a distance - like in Halloween . Then there is a series of bathroom-related incidents, which bring to mind the suspense of the shower scene in Psycho . Yes, this certainly has a few homages to the greats.
Although this is slow and suspenseful to start, like Friday the 13th it really kicks into gear in the Third Act with music and cinematography reminiscent of the works of Dario Argento .
A scientist (John Saxon -
Nightmare on Elm Street
) detects a strange object entering Earth's atmosphere
at ten thousand miles per hour.
It lands in England, but does not cause a crater.
Yes, somehow it landed under control.
The object is a glowing orb,
small and light enough to be carried to the scientist's lab.
The British army secures the area,
but they are not prepared for what takes place.
The orb is a teleportation transceiver, sent at sublight speed from Ganymede, moon of Jupiter. The aliens who sent it now use it to transport one of their own, who breaks out through the army's perimeter.
With the alien on the loose, the focus of the story turns to the police detective who is assigned with hunting him down. It turns out that the alien may be involved in the disappearance of some young women. Saxon joins the detective at an interview with Alf Garnett, father of one of the missing women. The trail leads to a shopkeeper (Aubrey Morris - Lifeforce (1985) ) ...
The alien abducts women and murders witnesses. All this appears to be pretty needless, since he could easily get volunteers if he marketed himself properly. After all, he is offering the unique experience of traveling to an alien planet, which has a more advanced level of technology, and becoming a saviour of that civilisation. One character in particular is killed off who should have been an eager participant.
This starts a lot like the movie
Critters
, released around the same time.
An alien spacecraft is passing near Earth when it experiences a jailbreak.
It is 1959 in the USA,
when a courting couple discover a strange meteorite.
By incredible coincidence,
there also happens to be an axe-murderer on the loose.
The main storyline takes place twenty-seven years later, in the mid-Eighties, on a college campus near where the meteorite landed. The campus frat-boys are bullies, just like in Revenge of the Nerds (1984). They test their new members by sending them on a dare, which is when they run into lab assistant David Paymer ( Chill Factor ).
The transgressing students unleash a plague of alien brain-slugs. Before long, possessed people are wandering around the campus trying to help the aliens reproduce.
The synopsis may make this sound like a pile of cliches. What really sets it apart, other than the impressive script and talented direction, is the performance of Tom Atkins ( The Fog ) as Police Detective Cameron.
This is a b&w classic from the 1950s, based on a short story by
MR James
. It starts with a voice-over that delivers exposition reminiscent of a Pathe newsreel.
Apparently the druids of Stonehenge communed with demons.
There are lots of other inaccuracies,
but this movie is intended to thrill rather than educate.
An American psychologist goes to England to investigate allegations of satanism. The casting is quite straight-forward. Our hero is tall, clean-shaven and American. The villain is shorter, fatter, goatee beard-wearing and English.
The demon is set to kill its victim on a specific day at exactly ten o'clock in the evening. As a result we get a nice countdown as the tension slowly ramps up.
Jake (Dennis Hopper -
), a young sailor, falls in love with Mora (
Linda Lawson
) - a girl who plays a mermaid in a seaside show.
As the film progresses,
he starts to suspect she may be a real mermaid.
This should not be a problem,
but her last boyfriend mysteriously died.
It looks like Jake could be next.
Deputy Duran (Nick Mancuso -
) is the lawman on a remote Native American reservation.
The locals include his girlfriend Anne Dillon (
Kathryn Harrold
) and a borderline racist shopkeeper, Selwyn (Strother Martin -
Hannie Caulder
). However, people start dying mysteriously.
This is one of the animal-attacks genre from the 1970s. It is quite reminiscent of Jaws , but instead of a shark there is a flock of vampire bats. The Mayor, Walker Chee (Steven Macht - Galaxina ), wants to ignore the danger and sell mining rights to a fossil fuel company.
The most interesting character is a mad scientist, Philip Payne (David Warner - Time Bandits ), who seems a bit of a combination of Quint and Hooper. In fact, he seems a lot more like Dr Van Helsing. He is obsessed with hunting down the bats, referring to them as vampires and pure evil.
The writer was Martin Cruz Smith, author of the Gorky Park detective books. The special effects are by Carlo Rambaldi, after whom the mcguffin-maker in Alias was named. They seem designed for 3-D cinema, as we get lots of face-on shots reminscent of the Piranha 3-D movies.
This was written and directed by
William Peter Blatty
, and much like his best known effort
Exorcist 3
this is also set in a mental asylum.
The movie starts with an expositionary voiceover
that mentions an epidemic of combat psychosis
that hit the US military during the Vietnam war.
The US military assumed there were a lot of fakers,
and responded with a secret study in a network of clinics.
This is set in the last one, number 18,
purportedly in an abandoned castle in the Pacific West of the USA.
In reality the film was shot on location in Hungary,
so the Castle is magnificent but not really credible as something in the USA.
The in-story explanation is that it was dismantled in Europe
and re-assembled stone by stone in the USA.
A medical officer named Colonel Kane (Stacey Keach - ) is assigned to Station 18 as staff Psychiatrist, and gets to know the inmates. Lieutenant Bennish (Robert Loggia - Lost Highway ) thinks he is an astronaut, exploring the surface of Mars. Another inmate is training dogs to perform the complete works of Shakespeare. However, casting is a problem. If he casts Hamlet with a great dane, he will be accused of typecasting. However, he draws the line at letting a female play either Rozencrantz or Guilderstein.
Kane focuses his attentions on helping one patient, Captain Cutshaw (Scott Wilson - The Walking Dead ), an astronaut who called off a mission to the moon. They bond well, until the story takes an unforseen twist. Cutshaw goes AWOL and runs into a biker gang, including Richard Lynch ( Galactica 1980 ). Unfortunately Sergeant Krebs (Tom Atkins - Halloween 3 ) and the other guards are nowhere to be seen.
This is a straight-up melodrama, since it is neither a comedy nor a thriller. There is no central antagonist, although the bikers do help create a climactic scene.
This starts with a nine-year-old boy being raised by a single mother,
who looks more like his grandmother.
The boy has selective mutism,
which leads to him being bullied by the other children.
They play a prank on him which goes badly wrong,
as it usually does in the prologue of this kind of film.
Ten years later, the boy is now an inmate in a mental institution. He has been a model patient, due to being permanently sedated. However, he escapes and goes on a murder spree. His primary targets are the kids who bullied him. They are at the perfect age to be victims in this genre. Not only are they young enough to be photogenic, they are old enough to be left alone without adult supervision. This allows them to be picked off one at a time.
Writer-director Christopher Reynolds is also the producer, which explains why the budget is as lacking as the creativity. He rips off Halloween a lot, including the iconic music. In all fairness, that movie borrows a lot from Black Christmas and at least Reynolds allowed us to see the escape scene. However, the lighting is as bad as the superior Severed Arm (made seventeen years earlier) and the filmmaking seems generally sloppy. The kill scenes have a certain ambition to them, but the director's ability was nowhere near sufficient - a bit like Ed Wood . Throwing in a few flashy moments every now and again just makes them stand out so the film seems uneven.
The British police are worried about a mad scientist (Bela Lugosi -
Phantom Ship
). He is ringleader of a criminal gang,
and maintains his power over them by posing as a vampire.
He dresses like
Dracula
, and sleeps in a coffin.
The Vampire plans to build an army of fifty thousand robots. He has ordered the first one from a factory in Ireland, and he placed the order under the pseudonym Dr Reilly. Unfortunately, the crate gets mixed up with one sent to Old Mother Riley.
Old Mother Riley is a caricature of an old irish woman - like in Mrs Brown's Boys. The Vampire summons his robot, and it brings the old lady as a hostage. She accepts the madman's offer of a job as cleaning lady, and does not realise that the free meals he provide are intended to fatten her up before the sacrifice.
Eventually the truth dawns on her, and she has to save the day.
Morgan the Pirate buried his stolen treasure,
and hid the map in a secret compartment on his bead.
Three hundred years later, the bed is in an antiques shop.
The bad news is that Mrs Riley works in the shop.
The good news is that Morgan's ghost is around
so he can show her shere the map is.
Some crooked treasure-hunters want the map as well. Luckily, Mrs Riley has a habit of chasing off customers even if they are genuine rather than crooks.
The Riley expedition meet a local tribesman. They expect him to be an uncivilised savage, but he turns out to be an old Etonian. He warns them about the local Voodoo worshippers, but then takes sides with the treasure-hunting crooks.
It is a nice twist that the first Black man they meet is Eton-educated, but the Voodoo tribe are just a crowd of negative stereotypes. All they shout is Abba, which makes about as much sense as Umgawa from the Tarzan movies. At least they are played by real Black people, rather than a bunch of Whites in Black-face, especially since this was only shot a couple of years after the Empire Windrush arrived in England.
The good guys get captured by the Voodoo worshippers, who are dressed like Southern African natives rather than people from the West Indies. Mrs Riley is given a choice: marry the Chief and get chained up with his other wives, or be sacrificed to the great snake god. Yes, there are a lot of cliches and stereotypes here. However, this is played for laughs and the Black people are not villains.
This is a black and white movie, set in the English town of Shrimpton
on an island six miles long and four miles wide.
They discover their island has been sucked off the face of the Earth
by gravitational force of a dead star that passed through the solar system.
Now Shrimpton is a second moon of Earth, less than sixty miles in circumference,
although the gravity seems to be the same as that of Earth itself.
The local aristocrat is appointed President, and his wife is made Commissioner for Women's Interests. The population start a campaign for equal rights. This not a modern-style gender equity campaign, since women are represented. Instead it is for equality between social classes.
This is a strange glimpse of a long-gone world, where making love means flirting. That said, someone also thinks it is a good idea to conduct a midnight raid while wearing a long white scarf around his neck.
The few hundred survivors start to battle over scarce resources. The aristocrats have the advantage, since they served as officers in the First World War. They have an armoury of sporting rifles, and an army of loyal servants. The townsfolk have a volunteer fire brigade, who must be trained and equipped with bows and arrows.
This is a parody of the
Cat and the Canary
subgenre of films,
with a bunch of unlikeable characters gathering in an
old dark house
for the reading of a will.
They must abide by a set of strange conditions
in order to get a share of the inheritance.
The body must not be buried underground,
but instead a special rooftop crypt must be built.
Until it is completed, nobody can leave the house's grounds ...
The protagonist, a life-insurance salesman named Tuttle (Jack Haley - Wizard of Oz ), visits the mansion hoping to sell a policy to the old man. He gets roped into guarding the body, first through a case of mistaken identity and later through pleas from an attractive woman. The salesman is no action hero, more of a comedy relief character.
The house is filled with secret passageways, and the butler is Bela Lugosi ( Dracula ). This certainly evokes memories of a lot of genre films of the period.
Alex (Heath Ledger -
The Dark Knight
) is a Roman Catholic priest, a member of the obscure Carolingian order.
His mentor, the head of the order, dies in mysterious circumstances.
Cardinal Driscoll (Peter Weller -
Robocop
) informs Alex that the mentor was murdered,
and orders him to Rome to investigate.
Alex has a couple of associates, Mara ( Shannyn Sossamon ) and Thomas (Mark Addy - Game of Thrones ). They met on a previous adventure, which is vaguely aluded to but not shown or fleshed out. A pity, because it was probably more interesting than this one.
This is not just a good old murder-mystery. The Carolingians are demon-hunters, making Alex the equivalent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . Yes, this is one of those movies where demons are as real as raccoons and the Church of Rome - not a church as old as Orthodox Judaism or as new as the Mormons - is the only Animal Control available.
Writer-director Brian Helgeland made this as a follow-up to his previous success, The Knight's Tale , and features three of the same actors. However, it is nowhere near as good.
This is about a pair of twin boys living on a farm
in Connecticut USA during the Great Depression.
It is a psychological thriller,
of the type that was popular after the success of
Psycho (1960)
, involving an element of untruthful narrator to disguise the fact that
one of the characters has undiagnosed mental illness.
The boys live with their grandmother, although we only see her directly interact with one of them. She teaches him to Warg, like in Game of Thrones . Then people in the area start dying mysteriously ...
The boy next door threatens to tattle-tale on the twins. Later, their mother Alexandra ( Diana Muldaur ) visits the farm. The twins' sister and her husband, Rider (John Ritter - ), have a young baby. Yes, there is an ever-expanding list of potential victims ...
The movie starts with a voice-over narrator
providing exposition about the US military-industrial complex.
This is a 1950s B-Movie, so that is pretty standard.
The US radar network picks up a UFO over Alaska, and tracks it as far south as California. Some Federal Agents in the area investigate sabotage incidents. It takes them forever to connect this to the UFO, even when there is an eyewitness description of the saboteur.
The alien invader ditches his space-suit in order to blend in better. He is humanoid, but the real reason he blends in is because he has the ability to turn invisible. This means that the film's SPFX budget is kept low.
Luckily, one of the investigating scientists is female. Not that the movie comes close to passing the Bechdel test, but at least there is a reactive character who can scream when in danger.
The Captain brings his new wife aboard,
despite the fact that he seduced her away from her previous fiance.
The crew are an unruly lot,
because half of them were press-ganged into the job.
Small wonder that people start mysteriously disappearing ...
and then the murders start.
Bela Lugosi, hidden under a bushy white wig, delivers an impressively memorable performance.
This was directed by Hitchcock's graphic designer
Saul Bass
, his first and only feature film.
That explains the unusual feel, reminiscent of
Night of the Hunter (1955)
, due to the constant use of close-ups on insects to set the mood.
The art director was
John Barry
, best known for directing some of the 1980s Bond movies.
The interiors were shot at Pinewood studios in England,
which explains the large number of English cast and crew for a film set in New Mexico.
The opening is wildlife footage of ants, with a voice-over that provides the necessary exposition. Unusual stellar phenomenae were detected that may have affected Earth's animals.
Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport - Peeping Tom (1960) ), a biologist, discovered that different species of ants had mysteriously begun to cooperate. He takes an assistant, and drives off into the Arizona desert to perform field The ants have constructed a cluster of nearly symetrical ant-hills, and most of the humans in the region seem to have fled in panic. Phase one of the experiment is to evacuate the civilians.
Hubbs is impatient to see some activity from the ants. He destroys the ant-hills, and this transgression causes the ants to counter-attack. Along with a local farm-girl ( Lynne Frederick ), the scientists are besieged inside their dome. One vulnerability is that the 1970s computers, which are as big as filing cabinets, need a special cooling system.
Doctor Linden (Terry O'Quinn -
The Stepfather
) has an anatomically correct dummy in his office,
and uses ventriloquism to make it seem alive.
He uses the dummy, named Pin (Jonathan Banks -
), to educate his children -
7-year-old Leon and 5-year-old Ursula.
Ten years later, Ursula ( Cyndy Preston ) and Leon (David Hewlett - Stargate: Atlantis ) are attending High School. Although Ursula has worked out her father's ventriloquism trick, Leon is still convinced that Pin is a sentient entity.
People start to die in mysterious circumstances, with Pin present. Ursula gets a boyfriend, Stan Fraker (John Pyper-Ferguson - Alphas ). Of course, Pin - and Leon - take a dislike to him.
Is Leon a paranoid schizophrenic, like in Psycho , which would make this a thriller ... or is Pin a cursed object, like Christine , which would make it a horror movie?
A group of college students attend an anthropology lecture.
Their lecturer is obsessed with a Latin American god named Death-a-coatl,
like Quetzacoatl in
Q: The Winged Serpent
. This god was turned into a clay idol,
and supernatural events happen when the idol is around.
As strange things happen to the college students, a nerdy guy find out and tells his girlfriend. She is a journalist working for a tabloid newspaper - but ironically, she would rather stick to proven facts than exaggerate things to make memorable headlines as her boss prefers. Anyway, she reluctantly investigates.
This movie turns out to be one of a subgenre of horror film that started with Christine (or possibly with The Shining , also based on a book by Stephen King ) and includes 976 Evil . The main character turns out not to be a hero, but rather gets corrupted by evil and becomes a villain.
Tom Canty (Mark Lester -
Who Slew Aunt Roo?
) lives in a slum in Tudor London
with his abusive father (Ernest Borgnine -
The Black Hole
) and his young mother (
Sybill Danning
). The old man sends his boy out to earn money in the family trade,
thievery, which is apparently the only way they can earn money.
When the boy blunders into the palace of King Henry the Eighth (Charlton Heston -
The Awakening
), he meets the Prince - who is his identical doppelganger.
At the Prince's insistence,
they exchange clothing to play a practical joke.
This all goes wrong thanks to the Duke of Norfolk (Rex Harrison -
Dr Doolittle
), who is then arrested for treason
and replaced by his rival Hertford (Harry Andrews -
Equus
).
The Prince, dressed as a pauper, is thrown out of the Palace. Luckily he meets up with Miles Hendon (Oliver Reed - Gladiator ), a soldier-of-fortune recently returned from Germany. Borgnine goes on the run after a violent encounter, and takes with him the boy he believes to be his son. They hide out in Hendon forest, in the hope of teaming up with the local band of robbers. Their leader, Ruffler (George C. Scott - ), claims to have been a monk who was cast out when the King dissolved the monasteries twenty years previously. One of the robbers, Hodge (Dudley Sutton - Lovejoy ), gives a sob story about being a ploughman and losing his livelihood when enclosure happened. In reality, the dissolution and enclosures were a step in the ending of the medieval agricultural society which led to the growth of the cities and the middle class.
Back in the Palace, King Henry dies of natural causes. Tom, now known as Prince Edward, takes over the government. He would rather be flirting with Lady Jane ( Felicity Dean ). This illustrates the strange lack of women in the palace. For example, Queen Catherine Parr out-lived King Henry and would have been Regent until her step-son Edward was of age. Instead all we get is a bossy brunette played by Lalla Ward . She seems to be set up as Princess Mary, but it turns out that she is meant to be Elizabeth Tudor. Yes, somehow Bloody Mary has been erased from history. This is certainly good news for Lady Jane, if she happens to be Lady Jane Grey!
Miles takes the Prince to Hendon Hall, the Hendon homeland which is conveniently located nearby. Yes, the Hendon family made a lot of money from Dissolution and Enclosure - which begs the question, why did a rich man like Miles become a soldier-of-fortune? Unfortunately, Miles discovers that his younger brother Hugh (David Hemmings - Barbarella ) has taken his inheritance ... and his fiance, Edith ( Raquel Welch ).
Based on a novel by Mark Twain , this was produced by Alexander Salkind and directed by Richard Lester . Although Salkind is most popularly associated with Superman (1979) , this has far more in common with the earlier Lester film The Three Musketeers . Not only the cast, which has many familiar faces, but the tone is that of a historical comedy-thriller - a romp. Miles may be facing multiple opponents, but despite being a hero he still loses more fights than he wins. Also, since it was filmed in Pinewood Studios in England and on location in Hungary, it may have used the same settings as well.
A couple of knife-toting tweenage thugs
are hitch-hiking around California.
They spot a beautiful woman,
and follow her back to her beautiful home.
Since the house next to hers is unoccupied,
they break in and hide out there.
The target of their intentions is not a mere suburban housewife. She seems to be a trophy wife in an upper middle-class home, and since her rich husband is a workaholic she has an element of the bored housewife about her. One of the thugs poses as a landscape gardener, and takes the opportunity to befriend her.
A US Government scientist makes contact with alien life.
Unfortunately, when he reports this to his superiors
they start to stage a coverup.
The scientist and his girlfriend go on the run,
pursued by government agents.
They are also pursued by big glowing balls of light,
a cheap SPFX used to represent alien spacecraft.
Ths basic storyline, UFO whistleblower chased by Federal agents, was also used in Hangar 18 which came out around the same time. That was pretty low-budget, but this looks even cheaper.
This was written and directed by Robert Emmenegger , who even wrote the music. However, his budget must have run out because they could not afford to put music over the end credits.
An American doctor (
) works at a mining camp in a remote part of Mexico.
Well, south of the Brandt line is closer to the Wild West
than the modern USA.
He is a high-functioning alcoholic,
but he is the only doctor available.
Unfortunately he gets bitten by a rabid dog,
so he only has a couple of days to get to the nearest hospital.
A thirty-something woman ( Stella Stevens ) works as an entertainer for the all-male management team, basically paid to have one-night stands with them. She has taken a liking to the drunken doctor, so she accompanies him on his journey.
The journey is reminiscent of the movie Sorceror , even down to the nerve-wracking bridge crossing. Instead of transporting dynamite, they transport the doctor himself.
A mentally unstable young woman (
Sondra Locke
) lives in a mansion with her divorced mother (
Mary Ure
). Then the girl's father (Robvert Shaw -
Jaws
) visits to tell them he is getting married
to his new girlfriend (
Sally Kellerman
).
That night, there is a string of brutal murders. This is something of a whodunnit, but with an unknown killer still on the loose the emphasis is on suspense.
As with all films of this sub-genre, this has a twist reminiscent of Psycho (1960) .
Despite the events of the first film, Count Yorga (Robert Quarry -
Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972)
) is back.
The disfigured henchman is also in attendance.
Instead of his small haren of three brides,
he has now expanded it to half a dozen.
However, that is not enough for him
and he quickly becomes obsessed with a human woman.
Although the first film was set in the greater Los Angeles area, this one takes place near San Francisco. It starts with a young boy wandering off from an orphanage, into the grounds of the mansion next door. He finds out the hard way that the new tenant there is Count Yorga himself. The Count then introduces himself to the orphanage staff, with his usual charm and bluster. Of course, none of them realises that they are all now marked for death.
In a progressive step, one of the main characters is a deaf-mute woman who communicates only in sign language. However, when she reports seeing a murder scene we are back with the same old cliches. The police are baffled - even Detective Sergeant O'Connor (Craig T. Nelson - Action Jackson - in his movie debut). The protagonist calls on the famous occultist, Professor Rightstat. However, in a fine subversion of the Magic Negro trope where the specialist witch-doctor is always expert in the specific piece of folklore necessary to defeat the evil, the Professor is a senile incompetent.
Count Yorga may dress like a cliched vampire, with a long flowing black cape, but he must know it is a cliche because we see him watching The Vampire Lovers - a contemporary piece of Hammer schlock. He also loves to drink the blood of his female victims, in a subtly erotic series of scenes, but he only ever strangles his male victims. Yes, he is certainly a traditionalist.
The story starts in Eastern Europe, 1958.
Dracula kills an artist and steals the dead man's identity.
Since the artist was en route to the USA,
Drac ends up emigrating to small-town California in his place.
He blends in quite well in 1950s suburbia,
and nobody seems too suspicious about the mysterious deaths that follow.
Luckily a vampire-hunter is still on Dracula's trail.
Dracula sets out to recruit himself a trio of new brides. His main target is Rachel, the beautiful young blonde who is at the centre of the story. Her main defence is a crucifix, which protects her enough to stretch the story out. Strange, since it was a gift from Janny the blind girl ... and it did not help Jenny in the slightest!
The movie is shot in black and white. However, the film-makers edited in one colour shot - a very impressive sight that takes the B-movie to a higher level. Unfortunately this is a one-off, leaving the climax rather flat compared to what it could have been.
1918, and the First World War is still raging.
A vampire (Bela Lugosi -
Dracula (1932)
) and his werewolf servant Andreas are on the prowl in England.
They are interested in Miss Norcutt,
an inmate in the local asylum.
The man in charge of the Asylum reads up on a book
by the expert on vampires, Armand Tesla.
It turns out that Tesla is now the vampire
who will be undone by his own published research.
1941, and the Second World War is now raging. Dr Ainsley, the lady in charge of the Asylum, wants the vampire exhumed from his grave. After all, this will prove the existence of vampires. Unfortunately, the grave is disinterred by a luftwaffe bomb. The good news is that Allied intelligence have rescued a scientist from a concentration camp, and smuggled him back to England.
The vampire was meant to be Dracula himself. However, this made by Columbia rather than Universal so they had to change the character's name.
A woman has died mysteriously at her mansion in Louisiana, USA.
Her brother investigates,
suspecting that her husband - German scientist (John Carradine -
Bluebeard
) - had something to do with it.
The scientist has taken a scientific route to duplicating the ancient Voodoo system of creating zombies. He plans on creating an army of them, so he can supply them to the Third Reich. He is keeping in touch with the Abwehr by radio, and even has a Nazi secret agent to help him avoid US Government investigators.
A follow-up to King of the Zombies , this is the first real Supernatural Nazis movie. It predates Shockwaves (1977) by several decades, and indirectly inspired the likes of Dead Snow . However, as of the year 2022 nobody has attempted a remake or a sequel ... yet.
A trio of off-duty school-teachers are out for a drive,
and stop off at a gasoline station to refuel.
They run into a Bonnie-and-Clyde duo of tweenage reprobates,
and it all goes downhill from there.
This is based on Charlie Starkweather's murder spree, which later inspired films like Badlands and Natural Born Killers . What makes this different is the fact it was made only five years after the events, a ripped-from-the-headlines approach that landed on an audience that still had the true-life events fresh in their mind.
The film itself may not be as famous as its successors, but the camera operator went on to work with Steven Spielberg in the 1970s.
This starts with a man going jogging.
He over-exerts himself, and wakes up in hospital.
The bad news is that the female nurse
appears to be taking his limbs, one at a time.
Yes, this is a gender-flipped version of
Boxing Helena
- or a less engaging version of
Misery
. After all, James Caan gets the first Act of the movie
to make himself likeable - whereas
Sherilynn Fenn
automatically has the audience's sympathy because she is female.
In England at the end of the Swinging Sixties, a vampiric serial killer is draining young women of blood. The police trail the killer to a building owned by Dr Browning (Vincent Price - Masque of the Red Death ). Could he be involved somehow?
In a country that looks a lot like East Germany, VIPs like Schweitz (Peter Sallis - Wallace and Gromit and Benedek (Peter Cushing - Frankenstein ) meet with violent deaths because they stand in the way of an ambitious underling.
When a British spy plane is shot down over East Germany, Fremont (Christopher Lee - Dracula ) has to negotiate with the man who replaced Benedek. His demands tie the different storylines together.
Most criticism aimed at this movie mentions the unusual structure, which features a series of storylines that barely interact. Lee and Cushing get main billing, but they do not have any scenes together. Vincent Price is likewise underused. The other actors in their different storylines are good, but the filmmakers decided to sell the movie on star power rather than treat it as a high concept film.
A man takes his new bride home to his fancy mansion in Dixieland, USA.
Unfortunately it has a bit of an unpleasant history.
Well, not an actual history - in the 1950s
the terrible history of American slavery and racism was still ignored.
This is a more recent history,
specifically the mysterious death of the man's first wife.
Now it seems that his new wife might have a similar fate.
Is there a slasher killer out to claim her as his victim? Are the mysterious ghostly sightings the signs of an actual ghost? Or is someone trying to drive her insane? Well, there are a couple of twists - but they were done so much better the next year in William Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1959) .
There is one way in which the film is a blatant Castle rip-off. The advertising states that the movie is so scary that the Producers will pay for the funeral costs of any audience member scared to death by it! It is a pretty safe bet that they never had to make the payout.
This is an exploitation movie made in London, England.
The story starts with a Satanic orgy that leads up to a human sacrifice.
It has a voice-over narration which breaks the fourth wall,
and it turns out that this Hammer House of Horror type scene
is a movie-within a movie, a recreation for a documentary film.
The documentary is about the self-proclaimed King of Witches, and follows a young woman who is interested in joining the witchcraft religion. It is more of a mockumentary, made not for comedy but to maximise the amount of nudity on-screen. Yes, there are lots of witchcraft ceremonies that show lots of attractive twenty-somethings naked.
A man gets sent a severed arm in a postal package.
He warns a small group of friends,
and we get a flashback to how they are connected.
They went on a trip to explore a disused mineshaft,
and were trapped by a cave-in. Like in
The Descent
, nobody knew where to look for them.
When their food ran out they drew lots,
and ate the arm of the loser.
Unfortunately, the loser was driven insane by the experience.
Now he is on the loose, and evidently out for revenge.
The result is a little-known 1970s slasher film, with very poor lighting but some inspired touches.
A Native American shaman, Old Man Hawk (Chief Dan George -
) summons his city-dwelling grandson home to fight an evil presence.
The grandson, Little Man Hawk (Jan Michael Vincent -
), has transitioned into passing as a white man named Mike.
He even works as a computer company executive in Seacouver.
Well, this is the era after computers were
Hidden Figures
but before they were household desktop computers.
The duo head home, accompanied by a journalist ( Marilyn Hassett ) who senses a good story. Unfortunately their car is driven off the road, and the trio have to travel cross-country through the mountains. All the while, the evil spirits manifest monsters to attack them.
Shatter (
Stuart Whitman
) is a professional assassin
who takes out international villains for large sums of money.
He takes out a dictator in Africa,
then visits Hong kong to pick up his payment.
Unfortunately his employer (Anton Diffring -
) attempts a double-cross.
Peter Cushing ( Star Wars: ANH ) is keeping an eye on things.
A mentally unstable man reaches his limit.
Driven insane by noise pollution -
not a rock band, like in
Driller Killer
, but his landlady's children -
he goes on a kill-crazy rampage.
The Sheriff (Chuck Norris -
) tries to catch the killer alive,
but the other cops are trigger-happy.
The killer's shrink (Ron Silver - TimeCop ) takes the dying man to the nearest hospital, which by coincidence also does ground-breaking research in genetics. The shrink scrubs in to help out with the surgery, because he is part of a project the head surgeon is working on. Although the surgery fails and the killer is officially declared dead, the surgeon uses an experimental fluid to revive the corpse. Yes, this is basically Frankenstein's Monster .
The sheriff uses his kung fu skills to beat up a bar full of bikers, and shacks up with his ex-GF - the Doctor's sister. Well, he is a Chuck Norris character after all.
The title music, plus the credit sequence of medical slides
(of conjoined twins in the womb)
make this effort reminiscent of
Twisted Nerve
. It was written and directed by
Brian De Palma
and scored by Bernard Herrman,
so you can expect a lot of references to the works of
Alfred Hitchcock
.
French-Canadian model Danielle ( Margot Kidder ) invites a man back to her apartment on Staten Island. However, she has an obsessive ex-husband who acts like the creepy Max Von Sydow character in 3 days of the Condor. This will not end well.
The resulting violent murder is witnessed by a neighbour, Grace ( Jennifer Salt ), who also happens to be a Lois Lane-style crime reporter. Instead of Clark Kent she has Charles Durning ( ) as her sidekick to investigate the murder.
The story is about a young woman who works for a doll-maker.
He is a kindly old gentleman who seems completely harmless,
and has a small factory to commercially produce
very lifelike six-inch dolls.
However, it turns out that the owner is linked to
a surprising number of missing persons cases.
When the young lady's fiance goes missing, she reports her employer to a police detective. However, the doll-maker easily talks his way out of the investigation. This leaves the informant vulnerable, and before long she suffers the same fate as her fiance.
The good news is that, despite his creepy vibes, the old man is not a serial killer. However, as the title suggests he has turned his victims into six-inch-tall puppet people. Now the victims must somehow escape and reverse this procedure.
A rich woman is grief-stricken over the death of her fiance,
so she visits a spiritualist and pays him to conduct a seance.
This spiritualist certainly gives the required results.
However, things get a lot more complicated -
and it veers into the typical B-Movie Film Noir territory.
The film starts in the aftermath of a massacre.
Henry Morrison (Terry O'Quinn -
Pin (1988)
), family annihilator, has killed his wife and kids.
He alters his appearance, changes his name to Jerry Blake,
and sets up home in a different suburb of Seacouver
with new wife Susan (
Shelley Hack
) and step-daughter Stephanie (
Jill Schoelen
).
By starting with the big reveal, the film sets the tone and creates suspense. If the story started slowly, with the reveal at the midpoint, it would be a horrendous example of genre shift. Without the suspense, the movie would be a slow-moving domestic drama.
This is an incredible artefact from the pre-Internet era. When someone wanted to share a newspaper article about the murders, they had to physically cut it out of the paper and snail-mail it across the country. The journalist publishes a follow-up article, but the editor decides there is not enough room on the page to include the accompanying photograph of the suspect. Jill has to hand-write a letter to the journalist requesting a personal copy of the photo.
Police Lieutenant Jack Wall (Blu Mankuma - ) may have written off the multiple homicides as being a cold case, but one man is obsessed with avenging the victims. He is methodical but unskilled, and his role is basically that of Arboghast in Psycho (1960) . Will he save the Final girl in time?
Henry Morrison (Terry O'Quinn -
Pin (1988)
), family annihilator,
has returned from the dead
and changed his name to ...
Henry Morrison (Terry O'Quinn -
Pin (1988)
), family annihilator,
has returned from the dead
and changed his face to ...
Lucy (
Joan Crawford
) returns to her family home after twenty years in a lunatic asylum.
A flashback explains that she had married a younger man,
caught him cheating on her with his ex-girlfriend,
and slaughtered them both with an axe.
The family farm is now owned by her brother,
while the work is done by a lumbering farm-hand (George Kennedy -
Just Before Dawn
). It is an impressively suspenseful environment,
with lots of a sharp implements
and a herd of hungry swine to feed bodies to.
The Third Act involves Lucy's daughter, who has grown up without a mother. She is more than happy to be reunited, especially when she plans to marry her fiance. However, the fiance's rich parents might object.
This was produced by William Castle , the B-movie schlockmeister. It was written by writer, Robert Bloch , best known for Psycho (1960) , while the star's recent movie Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? kick-started the Hag-sploitation sub-genre.
This is about a young child who grew up on the wharfside,
raised by an alcoholic single father.
The obvious comparison is with
Huckleberry Finn
, but to differentiate it this is about a girl.
The little girl grows up to be Hedy Lamar . She certainly stands out from all the rednecks in the hillbilly town, in part because she is beautiful and immaculately made-up but also because she is not a native English-speaker. Like a classic femme fatale, she uses her feminine wiles to manipulate the men around her. She marries her way to the top, jumping from man to man ...
The lumber industry takes off, so the backwoods village becomes a boom town - contemporary to Wild West towns due to the 1849 gold rush. This leads to rowdiness, as the population is swollen by an army of lumberjacks. The Strange Woman maintains herself as the alpha female by being a leading figure in the temperance league.
The story starts with a shipment of gold bullion.
A pair of robbers team up with criminal mastermind Sean O'Brien
to ambush the van and steal the gold.
However, rather than share the loot
the mysterious O'Brien rats his accomplices out to the police.
They each end up doing ten years for their crimes,
although the police have no apparent proof
except for the anonymous tip-off.
What keeps them going is the thought of revenge on their betrayer.
Ten years later, one of the robbers has been released from prison. He attempts to find employment or shelter at a stately home in the English countryside. The local drunk, Ferdy Fane (Bernard Lee The Spy Who Loved Me ), also hangs around. It all ends in murder, and the police get called in - like a cosy mystery story.
Finally, a preacher (Alastair Sim - The Green Man ) turns up looking for a room for the night.
This is set in France in the year 1806.
Duvalier (Jack Nicholson -
Wolf
) is a young army officer who has been separated from his regiment.
He sees a beautiful young peasant woman,
and follows her to a creepy old castle.
The Baron (Boris Karloff -
Frankenstein
) and his servant (Dick Miller -
Gremlins
) are hiding some terrible secret.
This movie was produced and directed by Roger Corman , while the assistant producer was Francis Ford Coppola .
An English VIP (Sir Michael Hordern -
The Bed-Sitting Room
) is asked by people purporting to be police officers
to help them evict some homeless squatters from a disused property.
He ends up being stabbed to death by multiple attackers on the Ides of March,
and left under a poster advertising a theatre play of Julius Caesar ...
This is only the first in a series of brutal and mysterious deaths, each planned to resemble a classic death scene from a Shakespearean play. The victims all have one thing in common - they were a group of newspaper critics who disrespected Lionheart (Vincent Price - ), a Shakespearean actor who has been missing presumed dead ever since a very public suicide attempt.
This is a b&w film based on the novel Children Of Light By H.L. Lawrence.
The sight of England at the start of the Swinging Sixties
shot in 1950s-style monochrome is shockingly anachronistic.
A middle-aged American meets up with an attractive young woman half his age. Unfortunately her brother, King (Oliver Reed - Gladiator (2000) ), leads a gang of bikers who spend their time mugging rich foreign tourists.
The protagonist and his love interest go on the run together. While in search of a place to hide out, they discover a secret government establishment. It is an underground prison, and it is filled with a dozen or so children.
The children are special, but they are also unhappy and disobedient. Things did not work out well for the people running the boarding school at the start of Dark Angel (1999) , and this lot have no better luck. The Major (Walter Gotell - The Spy Who Loved Me ) has to take some soldiers in and sort things out.
This was made in England by Amicus Films,
although it is based on a novel named The Gods Hate Kansas.
Strangely, it seems to be inspired by Heinlein's
The Puppet Masters
. One might say that this little-known effort is a British version of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, although it is obviously a rip-off compared to original English works such as Wyndham's
Village of the Damned
.
A group of meteors crash in Cornwall. The Government civil servant gets on to the head of space research, Dr Temple. He sends his assistants to investigate. However, after examining the meteorites they act unusually. They borrow a million pounds from the local bank, then invest the loan (plus all their savings) in constructing a massive secret base.
The scientist investigates in person. Since he has a metal plate in his head, he appears immune to the alien influence. Everyone else ends up possessed or dead. Luckily, as well as immunity the scientist also possesses the skills of a secret agent or an action-movie hero.
The scientist gets involved in an espionage sub-plot. Then he discovers a mysterious plague outbreak. However, the action-adventure storyline takes over. Eventually the good guys have to confront the Master of the Moon (Michael Gough - Sleepy Hollow (1999) ), a cut-price Ming The Merciless type.
Nada (Rowdy Roddy Piper -
) arrives in Los Angeles during an economic crisis.
As a skilled manual worker,
he is able to get employment on a construction site.
However, there is nowhere to rent so he has to stay at a homeless encampment.
There is a religious mission-house nearby, like in
Prince of Darkness
...
The television constantly airs consumerist programmes, typical of the Reagan era of 1980s capitalism. Of course, when contrasted with the homeless encampment this illustrates the enormous gap between the rich and the poor. A cable-hacker keeps interrupting the TV broadcasts, with a message about some kind of conspiracy theory.
The police raid the place, cracking down hard on homeless people rather than targeting the real criminals. Nada gets away, but all he can salvage is a pair of cool-looking sunglasses. When he tries them on, he discovers that they show him things that have been hidden. For example, the brightly-coloured capitalist adverts actually conceal subliminal autocratic orders to fulfill basic social tasks. Like the Copaganda TV shows that brainwash citizens into blindly trusting authority figures like the Police. More importantly, aliens walk among us.
Nada uses Holly ( Meg Foster ) as a human shield. Will she become his love interest? The abduction trope was used in at least four Schwartzenegger movies, so it was very familiar to this film's original audience. There are a limited number of ways a female character could be squeezed into a boys-own adventure in an all-male environment, but the female audience generally required a love interest subplot.
Nada needs an ally, so he chooses fellow tough-guy Frank (Keith David - The Thing ). This leads to a legendary five-minute fist-fight that leaves both combatants with no actual injuries. Well, this is clearly a light-hearted and somewhat comedic movie - similar in tone to Big Trouble in Little China .
This is a John Carpenter movie, with many of his regular tropes. He plays it for laughs, satirising the 1980s consumer culture by showing Reaganomics as an alien conspiracy.
Dr Ben Cahill is a top surgeon at a hospital in Boston.
Unfortunately a stressful career and a failed marriage
drove him to drink, so he moves to a
Cabin in the Woods
to recover.
Well, it is an old wooden house on an island off the Maine coast.
Supposedly Maine, because the Canadian cast
indicates it could be shot in Vancouver.
Food of the Gods
springs to mind, although the first entry in this subgenre would be
The Birds
.
Unfortunately Ben has a falling out with the town electrician, Jack Wald (John Savage - Dark Angel ), and his brother Eamon (Tom McBeath - Stargate: SG-1 ). Although they are a pair of drunken rednecks, they seem to be the only people in town who can get things done.
More bad news is that Ben's wooden house is full of massive african cockroaches. The worse news is that people start turning up dead. Since the cockroaches only come out at night, nobody has seen them and lived. Ben gets blamed for the deaths. Luckily Sheriff Hobbs (Dean Stockwell - Quantum Leap ) and the hardware store-owner, Nell Bartle ( Kristen Dalton ), take Ben's side. But can they defeat the rednecks AND the cockroaches?
Thomasine (
Vonetta McGee
) is a bounty hunter in MidWest USA, 1911.
She picks up a wanted poster for Bushrod (Max Julien),
a killer who is on the run from the law.
He is her ex-lover,
so when she tracks him down they team up to rob banks together.
Instead of keeping the money they share it with the poor people.
This makes them folk heroes,
and reduces the chance of anyone betraying them.
After all, there is a vengeful US Marshal on their trail.
They team up with an old friend, a Jamaican gunslinger named Jumo. While he is a one-note character, playing the role normally treated as the token black guy in what is basically a Blaxploitation film, there is one thing that makes him stand out. The actor playing this role was apparently shortlisted for the role that Harrison Ford got in Star Wars: A New Hope , so this is a great look at what a Black Han Solo would have been.
The director, Gordon Parks Jnr , is best known for blaxploitation movie Superfly. He is sometimes confused with his father, who directed the original Shaft film. This film has a touch of the nepotism that low-budget films tend to show. Julien wrote the script, and cast his then-girlfriend as the female lead. In all fairness, McGee is the most capable player in the film. She got the female lead in The Eiger Sanction, and Clint Eastwood only uses the best. Well, Eastwood also had a tendency to cast his own girlfriends as the female lead ...
This starts with an introduction by the producer,
William Castle
. He warns the audience that they,
like the characters in the movie,
may feel a strange tingling sensation.
Of course, he is just prepping the cinema audience
because on the initial release
some of the cinema seats were rigged with electric buzzers.
A criminal is executed in the electric chair. At his autopsy, Warren the medical examiner (Vincent Price - ) discovers that the man's spine was somehow shattered. It turns out that literal spine-tingling is a thing.
The convict's sister is a deaf mute who communicates only by sign language. Such diverse representation is a nice thing to see, but in the pre-Tarantino world everything is tied to the plot. She and her husband own and operate an art-house movie theatre. Yes, this is a setup for a meta scene that mirrors the audience's reality.
Warren is married to a rich, beautiful woman who bankrolls his scientific hobby. What exactly caused her to marry an impoverished doctor is not explained. The result is an unhappy marriage between a femme fatale and a ruthless genius who will do whatever it takes - like in House on Haunted Hill .
A blackmailer ends up dead, and the victim of the blackmail tries to cover his tracks -
only to discover that his dead blackmailer has returned as a ghost.
The result is a classic film noir storyline with a supernatural twist.
Unfortunately the obvious comparison is with the works of
Alfred Hitchcock
, especially Vertigo, and this B-Movie effort falls far short in the comparison.
The ghost usually appears as a floating head or hand, clearly created by 1950s-style blue-screen technology. Since the movie over-relies on this effect, the story lacks any real form of suspense. We can only imagine how much better the film would be if it had a talented director who chose a more minimalist approach.
This is shot in semi-documentary style,
with a narrator to explain the details.
This is especially fitting,
as it is based on the true story of an unsolved murder spree
that lasted for four months in 1946.
The peaceful town of Texarkana, on the Texas/Arkansas state line, settles into the post-war period. One night, a young couple are attacked on lovers' lane. Deputy Andrew Prine ( V: The Final Battle ) investigates, but the incident is only the start of a killing spree. Captain JD Morales (Ben Jonson - ) of the Texas Rangers is sent to coordinate the investigation.
Although this has many of the hallmarks of a standard police procedural, it also has a few tropes familiar to the slasher genre. For example, the killer is seen only with a hood over his head ...
The storyline has a comic-relief character shoehorned in. This character was played by the director himself, which presumably explains his reluctance to cut it out.
The US Treasure Department discovers that
someone is mass-producting counterfeit money.
The original counterfeiter, Stewart (Lloyd Bridges -
), has been in prison for the last three years.
Now a rival has gotten hold of his printing plates.
He makes a deal with the Secret Service,
to help hunt down the ones who stole his plates.
However, he has hiw own agenda.
Focused on the law enforcement investigators rather than on the criminal element, this is more of a police procedural than a Film Noir. The big discovery of this movie is Barbara Payton , who plays Stewart's moll. The actress later popped up as female lead in Four-Sided Triangle, The (1953) .
Anthony Perkins (
The Black Hole
) is arrested and held without charge.
This is directed by Orson Welles , who also appears as the accused man's lawyer. It is based on a novel by Franz Kafka , a satire on the bureaucracy he experienced while working in the civil service of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
This story was originally a six-part saturday serial.
Unfortunately the original episodes no longer exist,
no doubt wiped so that then-expensive videotape could be re-used.
Evidently it was quite successful,
because within a year of the final episode being broadcast
they were making this big-screen version
with an American lead for the international audience.
A lot must have been cut out,
for example the ending of this implies there was a romantic sub-plot between two characters.
This was written by Jimmy Sangster, best known as one of the more prolific content creators for Hammer Horror studio. It is from the era of the Quatermass movies, and certainly shares their scientist-as-hero trope.
There is no Troll Mountain in Switzerland - Trolls are a Scandinavian myth, not a Swiss one. The Swiss have Ogres, and their Ogre Mountain is the Eiger (as in The Eiger Sanction ). The name Trollenberg seems to have been picked purely because of the alliteration with the word Terror.
The scientist hero meets his friend, a Professor (Warren Mitchell - Assassination Bureau, The (1969) ), and they give us some exposition. There was a previous event in the Chilean Andes three years earlier, but rather than send in a military unit they have only sent an observer.
As the story progresses, one of the missing men reappears. He seems different - his fine motor skills are gone, to start with. The aliens somehow have the ability to brainwash humans. The aliens-in-human-disguise is an old trope, it allows TV shows to have an alien invasion on minimal make-up budget, and this must be one of the earlier uses of it.
What really lets the movie down is the third act. The aliens are revealed, in all their tentacled horror, and besiege the surviving humans. Due to the budgetary restrictions and low technology of the era, it turns out that the monochrome film actually works in their favour. Twenty years later the episodes of Dr Who that used similar SPFX are not the better for their full-colour film stock.
This is based on three short stories by
Nathaniel Hawthorne
. Unfortunately he comes across quite poorly compared to his contemporary,
Edgar Allen Poe
, whose stories were the basis of several other Roger Corman films.
As with the Poe films, the three stories in this portmanteau
all feature Vincent Price - albeit as different characters.
This is a 15-rated film, despite its early 1960s aesthetic.
This story is also a remake of an earlier film, which was Vincent Price's first entry into the horror genre.
Dracula (David Niven -
Casino Royale
) has gotten old and poor.
So poor, in fact, that he has to give guided tours of his castle
in order to obtain money and blood.
His newest tour group, booked by Bernard Breslaw (
Krull
), is a group of Playboy models - including
Julie Ege
.
Dracula's quest was to find a donor with a rare blood-type that would revive his wife, Vampira. The good news is that one of the models is the right donor. The bad news is that when she is revived, Vampira becomes a Black woman - Teresa Graves .
Dracula relocates his operation to London, the kind of city where the likes of Kenneth Cranham ( ) tries to mug women like Carol Cleveland . When Drac tracks down the Playboy models he possesses a young man, who he then uses to seduce the models and obtain blood samples.
Vampira, meanwhile, has started to become more and more of a cliched 1970s blaxploitatio-style jive-talking Black woman. While her husband is desperate to change her back, she does not seem too fussed by her new self. This all leads up to the twist ending, which in the 21st Century would be lambasted for black-face but is clearly not racist in intention.
A scientist is discovered dead
in his work-from-home lab in suburban USA.
He has been experimenting to reverse evolution,
and he may have been more successful than he wished.
The story follows the town doctor as he handles a series of heart attacks among people much younger than the stereotypical victim. Although the doctor does not seem too suspicious, the local police detective certainly thinks something is up.
This basically turns into a classic Film Noir plot, insofar as a crime has occurred and the protagonist is implicated. Rather than the Dracula stories, this bloodsucker owes his origins to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . Every night he must take an addictive pill, but when he does so he devolves into a Lon Chaney-looking monster and must drink the blood of a new victim.
Princess (
Season Hubley
) is a single mother who pays the bills
by walking the streets at night in Los Angeles USA.
The Vice Squad are the plain-clothed police
who harrass prostitutes with entrapment schemes
aimed at infringing personal freedoms.
However, it turns out that they also double as homicide detectives.
When a friend is murdered, a police detective forces Princess to help catch the man responsible - a brutal pimp named Ramrod (Wings Hauser - L.A. Bounty (1989) ). Of course, Ramrod escapes police custody and comes after Princess for revenge.
There are a couple of elements that make this seem a bit dated. Ramrod is tough enough to take on multiple cops in a fist-fight, which shows that this was made before the Rodney King beating. From the mid-Nineties onwards, instead of beating those who resist arrest the US police have opted to shoot suspects for mere failure to comply fast enough. Yes, the ED-209 method has become mainstream in real life.
Ramrod hunts his prey through the night, killing or maiming everyone who crosses his path. This is very similar to The Terminator (1984) , which came out a couple of years later.
The protagonist is a female TV journalist,
a talk-show host who interviews politicians and bureaucrats.
The show's current cause celebe is the case of a woman
who was convicted of murdering her abusive husband.
This draws the attention of a deranged thug
who attacks the journalist.
This is part of a genre of early-1980s slasher that seems to defy the usual rules. It does not focus on the investigators, so it is not a police procedural. The killer is not masked, and we know exactly who he is. The suspense comes from the audience spending about half the story with either the protagonist or villain, and waiting for them to encounter each other.
Cole Hawker (Michael Ironside - Scanners ) is a right-wing obsessive with nothing better to do than send abusive hate-mail to high-profile Liberals. He is the equivalent of modern-day Internet trolls, the only difference being that he had to hand-write his messages and snail-mail them to his victims.
Cole hospitalises the journalist, then continues to stalk her while she is under medical care. The Police are completely incompetent, not posting a guard or linking the series of murders until the stakes need raising in the Third Act, so it would be easy for him to just kill her. Instead he starts stalking the nurse who looks after her, which at least allows the story to continue at a greater variety of locations than just different antiseptic rooms inside the hospital.
The movie has a decent cast, indicating a reasonable budget. Ironside had just established himself as a super-villain in Scanners , while this movie came out the same year Shatner released Star Trek2: Wrath of Khan . However, the script or the editing seem to be lacking. There are a few non-sequitors - nobody seems certain how many people the killer has murdered, and the Police are remarkably incompetent - even for a slasher movie.
A woman who runs a major cosmetics company
is desperate to find a cure for aging.
She hires an old man who has managed to harvest royal jelly
from a queen wasp.
Unfortunately it affects everyone differently.
It affects the rich woman by transforming her into an enormous wasp. She uses this to fulfil two of her needs. One is to remove people who interfere in her business, and the other is to stay youthful ... by drinking the blood of her victims.
An amnesiac wanders into a bar in small-town USA,
and makes the mistake of flashing his cash.
After he leaves, a drunk follows him and tries to mug him.
The good news is that the mugger gets the worst of it.
The bad news is that the mugger is a local,
so the Sheriff rounds up a posse to track down the out-of-towner.
When they learn he is capable of defending himself,
their orders are ... shoot on sight, shoot to kill!
The fugitive was the unwilling victim of a scientific experiment. A couple of doctors want to develop a serum that will help them survive a nuclear war, and live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. They wanted superpowers, but the best they can do is lycanthropy.
A group of rowdy young men go on a drunken rampage in swinging London.
They harrass young women like
Patricia Quinn
, then decide to escalate their crimes to commercial burglary.
The rowdies break into the premises of Emilio the Magician (Warren Mitchell - Assassination Bureau, The (1969) ). The proprietor catches them in the act, so they overpower and terrorise him. Eventually he talks them into letting him perform his stage act for them. His speciality is making people disappear. Can he persuade any of them to volunteer?
This is set in Edwardian England,
in the era of primitive motor cars.
Aunt Roo (
Shirley Winters
) is a kindly old (well, early Fifties) widow
who hosts orphaned children for a party every Xmas.
This time, two kids from the orphanage - a brother and sister -
stow away and join the party uninvited.
Auntie Roo decides the sister looks like her own deceased daughter, so she kidnaps the two stowaways. The boy (Mark Lester - Eyewitness (1970) ) has read Hansel and Gretal, and assumes Auntie Roo is an old witch who wants to fatten the children up before she eats them. His attempts to escape start to escalate in violence.
As a relatively low-budget British film from the early 1970s, this has a small cast and limited sets. So how does it compare to modern low-budget films? Primarily the writing is of much higher quality. There is quite a lot of depth to the characters, not just the main characters either. Auntie Roo is a poor deranged woman, not really a villain at all. Albie the footman is a bit of a cruel sort, who cares only for his own profit and cheap thrills. This kind of attention to detail is lacking in modern, fast-plotted efforts.
Willard (Bruce Davison -
The X-Men (1999)
) is a nerdy office-drone
who is overworked by his boss Martin (Ernest Borgnine -
). He befriends a white rat, who he names Socrates.
By befriending and feeding one rat,
he ends up inadvertently attracting a horde of more rats.
The main film is actually a melodrama, with hints of romance between Willard and a co-star ( Sondra Locke ). Things hot up in the Final Act with the arrival of Ben, a black rat. He becomes the leader of the ratty horde, and things go to the next level.
This is a black and white film, featuring Lon Chaney Jnr (
), like the Universal Studios films of the 1930s.
However, it was made in England in the 1960s -
like the Hammer House of Horror films.
The resulting film includes a few horror tropes
that had already become cliches,
yet has none of the freshness
of the mainstream 1960s horror genre.
In a small town in contemporary England, the descendents of a witch-hunter named Lanier live in a big mansion. They bulldoze the local graveyard so they can build a suburban housing estate. Not long after, they start falling victim to mysterious accidents. Have they been cursed by modern-day witches? After all, the witch-hunter's most famous victim, Whitlock, has descendents who live among the town's poor. Perhaps the witch, entombed in 1650, returned when her grave was disturbed by the bulldozer.
The witch-hunter's house has a secret passage dating to the 1500s, when priests were victim to religious persecution. However, the film-makers show no such sympathy towards pagans who were also victims of religious persecution a hundred years later.
The pagan coven wear KKK-style robes, of the type that were generic in 1960s depictions of witches. That sums up exactly how generic this is.
This movie starts with a middle-aged Hunter (Cameron Mitchell -
Space Mutiny
) taking his tweenage son on a hunting trip in the wilderness.
As with most slasher movies, this centres around a group of horny tweenagers. Tom (David Caruso - ) and his girlfriend take a couple of their friends along.
Normally, a slasher movie has a creepy old man who acts as a harbinger of doom. This movie has TWO of them. Joe Taylor (Jack Palance - Hawk The Slayer ) runs the fuel station, while Fred 'Sarge' Dobbs (Martin Landau - Space: 1999 ) hangs around the bathroom waiting to harrass tweenagers with his tales of doom and disaster. However, this is not redundant duplication - they actually perform different roles in the story. One believes that the alien is the first step of an invasion, while the other thinks it is hunting humans for sport.
The Alien trophy-hunter turns out to be played by Kevin Peter Hall ( Predator ). Yes, this movie - along with Southern Comfort - appears to be a major inspiration for a certain John McTiernan movie from 1987.
An English scientist goes to a Third World country
and makes a great scientific discovery.
A few years later, he is experimenting on it
in the basement of his mansion in England.
Unfortunately local women start to go missing ...
This has a lot in common with Konga , although that has a killer gorilla from Africa while this is about a killer tree from South America.
This is a 1950s film noir set in San Francisco USA.
At least some of it was shot on location,
which gives the street scenes a lively feeling reminiscent of
The Sweet Smell of Success
.
The title is a bit of a misnomer. The woman's husband is witness to a gangland hit, and he is the one who goes on the run. The title character is then followed by the police as she attempts to contact her on-the-run husband. A tabloid journalist tags along, eager to find the witness and get the story.
This successfully mixes a few genres. The police investigation gives this shades of a procedural, while the killer's concealed identity make it a straightforward whodunnit. There is also an element of melodrama as the wife uncovers a series of facts about her husband that he had never cosen to share with her. In the end, the suspense element is as much about whether the embattled spouses will give their strained marriage a second chance, while the gangster storyline almost takes second place.
Some Warsaw Pact soldiers dynamite a crypt in Transylvania,
disturbing the eternal slumber of its residents.
That night, only one soldier is left on guard.
Luckily, next morning a police inspector (Jose Ferrer -
Dune (1984)
) visits the site and gives the necessary exposition.
Well, that and Zoltan the vampiric dog has a flashback scene
which explains his backstory.
Zoltan the vampiric dog gets smuggled to the USA by his keeper, a ghoul who worked as Dracula's servant. With the original vampires all destroyed, the ghoul and the dog need a new vampire as their master. The only one of Dracula's bloodline who survived emigrated to California as a child ... and changed his surname to Drake. Strangely, he is not a vampire yet ... he must have been born as a human and raised by vampires, which sort of defeats the advantages of vampiric reproduction.
Mr Drake is living in blissful suburbia with a wife, some dogs and a couple of kids. He takes the family camping in a National Park, where the kids and the dogs can run wild. The ghoul follows them, and every night he sends Zoltan out with the intention of turning Mr Drake into a vampire. Of course, Zoltan is more interested in biting the dogs and converting them into his own pack.
Although the inspector sets off at the same time as the ghoul, from the same place and with the same information, he arrives two days after the ghoul does. Despite the inspector travelling by jet-plane while the ghoul is on a cargo ship. Anyway, he catches up with Mr Drake - just in time for the climax.
The Director of Photography ( Bruce Logan ) worked on the Third Unit of Star Wars: ANH the same year, and a few years later worked on Tron . His cinematography is probably the best thing about the film. That said, although the film itself is quite terrible, the make-up effects are by the famous Stan Winston himself.
