Decades of Terror: Takoma's Slow-Moving October Time Machine

Creatures from the Abyss, 1994

A handful of teenagers go out for a day of fun in a motorboat, but find themselves stranded in the middle of the ocean when they run out of gas during a storm. Luckily (or not), they come across an extravagant-but-abandoned yacht where the former occupants seem to have been conducting experiments on some very strange creatures.

Bizarre and containing a few surprisingly effective moments, this one has all the joys of a camp favorite.

There’s a certain manic quality to this film that serves it well for a shocking amount of the runtime. The basic template of the plot is one familiar to anyone who watches a decent amount of horror: a group of young people stumbling over the remnants of science gone wrong. But it’s the details and unique touches that sustain a jittery energy where you’re not sure if you’re laughing with the movie, at the movie, or if you shouldn’t be laughing at all.

In the bigger picture, you have things like the sharp-toothed fish that fill jars and are frequently displayed/restrained in systems that make it look like they are being tortured, not studied. Two different characters, victims of a strange ooze aboard the yacht, engage in a sex scene that is incredibly disturbing and gross. (I can’t remember the last time a movie made me actually say out loud “Oh, gross!”, but this film is the current holder of that dubious title).

But there are also the little touches. The yacht has an AI computer that controls several functions, like the shower. But why oh why is that AI program a perpetually horny woman? Multiple times we watch characters take showers as the AI voice purrs at them “Mmmmmm. Now use your fingers.” If you say so, shower computer! The characters seem only vaguely aware of this lusty narration, which adds to the surreal and funny nature of it. (Naturally the film serves up a female character taking a sexy shower because whoever wants to be accused of originality?).

Maybe the best thing that this movie has to offer up is the total lack of predictability. And I’m not just talking about who will live or die, or when or how. I’m talking about a plot twist suddenly revolving around the scientific discovery that some of the evil fish might also be gay. Or the totally unhinged developments as one of the characters deals with the fallout of consuming some of the wicked plankton. This is a movie that, for better or for worse, keeps you on your toes. And to the film’s credit, 95% of the time it ends up serving something genuinely interesting or so out of left field that it demands your attention.

I think that some people will be more mixed on the other, um, distinct elements of this film. There’s constantly a fish-eye lens used to shoot creatures stalking the main characters, at times coming right up to them. The dubbing is so jarring in certain scenes that even as someone who doesn’t normally notice dubbing that much, I was like “Dang.” There’s also a total lack of consistency when it comes to the tone. One moment, characters seem genuinely distressed about each others’ safety, and not a minute later one of the same characters is making a joke about a friend’s death.

And one place that the movie is predictable is in its use of sexual violence and exploitative-feeling nudity. Even in a movie where I’m laughing at the horny, sentient shower, I’m going to roll my eyes at a pointless full body shot of a woman showering. Likewise, I didn’t think that the movie needed to use so much rape imagery when part of the point of the creatures seems to be their ability to steer behavior. Obviously this stuff isn’t unexpected, but it’s always disappointing in horror movies that feel out-of-the-box that sexual violence is the one gravitational pull that no one can resist apparently.

Recommended, but you have to imagine that the font of that recommendation is Comic Sans.

When a Stranger Calls Back, 1993

Julia (Jill Schoelen) is a high school girl babysitting two children when a mysterious man appears at the door asking her to call him a tow truck. The only problem? The phone is mysteriously dead and Julia starts to wonder if the man is really just there because of car troubles. After a grueling, disturbing ordeal, Julia barely escapes alive. Years later, Julia is a college student who realizes that someone is coming into her apartment. Mocked by the police, Julia finds unexpected allies in Jill (Carol Kane), a college mental health counselor, and John (Charles Durning), a police detective who once helped Jill with a very similar problem.

Genuinely frightening from beginning to end, this sequel builds wonderfully on the story from the original film.

If ever there was an unlikely candidate for a great horror film, it’s a made-for-TV 1990s sequel to a film from the 1970s. And yet here we are with a movie that is solid and spooky.

There are a lot of really great decisions made in this film, and one of the best has to be letting the initial sequence with Julia and the mysterious man play out for a loooooooong time. It’s like its own horror movie, that beginning sequence, lasting over 20 minutes of gradually increasing terror. Not wanting to admit that the phone is dead, Julia pretends to call the tow service, digging herself in deeper and deeper with the man as he comes back to the door for updates. Aside from checking on the windows and doors sooner, I’m not sure what else I’d have done differently in Julia’s position, and that alone is very scary. She’s a teenager in a house with two sleeping children and no phone. The man informs her that none of the neighbors are home. So just what is she meant to do?

It’s once we get past that opening sequence---one that is pure horror and suspense---that we get into more of a psychological horror. Julia is convinced that someone is coming into her apartment, but the mystery intruder is just making small changes. He moves a book. He changes the time on her alarm clock. Talking to Julia, Jill immediately gets it: “He makes small changes. But the scary thing is that he knows that you’ll notice.” Having experienced and survived the trauma of that night, Julia will forever wonder about the man and where he is and what he’s doing.

I’m not usually into movies where the killer is something of a blank, but here it really works because we are so locked into Julia’s point of view. Why should we know who this man is? (Or if it is a man, or two people?). All through the film we grapple with Julia’s uncertainty, not knowing when she should be afraid. Actually, we do know: she must always be afraid. And there’s something really refreshing about the way that the film puts the emphasis on Julia and the way that Jill and John work to support her. Obviously the stalker’s sadism is a huge part of the film, but the real focus is on Julia and Jill and how they work together to survive the threat. John’s character is also a great portrayal of an ally. When Julia’s statements about the night she was menaced don’t quite add up, John doesn’t merely assume that she’s lying or hysterical. He takes a step back to consider how what she experienced might make sense. His character is also a welcome addition because it keeps the film from merely being about men (the stalker, the police) making life miserable for women, and instead makes it a film about someone who knows just the line to walk to keep his victim helpless.

While the commentary on trauma and fear is effective, the movie is also just straight-up scary. The scene in the beginning sets the bar, and the rest of the film mostly lives up to it. In one scene that had me on the edge of my seat, Julia wakes up in the middle of the night not totally knowing why. She immediately calls Jill, who has Julia check the whole apartment while they are on the phone. Finally, she has Julia turn out all the lights to look out the windows. And what’s that, just there, in the corner of the window? As the camera pans slowly back and forth across Julia’s apartment, your eyes can’t help but grab every errant silhouette. This is how Julia feels all the time, and it’s horrifying just as a spectator.

The finale definitely goes some places. In lesser hands, some of the elements of the last act would come across as laughable or absurd. But through a combination of the performances and some absolutely bone-chilling visuals, I was in no laughing mood.

I also have to hand it to the film for some visceral elements that keep the movie grounded. After a character is attacked, two other characters arrive to the location and find IV bags and a bloody cloth---the remnants of the EMTs attempts to save the person. When a character fires a gun, the victim is thrown backwards. In one icky, uncomfortable scene, a character approaches someone in a hospital bed. Poking them tentatively at first, those pokes soon escalate to fists. What happens next in the hospital room is awful and yet also distressingly mundane. The movie creates an aura of real life, so that when things get a bit outlandish, it somehow still feels grounded.

And the performances are all really wonderful. Schoelen fully embodies Julia’s fatalistic outlook as a woman who is realizing she will never really be free. Kane is warm, but also teeters on the edge as Julia’s ordeal forces her to relive elements of her own traumatic past. And Burning is authoritative and yet with a hint of middle-aged fallibility that makes you nervous about him going up against a killer.

Seriously, no notes. This is a spooky, affecting horror movie.

Demonic Toys, 1992

Judith (Tracy Scoggins) is a police officer attempting to arrest a group of drug dealers. Things go wrong, Judith’s partner is killed, and Judith ends up in a strange warehouse with one of the drug dealers, Lincoln (Michael Russo), a security guard (Pete Schrum), a delivery boy (Bentley Mitchum), and a teenage runaway (Ellen Dunning). Unfortunately for them all, the warehouse is home to a demonic presence that has animated many of the toys in the warehouse and intends to take over the body of Judith’s unborn baby.

Despite a handful of effective moments and images, this one is overall a dud.

There’s a not so bad premise in this film, one that could have been played straight or ventured into full camp territory. What ultimately undoes this as a horror movie is that it can’t seem to commit either way.

When the movie does play things straight, it can be pretty effective. Characters hide in a series of air ducts, hiding from phantasms that look like young women on tricycles wearing gas masks. There are quite a few sequences that take place in an imagined space, where Judith speaks to a young boy (Daniel Cerny) who represents the demon. In these sequences, the boy calmly explains that he will take over Judith’s baby’s body. He mocks her by alternately taking on the form of her dead partner/lover (Jeff Celentano) and that of a large beast.

It’s also true that aside from the character of Lincoln, the large cast is likable. The characters are not particularly well-developed, but Mark, the delivery boy, is a nice guy. Anne, the runaway, gives the group important context about what’s happening. Even the security guard, who is definitely not very good at his job, seems to be at least a decent enough person. The characters are just nice or good enough that you want them to survive, which does add some heft to the deaths that do occur. I was surprised by one or two of the deaths, which also added a sense of unpredictability.

Finally, while I won’t go into specifics, the final act has an element that is kind of cheesy, but somehow I thought that it worked. The overall conclusion of the film, the last 10 or so minutes, are actually a bit scary and wrap up nicely.

But this is a film that’s branching out of the Puppet Master universe, and as such there’s a comedy element that is pushed to the forefront in a way that’s very unfortunate. The real downfall is the character of the baby doll, Baby Oopsie Daisy. This character is made up of exactly one joke: wouldn’t it be funny if a baby doll said swear words? Funny, right? I hope you think so, because the film tries to get laughs from this premise about six or seven times. And perhaps in a baby doll voice this might have been a little funny, but the voice acting sounds like a bad Bart Simpson impersonation.

Sometimes, the movie tries to mix the actually scary with silliness, and then it’s actually frustrating. In a flashback, we see a woman attempt to deliver a baby that is possessed by the demon. The baby dies, and the family then GIVES THE CORPSE TO SOME TRICK OR TREATERS. This is outlandish, but the movie wants to have it both ways. It’s really disturbing to think about children being given a dead baby corpse. It’s kind of funny and absurd to watch them hand over a dead baby like it’s a fun-sized Snickers. The movie itself doesn’t know how to play this sequence, and so ends up trying to be both scary and funny. Pick a lane, movie!

I also didn’t find any of the toys all that scary or compelling. At least in the Puppet Master series, I find the Leech Woman visually disturbing. But here the toy designs all left me a bit cold. A teddy bear with teeth . . . eh. A robot toy that shoots flames . . . meh. Nothing here really grabbed me, and so I couldn’t even have fun with their appearances.

I will give the film credit that the acting is pretty good. Scoggins is a solid lead, and given the dialogue and role he’s handed, I thought that Cerny did a nice job as the demon-child. There are no performances that stand out in a bad way.

Easy to watch, easy to forget.

[b]The Boneyard/B], 1991

Jersey (Ed Nelson) is a police detective who calls on old friend, psychic Alley (Deborah Rose) to help get to the bottom of a disturbing case involving a coroner named Chen (Robert Yun Ju Ahn) who was keeping three children prisoner in a morgue, and possibly feeding them parts of corpses. Chen however, claims that the children aren’t children at all, but rather evil spirits that he sought to contain. When Jersey, Alley, and Jersey’s partner, Gordon (James Eustermann) head down to the morgue to investigate, things kick off in a gruesome fashion.

Both genuinely engaging and moving and full of some gross-out absurdity, this is a very enjoyable slice of early 90s horror.

An online horror friend of mine was a big fan of this movie, and yet I always thought that it was just a big piece of camp and that I wouldn’t like it. While the film does have some strong camp elements---largely thanks to a morgue supervisor named Mrs. Poopinplatz (Phyllis Diller)---it also has surprisingly good character development across the board and some affecting relationships.

I was really sad to see that this was the last credited role for Deborah Rose, because I really enjoyed her performance as Alley. Alley has psychic gifts, but is fully burned out from being involved with cases that necessitate her to confront murder and cruelty directed at children. With the death of her own child (and the subsequent end of her marriage) looming over her, Alley is depressed and disengaged, and must be reluctantly drawn into the case. It always feels like a backhanded compliment to say that an actor looks “like a real person”, but here I fully mean it as a positive. There is something so relatable about the way that Rose plays Alley, a woman who is talented and smart, but just bone-tired of coming face to face with the evils of the world.

Nelson is also enjoyable in his role, especially because of the obvious affection that his character has for Alley. He doesn’t just see her as a means to solve his cases, but as a friend. Ahn is eerie as the coroner who has been hiding a very dark secret. I also have to shout out Eustermann, a character who in most films would be a total write-off, but here is given some depth via his relationship with a young woman named Dana (Denise Young). We meet Dana in a very memorable fashion, as she is wheeled into the morgue supposedly dead, but springs back to life when the first cut is made during her autopsy. The burgeoning romance between Gordon and Dana is very sweet and gives both of their characters a boost.

And the kids-who-aren’t-kids? Yeah, they are dang creepy, especially when they first begin to “wake up” in the morgue. Our understanding of their nature continues to shift through the film---first from Chen’s testimony, then Alley’s visions, and finally their actions in the morgue once they come back to life---and they are fun, eerie antagonists for our main characters to face off against.

When it comes to the last act of the film, I was very split on how I felt about it. On one hand, there are some practical effects that are very visually engaging and funny. I definitely laughed very hard at the appearance of the creatures, which look like cartoons come to life. On the other hand, there is a part of me that wishes that the film had continued to play things a bit more straight, letting the movie be mostly driven by real, creepy horror, and keeping the humor as more of an undertone to the whole thing.

A very solid horror movie, and an easy recommendation.

Def by Temptation, 1990

In a bar in New York, a woman known only as the Temptress (Cynthia Bond) is secretly a succubus who seduces men and then kills them. Minister-to-be Joel (James Bond III, who also writes/directs) decides to take a break from his studies and visit his friend K (Kadeem Hardison) in the city. Soon K and Joel are in the Temptress’s sights, and only a suspicious fellow patron, Dougy (Bill Nunn) is on their side.

Colorful, gory, and funny, this is a very fun flick.

Some horror movies are best defined by their heroes, while others are best defined by their villains. Every now and then you get a movie like this one, where the characters on both sides of the equation are memorable and engaging.

Cynthia Bond’s Temptress is just a ton of fun, and she provides a great anchor to the film. A seasoned predator, Temptress knows when to turn on the sweetness and when to show her teeth. As she sits in the bar, the way she holds a cigarette or drinks her champagne is a promise of sex. Once she gets a man back home, she’s everything they want her to be. Once she has them in her grasp, she’s a cold-blooded sadist. In one sequence, she gets into a confrontation with K after pretending not to know him. When Joel walks into the room, Temptress’s voice changes from a hiss to deferential in the blink of an eye.

And on the protagonist side of things, the relationship between Joel and K feels very lived in. While I overall found Joel to be a bit bland as a character, his friendship with K does feel real, and Hardison’s performance as the fast-talking K more than makes of for Joel’s more subdued personality. The two of them have frank, caring conversations with one another, which makes it all the harder to watch the Temptress come between them. And while he doesn’t spring into action until the second half of the film, Nunn’s character is very funny. Every night he sits at the bar, watching Temptress and plying all of the other women with pickup lines so terrible that it’s no surprise he’s perpetually alone.

There’s also a lot of visual delight here, with the scenes featuring the Temptress soaked in deep red hues. This is the scary, neon New York where you fully believe that someone like Joel would stumble across a monster. Temptress’s outfits are immaculate, as are her long golden fingernails. It would be too spoiler-y to say more, but there is a sequence in the last act involving a television that is simply superb and the standout moment of the film, in my opinion.

I also thought that it was interesting to see the various manners in which the Temptress handles the men she victimizes. While there is plenty of bloodletting of the deadly kind, one man is simply informed with a laugh that along with some very visible evidence of lovemaking on his body, he’s been infected with HIV. The men in question range from more innocent victims like Joel to men who themselves behave in predatory ways. It goes against the usual trend of a monster who either only goes for innocents or for creeps.

The only aspect I’m a bit mixed on is the moral message underpinning the film about faith and desire. Joel doesn’t drink, and obviously hasn’t had much sexual experience. K serves as a contrast, frequenting the bar and making moves on the ladies there. But in the context of the film, stepping away from faith, even a little, is a deadly mistake. While this makes for good drama and a memorable element of the ending, I’m not sure how I felt about what it was saying about characters like K who, while they drink and hook up, are still basically good people.

And just on a personal note, I have such strong nostalgic associations with Hardison from his role as Dwayne Wayne that it was really interesting seeing him in such a different role.

I really enjoyed this one and I thought that its final act was particularly strong.

I'm gonna have to re-watch this aren't I.
This was one of MASSIVEminiatures favorite movies and he even sent it to me in the mail on a memory stick. I watched it on DVD a few years ago and it really didn't resonate with me... in fact, I thought it was kinda terrible. But I also had a funny feeling that maybe I was wrong. I mean, I got the joke, all the way, I just didn't think it was a very good joke and, to me, it is a movie you have to buy in on or it's just brutal. I guess I couldn't buy in.
But I am open to trying again after another strong supporter coming forward.

If you focus on the characters and relationships and less on the messy, inconsistent zombie rules and monsters, I think it's a solid flick.

Warlock, 1989

An evil warlock (Julian Sands) is about to be executed when he makes a daring leap into the future. Landing in the 1990s, he is pursued by Redferne (Richard E Grant), a man whose wife was killed by the warlock. The warlock lands in the home of Kassandra (Lori Singer), an aspiring actress who reluctantly teams up with Redferne after the warlock curses her. Together, Kassandra and Redferne race to prevent the warlock from assembling a book that could end the world.

Brilliant when it's dark and grating when it goes for comedy, a delightfully wicked performance from Sands gets lost in the odd-couple comic stylings of the protagonists.

Sometimes in a horror movie, you perversely find yourself rooting the villain simply because they are so much more interesting than the heroes. Such is definitely the case here, where the sequences with Sands in the titular role are highly engaging and shockingly violent. Things kick off right from the beginning with the Warlock’s brutal murder of Kassandra’s roommate, Chas (Kevin O’Brien). Chas is gay and a bit annoying, and so at first this feels like the movie getting in some violence on a marginalized character. But the reality of the situation is that the Warlock sees anyone and everyone who stands in his way, even a little, as totally disposable.

Things kick up a few notches when the Warlock visits a medium (Mary Woronov) and requests that she channel a demon for him. She pretends to do so until the real big bad arrives, and on instructions from the possessed psychic, he removes her eyes so that they can guide him to the pieces of the book. The kill count from the Warlock is absolutely gruesome and lends a terrible tension to every sequence. The Warlock at one point needs to travel faster, so he charmingly isolates a little boy (Brandon Call) and then murders him so violently that the locals assume he’s been killed by a coyote. We then watch the Warlock boil the fat that he removed from the dead child. Later in the film, we watch as the Warlock drives nails into Kassandra’s feet in order to gain leverage against Redferne.

So on the Warlock side of things, this movie delivers in spades.

But then we get to the main characters and, yikes.

I really like Grant as an actor, and I have nothing against Singer, but the characters and dialogue they are saddled with is simply unworkable. For reasons I just don’t understand, the writers decided that the Kassandra/Redferne side of the movie should be an odd-couple road trip movie. Kassandra gee-gollys at the magic; Redferne gee-gollys at modern technology. Redferne can’t stop brooding about his dead wife; Kassandra can’t stop brooding about how the Warlock has aged her by 20 years. And because Redferne is so obsessed with the Warlock and his dead wife, and because Kassandra is so unrelentingly self-centered about her looks, they don’t get the chance to develop any kind of deep relationship.

There is one really solid sequence when the two parties come together: the Warlock has taken shelter in a barn owned by a Mennonite man (Richard Kuss) and his adult son and daughter-in-law. The Mennonite knows the signs of evil, and teams up with Redferne and Kassandra to try and take the Warlock down. Things don’t exactly go to plan. There’s a great part where Redferne tells Kassandra that she can slow the Warlock down by driving nails into his footprints. It’s a very simple and yet very effective sequence.

Overall, however, this movie is terribly unbalanced. Sands gives a very fun, wicked performance as the Warlock, which keeps your interest, but the sequences with Kassandra and Redferne drag. From bits and pieces I’d seen over the years, I was excited to watch this one in full, but it was a bit of a let-down.

Death Spa, 1988

Michael (William Bumiller) has just opened a new state-of-the-art health spa. The spa’s elaborate computer system is managed by David (Merrit Butrick), the brother of Michael’s deceased wife, Catherine (Shari Shattuck). It’s not long before strange and deadly things begin happening, including the near-killing of Michael’s new love interest, Laura (Brenda Bakke) when she’s trapped in a sauna room filled with chlorine gas. But who, or what, is behind these fatal “accidents”?

Sporting gruesome kills, a heady mix of drama and the supernatural, and a wild final act, this one is buckets of fun.

I’m retroactively sad that the title and cover of this movie kept me away from it for so long, when there’s a lot more to the film than the title and premise would suggest. Just on its own, the idea of a smart gym malfunctioning and killing off various patrons suggests that you’re in for 100 minutes of people getting knocked off by different exercise equipment. But where the movie really takes it up a notch is in the integration of the mystery and supernatural elements.

The overall story of the characters in the film is much more complex and nuanced than I ever expected. Michael is trying to start over after the death of his wife. But we soon learn that his wife died under horrible circumstances: after becoming seriously disabled from delivering a child who ultimately did not live, spiraling into a depression and ultimately dying of suicide. This adds a fair amount of weight to the dynamic of David working for Michael. David has to sit around and watch as Michael pursues a new romance with Laura. Once the supernatural element makes an appearance, the dynamic gets even more complicated.

And the attacks/killings themselves are pretty good. Whatever is happening in the spa manages to walk a line where you can’t fully tell if it is something supernatural or merely clever human sabotage. There is always going to be a certain amount of cheese when people are being killed by malfunctioning weight machines, but the movie is able to keep the killings one part entertaining and one part actually disturbing. It’s a real master-stroke to have Laura survive her attack in the sauna, only to spend the rest of the film stumbling blindly through the spa while you wait for her attacker to take another stab at things.

I had some mixed feelings when the film introduced the idea of David being obsessed with Catherine. Yes, any time you have twins in a horror movie there’s going to be something weird going on. But at times there was an air of transphobia/homophobia in the way that David was treated. Ultimately, though, I think that the film is empathetic to David and his experience, though I wish the film had developed his character a bit more.

The movie goes to a whole other level when the final act kicks in. For the most part, I really dug it. It is truly unhinged, and also totally unpredictable. Will everyone get killed? Will everyone get saved? I literally didn’t know until the last minute how it would all play out.

Somehow, this movie also manages to have an odd-couple detective duo---the slovenly Fletcher (Francis McCarthy) and the more poised Stone (Rosalind Cash)---that’s actually fun to watch. The police investigation can only get so far once you introduce vengeful ghosts, but they help give some structure to the events of the film.

Just . . . surprisingly good and fun and even disturbing.

Wolf’s Hole, 1987

On an isolated, snowy mountain, a group of teenagers are assembled to take place in a rigorous week of training under the watch of Daddy (Miroslav Machacek) and his two menacing assistants. Shortly after arriving at the isolated encampment, it’s announced that only ten teens were invited, and yet eleven have arrived. One of them is an imposter and must be discovered. As the week goes on, tensions grow between the teenagers and between the teens and their supervisors. But what ultimately is the real intention of the adults?

Spooky and strange, this tale works as both horror and broader commentary on humanity.

There’s that saying about how there’s no one more ignorant than the person who doesn’t know a fact you just learned. And I think there’s some film cousin to that rule where there’s no film you want to insist that other people watch more than the one you didn’t know about two days before watching it. I’m not saying that this movie is perfect, but I found it incredibly interesting, eerie, and above all it managed to surprise me right up until the last frame.

The main focus of the film is the dynamic and shifting relationships between the different teenagers. Most of them are just normal teens with the usual mix of arrogance and insecurity. Some of the boys are more boorish, some of the girls are more vicious. A young woman named Gitka (Rita Dudusova), repeatedly called out as being a “gypsy” by her fellow teens, makes a big impression with her mix of antagonism and vulnerability.

But the normal, petty bullying and cliquishness of any group of teenagers takes on a whole new level when the teenagers are ordered to identify----and possibly eliminate!---the “extra” kid in their midst. The film is a slow-burn of the adults who are supposed to take care of the kids working to turn them against one another. Grueling physical workouts are followed by a reminder that the extra attendee means less food for everyone. It would be so easy to pick someone, wouldn’t it?

And through all of this builds the mystery of what exactly the nature of the adults is. At night, one of the teens sees two of the adults flailing around naked in the snow. What at first might look like a very chilly sexual tryst quickly becomes something else---that is not the good kind of flailing! These sequences are darkly lit and shot from the angled perspective of a kid trying to peer out a window. What exactly is he seeing? He doesn’t know, and neither do we. Daddy takes a special interest in one of the girls, pulling her from her room for “conversations” in his room. Is this just pervy indiscretion, or is there more to his interest in her?

The whole film hinges on whether the teens will pick someone, and that tension lingers all the way to the end. Some of the teens are easy to hate, the kind of characters you’d normally be rooting for to bite the dust in a typical slasher. But what will it mean for them if they do choose?

It’s part of the brilliant point of the film: when people are turned against one another, there will always be at least that one person who is a bit too rude, too outspoken, or simply too different. It’s obvious where the finger will be pointed when push comes to shove, and the teens all teeter on the edge between individual preservation and group survival. From the outside, you at first find yourself wanting one character to just shut up and play nice. Then it occurs to you that this child isn’t the problem---the problem is that these children have been pitted against each other by the people who were supposed to be entrusted with their safety and care.

As with many great horror scenarios, there is no easy solution to the dilemma faced by the characters. They are stranded atop a mountain, the road is blocked off, and they have no means of communication with the outside world. It’s the kind of setting where any number of deaths could easily be written off as accidents, and their situation only grows more dire as the film goes on. The slopes are shot with a vertigo-inducing steep angle, and the snow seems to stretch endlessly in every direction outside of the camp. This is a movie where you can practically feel the cold.

Overall, this was a very pleasant surprise. It’s just very weird and creepy and presents an interesting perspective on how people respond under oppressive and malicious authority. Highly recommended.

Gothic, 1986

Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson) and Percy Shelley (Julian Sands) visit Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), who is married to Mary’s half-sister, Claire (Myriam Cyr). Also living in the house is Dr. Polidori (Timothy Spall), Byron’s physician and close personal friend. One night, the group endures a tremendous thunderstorm, during which they tell each other scary stories and experience increasingly intense and frightening events.

All over the place, but mostly endearing, this is a high-camp take on the origins of iconic horror stories.

I think that there are times when watching a film that you’re aware that something isn’t really hitting the mark, and yet for the most part you’re having a good old time anyway. This was definitely the case here, as one part of me didn’t feel that the movie made the most of its premise, but I felt myself carried along by the narrative and the outlandish performances.

When I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in college, it made a huge impression on me. Even more so when I learned the origins of the story--Shelley losing a child in birth--and the weekend in which several great literary minds got together to hang out and tell scary stories.

I liked that Mary ends up being our point of view character here, largely watching (and at times babysitting) a house full of people losing their dang minds. Byron, as portrayed here, is mercurial and incredibly selfish. He wants access to people like Shelley and Claire, but also the privilege to discard them when they are no longer desirable or suiting his wishes. As the film goes on, Byron is represented as borderline vampiric. Claire is more sympathetic but also clearly suffering from some serious mental health problems. And Percy Shelley basically becomes that friend in college you have to keep an eye on all night because he got a little too high and you’re worried he might try to climb a clock tower or something.

As you’d expect with a Ken Russell film, sex and sexual anxiety permeate much of the film and its characters. The Shelleys discuss that they believe in free love, but this gets really complicated when Mary sees the attraction between Percy and Byron, and considering Mary’s familial relationship to Claire. I did somewhat enjoy the atmosphere created in this space where sex and nudity are things that simply happen. It gives the impression of an environment of trust and intimacy, and yet one that also walks on the razor’s edge of the moods of the different personalities. Sexy moments can quickly turn hostile or frightening, and vice versa. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I appreciate when movies show something even approaching parity when it comes to erotic gaze/nudity. While this movie doesn’t quite get there, it does offer up a delightful uncertainty about who exactly will be undressed randomly in the next scene. (Sands carries most of the weight on this front. No complaints.)

Somehow, though, while there is decent atmosphere and a game cast, it doesn’t really cohere into something great. There are a lot of interesting ideas and themes here---the challenges of polyamory, grief over a lost child, jealousy, repressed sexual desire, religious guilt related to homosexuality, etc---but none of them get a treatment that lift them much above a thing that is in the movie. Spall gives an admirably over-the-top performance as a man being torn up inside by his guilt over his homosexual desires, but his character doesn’t really progress in any significant way.

Overall I did quite enjoy this film, even though I totally acknowledge that it was a joy gleaned from some more basic instincts. (Hey! I get that reference! Hey! I also get that reference! Hey! A naked guy running around on a roof!). I’d recommend it, but not as much as I’d recommend reading Frankenstein.

After Darkness, 1985

Peter (John Hurt) is a professor who is married and has a young daughter. Peter’s younger brother, Laurence (Julian Sands), is committed to a mental institution and has made several attempts on his own life. Peter makes the rash decision to pull Laurence out of the facility and try to resolve his issues on his own. But Peter soon finds himself drawn into LAurence’s world, and increasingly jealous of Laurence’s growing friendship/romance with Peter’s work colleague, Pascale (Victoria Abril).

Often too subdued, this psychological horror has a few moments of brilliance but a far too predictable story arc.

There are a lot of promising elements to this movie, and overall I really liked the premise that centered on Peter’s pathological need to understand Laurence’s world even if it means a descent into madness. We get quite a few flashbacks to Peter and Laurence’s childhood, most of which show us Laurence at play with a twin brother, Jan, and the deliberate exclusion of Peter. It’s never exactly spelled out if Jan and Laurence hiding from Peter and leaving him out of their secret conversations is just twin cliquishness or a response to something darker that they sense in Peter. In something that is either a memory or a nightmare, Laurence comes across Peter allowing Jan to fall into a sinkhole on the beach, disappearing into the sand.

The theme of Peter seeking out that connection that he was so jealous of, even to the point of alienating his own family, alienating his professional colleagues, and emulating dangerous behaviors is a powerful one. What is it that Peter hopes he will achieve if he can understand Laurence’s mind?

I liked the little moments where the film moves away from just psychological horror and into some more overt strange stuff. The flashback/nightmare of Jan disappearing into the sinkhole is one such moment. There’s another interesting sequence where Peter and Pascale are filming an interview with a young woman whose answers suddenly begin incorporating language from Laurence and Jan’s childhood.

Overall, though, there’s something just a bit too measured about the whole affair. Sands is appropriately brooding and enigmatic as Laurence, but the character isn’t actually given all that much to do. The weight of the story is on Hurt as Peter. Again, the performance is fine and Hurt captures Peter’s obsession well. But the dynamic between the brothers remains too obtuse, and the failure to clarify the exact nature of their relationship as children lessens the impact of what happens through the film.

The character of Pascale is an interesting one. I really liked how Abril plays her as a professional woman who isn’t going to let Peter stonewall her. But it’s kind of inevitable that she turns into the main point of conflict between the brothers. While the film isn’t so basic as to treat her as a trophy, per se, she isn’t that well fleshed out.

Visually there were some moments I really liked. The flashback sequences are shot in a way that keeps ambiguity about whether they are actually flashbacks or nightmares. I also liked how we see the way that Laurence processes certain traumas, such as when looking at a bathtub reminds him of a suicide attempt back at the mental hospital.

And while it might be a function of the print I watched, some of the sections of the movie seemed to take the title a bit too literally. As in, I had a hard time seeing the action because the screen was so dark. Again, though, maybe just a subpar print.

The performances and occasional moment of visual interest kept me engaged, but it feels like the story could have been so much stronger.

The Initiation, 1984

Kelly (Daphne Zuniga) is a college student who has long suffered nightmares in which a man in her parents’ bedroom is set on fire. This dream takes on special significance leading up to a sorority initiation in which Kelly and her friends Marcia (Marilyn Kagan) and Alison (Hunter Tylo) must spend the night in a building owned by Kelly’s wealthy father. A graduate student named Peter (James Read) attempts to help Kelly decipher the meaning of her dream before it’s too late.

Uneven, but at times quite effective, this is a worthy slasher that admirably escalates the action into an absurd-but-fun final act.

My feelings about this movie are mostly positive, but I have to say that it’s kind of haunted by the sense that this was almost a great film, or at least had some of the ingredients to be one. What we have here is the attempt to inject some serious drama and topics into a generic slasher template, with mixed success.

I really enjoyed Zuniga in the lead role, and I also enjoyed Kagan and Tylo as her friends. They know that the sorority stuff is dumb, but they’re willing to jump through a few hoops to get in. They are all likable enough, and they have good friend chemistry that adds some realism to their scenes together. And while this is not a movie that needed a romance, the character of Peter ends up being a worthy ally to Kelly. We also get the bonus of Joy Jones as Peter’s eccentric research assistant, Heidi. The two of them are a fun odd-couple team, and the way that Heidi pops up, meerkat-like, from a desk is a fantastic character entrance. And while I was very mixed on the character himself, Trey Stroud brings some unexpected warmth to the character of Ralph, a jokester who has a thing for Marcia. Vera Miles brings a steely, imposing air to Frances, Kelly’s mother and a woman who clearly knows a lot more than she’s telling about the past and the meaning of Kelly’s dreams.

What I liked most about this film were some really engaging visual moments. The slow-motion dream sequence of the man being set on fire is strong. Later when the women are in the mall, there’s a great sequence where Alison takes a pair of skates and wheels her way around the second level of the building. At a scene that takes place at a mental institution, an overbearing nurse finds a group of escaped patients in the parking lot. As she begins to berate them, one of the men effortlessly pulls her into the center of the group, and the entire vibe shifts as she realizes that she’s outnumbered and overpowered. There’s an energy added by the visuals that is very appealing.

But for all of the things that work here, quite a few just don’t. Until the last act, the murders are all shot in the exact same way: a disembodied hand strikes at someone with a sharp instrument. It’s frustrating waiting for Frances to finally spill the beans about what’s going on, and her obviously guilty behavior actually robs some suspense from the film. Finally, the film attempts something actually serious and I give it some credit for that. The character of Marcia is teased throughout the film about being a virgin. Ralph repeatedly tells her that he’s willing to “help her out” in that department. In the last act, she finally explains why she hasn’t had sex yet and it’s really heartbreaking. But this heartfelt, sobering sequence of a young woman opening up to her friends feels horribly out of place in what is rapidly becoming a totally over-the-top and absurd slasher showdown. Worse still is how the film “resolves” this plot point with Marcia. Points to Kagan for her performance, and also to Stroud who manages to make Ralph’s response to Marcia’s confession somewhat sweet instead of creepy, but the whole thing is still a misfire.

Somewhere in here is the kind of slasher that is amazing and campy and endlessly entertaining, but it just doesn’t manage to get there. Worth checking out, but it feels like a missed opportunity.

Wilczyca, 1983

Wosinski (Krzysztof Jasinski) returns home to find his wife, Maryna (Iwona Bielska) dying from a botched abortion. Her last words are a promise to curse her husband, and Wosinski finds himself being haunted by a wolf who follows him through the icy landscape. On his journey, Wosinski comes across a countess (Bielska) who he believes is possessed by the spirit of his dead wife.

Mostly an exercise in icy atmosphere, this one won’t be for everyone, but its twisted folklore energy and a killer last 10 minutes make it well worth checking out.

This movie starts with a bang, with Wosinski returning home to find his wife dying after aborting her unborn child. It seems that Maryna has been two-timing her husband . . . with Satan?!?!?!?!?!? In any event, her contempt for Wosinski leads her to curse him as she dies, and what follows is an eerie tale of haunting and possible reincarnation/possession.

Much of the first half of the film consists of Wosinski being stalked by a mysterious she-wolf who appears out of the woods. In one really excellent sequence, Wosinski discovers paw prints in the house, leading up to the upstairs floor. But things shift in the middle of the film as we are introduced to a Count Ludwick (Stanislaw Brejdygant), a man whose wife is behaving in a disturbing and outlandish manner. His wife, Julia, openly engages in sexual flirtation with her maid, descending into hysterics when Ludwick tries to talk to her. Julia later seduces a younger man. All the while, a knowing, slightly manic look on her face.

I enjoyed each of the different parts of this film, as they each tap into a different branch of horror. I liked the low-key stress that Wosinski experiences as he realizes that he’s being followed by the she-wolf. It’s the kind of ever-present, not-quite emergency that can drive a person mad. I also liked Bielska’s portrayal of the Countess, a woman who overtly enjoys manipulating others, and Wosinski’s disconcerted reaction to the fact that this woman is somehow his wife. The last ten minutes or so of the film don’t quite constitute a full act, but they contain some excellent imagery and one visual in particular that is worth the price of admission.

The real downside for some viewers will be the film’s more subdued nature and its slower pace. I didn’t mind these elements, as I thought they fit perfectly with the more low-key, frozen landscape energy of the film. And I say only half-joking that my only real downside was the fact that Wosinski’s hairstyle and general facial features meant that every time he entered a room, I expected him to say “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.”

This one is a film that does its own thing, and I dig that. Recommended for something a bit different in your horror diet.

Nightbeast, 1982

An alien is cruising around space when a meteorite knocks its craft into Earth, and specifically into a small town. As the alien goes on a violent killing spree, only Sheriff Cinder (Tom Griffith), Officer Lisa Kent (Karin Kardian), and local good guy Jamie (Jamie Zemarel) stand in its way. Unfortunately, local nogoodnik Drago (Don Leifert) is also out to sow some chaos.

This is a film that defies descriptors like “good” or “bad” and can really mostly hope to land on eyeballs appreciative of its particular brand of oddity.

I have to give this movie credit for a genuinely, deliriously enjoyable first 10 minutes or so, in which every time I announced to myself, “Oh, so THIS is the main character”, that person was then immediately incinerated by the antagonist’s ray gun. When we finally do land on some protagonists destined to survive at least the first act, and when the ray gun sadly goes by the wayside, what comes after is still mostly enjoyable.

Considering this is a movie about a disgruntled alien on a random murder spree, large swaths of the film are devoted to two non-alien or alien-adjacent subplots. The non-alien subplot concerns local bad guy Drago, who we mostly watch menacing his girlfriend, Suzie (Monica Neff), who has been cheating on him with Jamie. The alien-adjacent plot involves local politician Mayor Bert (Richard Dyszel) who is determined to hold a fundraising pool party no matter how many alien murders are happening in the periphery.

The pool party subplot does have the downside of feeling redundant. There are multiple scenes where one character or another shows up to the party to ask why it’s still happening, only to have Bert insist that the party must go on. The longer the film goes, the more absurd it becomes to watch Mayor Bert and his band of merry extras lounging around his modest backyard pool. In a movie that’s already kind of odd, this repetition at times lends a degree of quirkiness, as we’ll go from watching the Nightbeast dig its bare mitts into some poor victim’s abdomen, only to cut to someone having the time of their life on a pool floatie.

The Drago subplot only works in part. I like the idea of having a malicious local whose conflicts with the police and other townspeople adds stress to the whole situation and even at times may obscure the monster’s crimes. In execution, though, it’s a mixed bag. There’s something I find very creepy at times about low-budget attempts at portraying domestic violence. They can seem over-written and improvised at the same time, if that makes any sense. When you realize that his main scenes with Suzie are also doubling as an excuse to get the actress undressed, it adds a real layer of ick to the fictional abuse suffered by the character. Much more effective is a later sequence where Drago ambushes the Sheriff and Kent, forcing a final confrontation.

When it comes to the actual quality alien content we were promised---this is an Amazing Film Production after all---it largely did work for me. The alien is ticked off and willing to zap or eviscerate anything that gets in its way. And really, what is the solution here? While I wouldn’t say that I felt sympathy for the alien, it does have to be said that it’s basically like a trapped animal with no way to escape. There is something frightening about someone who has reached a point where there’s only anger and destruction.

As for the main characters . . . . well. Right from the start I got a bad feeling when it was established that Kent was part of the police force but also still a woman. (A scene where she, an actual police officer, is asked to stay behind while the Sheriff instead rounds up “a few good local men” sure is something.) The best part of this subplot is watching them work together to come up with strategies despite the total lack of help from the Mayor. The worst part of this subplot is when an uncomfortably long scene is presented to us, the viewer, wherein Sheriff Cinder and Officer Kent get slowly (why), awkwardly (why?), sexually intimate (WHY?). I’m very torn on this scene, because one part of me feels like it compliments the unpredictable, low-budget vibe of the whole thing, and another part of me feels like if it weren’t for the exploitative treatment of the Suzie character earlier, it would be almost endearing.

It’s always hard to rate a film like this, where its pleasures are not those of conventionally “good” movies. I’ll just say I’m glad I watched it and generally recommend it to anyone who needs some joy in their life.

Rock would be so proud

His son is all grown up and vaporizing anything that moves.

X-Ray (aka Hospital Massacre), 1981

Susan (Barbi Benton) reports to a hospital one afternoon as part of a follow-up to a medical screening for her new job. But her regular doctor is nowhere to be found, and Susan soon finds herself virtually a prisoner in the hospital. The vaguely sinister Dr. Saxon (John Williams) insists that she must stay the night. A slightly more friendly doctor, Harry (Charles Lucia) tries to help Susan get to the bottom of who has been messing with her medical records. But will Susan figure things out before the deranged masked figure gets her under the knife?

Mostly landing in the sweet spot of stupid fun, this outlandish slasher suffers mainly in the charisma department.

There’s a line where movies go from being bad to just being weird. I think that the best way to describe this film is that it kind of walks that line for most of the runtime, ultimately spending more time on the weird side. So many aspects of this movie live in a strange place between not making sense and feeling like exaggerations of genuine fears.

It all starts when young Susan makes fun of a neighbor boy who gave her a Valentine. And as retaliation, that neighbor boy IMPALES HER FRIEND ON A COAT RACK. He then leers at her through the window and I guess we are to assume that he never faced consequences because he’s seemingly found a way to get into the hospital where her doctor is.

I think that an uncomfortable truth about this movie is that a lot of the things that I know were just designed for plot convenience or even as base titillation ended up being weirdly effective for me as a viewer because they ended up being adjacent to real experiences. There’s a scene that is so stilted and exploitative that it plays almost more like a parody of the start of a porn scene: Susan is ordered into a poorly lit room to be examined by Dr. Saxon. As soon as she sits on the exam table, he just takes off her gown so that she’s sitting there in nothing but her underwear. And then, without saying a single thing to her about why she’s being examined or what he’s looking for, he just proceeds to put his hands all over her. While I haven’t experienced something of that scale, I did spend a few years with a doctor who was very noncommunicative and sort of a “do stuff without explaining” person and it was really unnerving and uncomfortable. Despite the ogling nature of the scene, it did give me some genuinely upsetting echoes of how I felt with my doctor.

Likewise you have the ridiculous idea that a doctor can just order someone to stay in the hospital. Dr. Saxon and his two creepy nurse assistants physically and verbally bully Susan back into her room every time she tries to leave. While Saxon “committing” her for the night is obviously necessary for the killing spree to continue, I think most people can identify with the fear of walking into an institution and not being allowed to leave. A consistent thread in the film is that no one will tell Susan what is happening or why, and it’s a deeply unnerving scenario even with all the goofy stuff going on around it.

The hospital setting itself is very over-the-top. Susan stays in a room with an unhelpful Greek chorus of elderly women who downplay all of her fears. All of the medical staff are some mix of creepy and incompetent. This is the kind of film where you can’t even pick out who you think the killer is because it could easily be any or all of them. A man who is intoxicated or mentally ill lumbers around with a ketchup-saturated burger, growing increasingly sexually aggressive toward Susan. The majority of the action takes place on a semi-abandoned floor, where dead bodies on stretchers and half-empty laboratory rooms are the norm.

The acting is exactly what you might imagine. Benton is all annoyance and eventually panic, while all of the other women simply help stonewall her and all the men size her up like she’s their next meal. There’s something languid about the film, which makes it drag at times. That said, everyone is kind of on the same rhythm, so at least there’s some internal consistency. This is the kind of film where once things are revealed you just sort of go, “Oh, okay.”

Enough here to generally recommend for horror fans, but a bit too muted to be the full-on campy weird fun it could have been.

Maybe not personal experience in my case, but more of a "this could conceivably happen" kind of thing was the idea that you might be subjected to needless surgery because someone has tampered with your records. That could have been really squirmy in a Cronenberg kinda way. So I agree that they occasionally (accidentally?) stumbled on to an effective idea but ultimately not much came of any of it.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

The idea of two medical professionals looking at your test results (okay, it seemed to be an x-ray that made it look like her abdomen was full of confetti?) and making worried hmmmmm noises but not telling you why is immediately anxiety-producing, even in a super-dumb movie like this one.

I think I'm actually kind of mad because it gave me some genuinely upsetting flashbacks to poor medical care/experiences, but, like you say, the fact that they seem to have more stumbled into it is annoying for reasons I can't put my finger on.

But really, the story we all want is how (MAJOR SPOILERS)