Reviews

Three thieves on the run stop at a rundown farmhouse owned by a practically mute young woman named Lisa and her wheelchair ridden grandfather. Little do they know that Lisa isn't as pure and sweet as she seems to be.

Axe gets a lot of production value out of the creepy farmhouse isolated in the middle of nowhere and all the performances are strange and have the feeling of being broadcast from another planet. This gives Axe an unusual atmosphere that can't be easily replicated and is the best reason to give it a watch.

An anthropologist takes his students and a woman whose father has been murdered to a remote forest to figure out if the local Bigfoot legends are real and ends up putting everyone in danger as the legend turns out to be true.

From a script perspective, Night of the Demon won't win any awards, but at least they find a way to add padding and extra gory deaths into the plot in an inventive way. In most films, they would simply cut to another part of the forest and show an unnamed character walking around before getting attacked in a totally unrelated scene to the plot, but Night of the Demon adds these deaths scenes in the form of urban legends and campfire tales about others who have perished from this bloodthirsty Bigfoot creature.

The film still has a few pacing problems, but it was better made than I'd expected and the last act will be hard to forget.

Actresses hoping to score the lead role in a big director's next film are brought to his snowy, secluded mansion for an audition session and find themselves up against more than just the usual egos and mind games in a situation like this. Someone in a hag mask has decided they want the part more than any of them and they'll kill for it.

The idea of mixing mad slasher tropes with backstage All About Eve theatrics is a brilliant idea, but Curtains can never figure out what it wants to do with the idea. At times, it feels like the producers each gave a different director and writer a prompt, gave them the same cast and location, and cut all their versions together without thinking about making a cohesive film.

There are still some memorable sequences, performances, and ideas that make Curtains worth seeing for curiosity's sake.

A motorcycle helmet-wearing slasher is terrorizing the female students of Professor Millet's night class and a detective is trying to get to the bottom of it before the killer strikes again, leaving another severed head floating in water.

Director Ken Hughes seems to be an odd choice to direct a film like this, but he gets as much atmosphere out of the dark, Boston locations and the story is better crafted than many others like it. It's low on gore, but makes up for it with a level of mean spiritedness that's very alarming.

Joe D'Amato delivers the splattery gore he's known for in Anthrophagus, a Greek set slasher where a bunch of tourists are picked off, one by one, by a sun-baked cannibal in a creepy mansion.

Going into a film and expecting acting and writing above merely competent would be a mistake and a lot of the dubbing is no great shakes either, but if you're just here for the gore, it's hard to imagine you'd be disappointed.

It's best to know going into it that Nightmare is a sleazy and reprehensible film with just about no redeeming value whatsoever. Not only is the lead character a sweaty, disgusting murderer but his victims aren't much better and you might find yourself rooting for him to dispatch them as quickly as possible.

Baird Stafford plays George, a mentally unwell man who is let out of an asylum and goes off to search for new victims. But not before stopping off at a scuzzy Times Square peepshow.

The effects are impressive and some of the best and most stomach-churning in the genre, but there's an unpleasant coldness to the film that'll really upset your stomach.

Susan Tyrrell steals the show as the criminally insane Aunt Cheryl in Night Warning, an odd mix off slasher tropes, "hag horror", and TV movies of the week.

Tyrrell has a strange affection for her nephew, Billy, who's lived with her ever since his parents died under mysterious circumstances and, when Billy's about to graduate and go off to college, Tyrrell has a full-on mental collapse and becomes a danger to anyone who tries to take him away from her.

It also features a supporting cast of faces such as Julia Duffy and Bill Paxton in early roles, but it's Tyrrell whose performances stays with you long after the film has run its course.

Director Rick Rosenthal does capture some of that John Carpenter atmosphere in Halloween II when he allows his camera to show those menacing wide shots of the darkened hospital halls, but the story feels like a less exciting and suspenseful version of the original with a truly moronic twist.

Jamie Lee Curtis spends most of the film comatose in bed wearing a bad wig and Donald Pleasance turns up the mania to an 11 with Dr. Loomis as he tries to find the escaped patient he's now sure is "pure evil." The hospital staff have their charming moments, but they're not well-written enough to come across as anything more than knife bait.

Still, it's a fine and entertaining sequel.

Zoe Thund is exceptional in a completely silent performance as Thana, a mute seamstress who is attacked multiple times in one day until she's forced to fight back. Unfortunately, these attacks have fractured her mind and she goes on a quest to clean up the city's dirtbag male population.

Thana is an interesting anti-heroine to follow around due to Lund making her so likable from the get go. When she finally snaps, we know what she's doing is wrong, but we can't help but feel like she earned a little bit of her aggression.

The Aussies have made their fair share of horror films, but only a precious handful of them are well remembered or regarded. Next of Kin is one of the better and more atmospheric of their early 80's horror offerings by taking the little used nursing home location and mining it for maximum chills.

In the film, Linda, a young woman who returns home after her mother's death to discover that she's inherited the creepy nursing home her mother had operated. Upon finding her mother's diary, she discovers that her mother was paranoid about someone wanting to kill her and this person might still be lurking around the premises.

It's a slow burner and one that's sure to tick off those wanting more of a fast-paced slasher type movie, but the wild finale is more than worth the wait.

The concept of Homebodies is a good one and an amusing, darkly comic one at that. It features a mostly elderly cast and gives them interesting material to chew on. Of course, interesting doesn't always mean it's without flaws.

Homebodies pits senior citizens against uncaring social workers who want to move them out of the apartment complex they've been in for 30 to 50 years and into nursing homes so a construction company can bulldoze it and use the land for something more productive. As the stakes begin to escalate, the elderly residents team up to stop anyone from taking them or their property anywhere and, sometimes, that means murder.

It's fairly amusing for its first half, but it struggles as to which direction it should go in its second half. This might be a good candidate for a modern remake with a more refined script.

While watching Blood Beat, I couldn't help but wonder if this was someone's student film project. While there's clearly talent at work here, it comes across as confused and unfocused without anything it's really trying to say or give the viewer.

The sword-wielding spirit of a Samurai possesses a college girl while at her boyfriend's family's house for the holiday break and causes all sorts of strange things to happen.

Blood Beat is nearly impossible to critique, because it's so hard to figure out what it's even about or what the filmmakers were intending. What it does have going for it is a lot of low budget filmmaking charm which takes it further than it probably should.

When I saw that Troma produced this, I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch this. While I enjoy their films, I wasn't in the mood for something as silly as those usually are. Mother's Day, thankfully, isn't quite like any other Troma film I've seen. It's mean, bleak, and nasty at times, but also has just enough of a sense of humor to keep the movie from being unbearable.

In the film, three girlfriends reconnect for a weekend of camping and are captured by two redneck brothers and their psychotic mother who want to use them for their own sick and twisted games.

When Mother's Day wants to get nasty, it goes all the way in. The disturbing moments stick with you and make you feel lousy and disgusted. You really root for these girls to overcome their troubles and get revenge which makes the final act so much more satisfying.

A visiting photographer has been killed in the town of Potter's Bluff and a local policeman is trying to get to the bottom of it. Things get even stranger when the guy shows back up looking like nothing ever happened to him.

Dead & Buried takes the tried and true zombie formula and injects a healthy dose of all-American dread and existentialist drama into the mix with elements of comedy, the slasher film, and a bit of magic. The end result is an unforgettable and clever horror tale that deserves a much wider audience.

Drenched in hazy seaside menace, Dead & Buried is at least as good as many better known 80's horror films and deserves 90 minutes of your time.

The first Slumber Party Massacre was an enjoyable attempt at a satirical slasher film long before Scream even if it didn't totally succeed at what it was attempting. This sequel carries over a few of the surviving characters from that film, but goes in such a wild and bizarre direction that you have to applaud the filmmakers for the sheer audacity they display.

After the events of the last movie, Courtney is trying to get to normal even though her sister, Valerie, is stuck in a mental hospital. Courtney has a new group of friends and they even have a decent all-girls band together, but a slumber party will reawaken all her trauma when a psycho with a murderous guitar crashes their celebration.

Slumber Party Massacre II starts out as your average sequel complete with dream sequences and flashbacks, but once the singing killer shows up, logic flies out the window and you'll either go along for the ride or end up scowling the entire time. I went along the ride and ended up really enjoying it. At under 80 minutes, it's not like it's a huge commitment.

Put Carrie, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Exorcist into a blender, hand the script to David Lynch, and you've got Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II looks like. It's about as different from the original as you can get. Whereas that film was, more or less, a slow moving Halloween rip off with a somewhat interesting emotional center, Mary Lou gets right off to the races within the first 5 minutes and never lets up.

Mary Lou was a fun loving teenage prom queen in the 1950's who was burned alive before she got to wear her tiara by a jealous boyfriend. It's now the late 80's and a mousy high school student named Vicki discovers this tiara and sash in a prop room and the dead prom queen takes this as an opportunity to be reborn again using Vicki's body as a vessel so that she can not only get the chance to experience the magic of prom night, but to get revenge on those who led to her untimely death.

There's so much happening in this movie that, at times, you feel like you need to hit pause just to catch your breath, but the tone is so joyful and fun and you can feel all the filmmakers and actors winking at you the entire film.

If you're looking for an ideal representation of late 80's horror, I doubt you can do much better than Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps. It's a wild mix and match of sci-fi movie, slasher, possession, and body snatcher film all rolled into one incredibly bright and colorful package.

An alien parasite falls from the sky in the 1950's and possesses a frat boy. His body is frozen in the school lab and, in the 80's, two dorky wannabe frat boys are asked to access the body as part of an initiation prank and they unleash this alien parasite who begins wreaking havoc all across the campus.

Writer/director Dekker seems to be having the time of his life as he swings from the rafters, trying to entertain his audience with as many funny one liners, quirky characters, and fantastic practical effects as he can. The tone, which could have easily been confusing, seems right on the money in his capable hands.

I'm no stranger to a slow burn horror film. In fact, I adore them, but there's a difference between a slow burn and a movie where almost nothing happens. For almost its entire runtime, Dark August appears to be building up to something really great an fails to deliver with one of the worst climaxes in film history.

As a concept, Dark August seems to have everything going for it. After accidentally killing a little girl, a middle aged man believes that the little girl's grandfather has put a curse on him and he has to find some way to get the curse reversed.

Every now and then, there will be a slightly unnerving shot of black cloak-clad stalkers peeping at the protagonist from behind a tree or another character will accidentally saw into his own leg because the protagonist is having some kind of a curse-induced dizzy spell, but these moments are few and far between and at about 85 minutes, Dark August feels as if it overstays its welcome.

Despite its narrative issues, Dark August is still pretty well shot with some beautiful images of the countryside and the actors are good, but it's in service of a story that might have needed to spend a little more time in the oven.

After hearing about this one for years, I decided to finally give it a go and I really regret that choice. The time spent waiting for something interesting to happen in this movie could have been better spent doing more exciting things like balancing my checkbook or getting a rectal exam.

The Legend of Hell House starts out promisingly enough, if not almost exactly like the much better and scarier The Haunting. A group of people involved in the paranormal go to the mansion where they have a few days to figure out if there really is life after death and if the grisly stories about the residents of the home are true. With them, they have the survivor of the last massacre that took place there and he seems ready to crack at any second. Apparently, the original owner of the house was quite a hedonist and sadist who got off on all kinds of sexual craziness. Soon, the group (mostly the women) become possessed by randy spirits who - I don't know - want to have sex with everyone.

For a film with so much atmosphere and moody cinematography, there's not a lot of threat lingering around for much of the run time. It's excusable for the first 30 minutes when it's trying to establish said atmosphere and the plight of the characters, but it never builds to anything very exciting.

You're better off watching The Haunting, The Innocents, The Sentinel, Burnt Offerings, or many better haunted house films.

Brian De Palma eliminated and changed a few aspects of Stephen King's novel for his 1976 adaptation of Carrie, so a TV remake adding back in a lot of aspects of King's novel seems like a good idea on paper and I'm sure the script read fairly well, but there's something that doesn't quite work this time around.

This is no fault of Angela Bettis who defies the odds and gives us a Carrie almost as memorable as Sissy Spacek's iconic turn. Bettis is reason enough to give this film a spin. Rena Sofer and Emile De Ravin excel and Carrie's kindly gym teacher and her worst enemy and bring a different, but refreshing energy to their roles. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag without any major standouts. It's the ensemble heaven De Palma put together, but the worst offender is Patricia Clarkson. Clarkson is a wonderful actress, but seems horribly miscast as Carrie's abusive religious fanatic mother. She seems too low energy to ever be truly frightening.

I suppose, due to budget, this Carrie is shot on digital and it sure looks it. The photography is bland, flat, and colorless. The computer effects aren't much better as they range from passable to downright embarrassing.

This Carrie is a mixed bag of tricks and treats and just goes to show you how the right team at the right time can make all the different when adapting a novel, no matter how great the source material.

The Boys in the Band paints a vivid picture of a group of friends who gather to celebrate one of their birthdays and the drinks start flying (as do the insults) as a mysterious stranger puts a damper on their party plans and forces them to confront a lot of things they've been hiding.

Based on the play of the same name, The Boys in the Band sometimes feels like a gay version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with more characters and maybe even more vitriol. Performances are terrific all around and William Friedkin's direction is strong, opening up the play in ways that make sense and don't seem over the top or trying too hard.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about The Boys in the Band is how much work the gay community still has to do to eliminate self-loathing and teach each other to be kinder to one another (and to themselves). It still feels relevant in this time period.

Melissa Sue Anderson is a long way from that Little House on the Prairie and, this time, Ma and Pa can't help her. She plays Virginia - a member of the "top Ten" - an elite group of snobs from an elite snobby school called Crawford Academy. It's getting close to her birthday and her fellow "top ten"s are disappearing one by one and/or being murdered in increasingly ridiculous and gruesome ways. Maybe she's the one who holds the secret to who the murderer is. Could her frequent blackouts hold the key?

Happy Birthday To Me is like a slasher film for people who don't like slasher films. It's glossy, well made, beautifully shot, cast with people who can actually act, and has a great whodunit angle. There's something very old Hollywood and sophisticated about it.

It also meets the requirements for the usual slasher fan with its grotesque death scenes (which they brag about on the film's poster). Where the film really comes alive is during its memorable, off-the-wall ending where the killer is finally revealed in the most Scooby Doo of fashions which nearly turns the film into a wicked dark comedy right then and there.

There's something both modern and refreshingly old fashioned about Cherry Falls. It was clearly made at the tail end of the post-Scream slasher glut that lasted for about 4 or 5 years then died down. In these films, the victims are usually required to be painfully self-aware, sarcastic, and know that they're in a horror film situation.

There's a little bit of that in here, but most of the humor in Cherry Falls comes from a less spoofy place than Scream or some of the films that followed in its wake. It feels far more Heathers than Scream in this regard and the set up feels like it'd be more comfortable in a late 70's or early 80's slasher film than one from 2000.

The comedy and satire doesn't always land and neither do all of the scares, but there are some excellent set pieces and ideas in here (even if a lot of the film suffered under the scissor happy MPAA). The cast is impressive for a film of this sort with Brittany Murphy giving an excellent leading performance as our heroine and Candy Clark giving a darkly funny turn as her lush of a mother.

It's hard to imagine a world where cigarette voiced Lauren Bacall is the most in demand musical diva on Broadway (was Lucille Ball busy?), but you go along with it due to Bacall's star power and iron will.

The Fan isn't anything we haven't seen before, especially if viewed with a 2019 lens. It exists in between the realm of respectable thriller and sleazy slasher flick (which were all the rage at the time, so it's understandable), but never fully commits to either style and this leaves the film a bit tonally wonky. One wishes it would either scrub away the sleaze and thrill us or add a few extra helpings of gore and really disturb us. The Fan wants to have its cake and eat it, too, and it leaves the viewer a bit confused.

While I could never say The Fan is a great or brilliant film, it's never less than entertaining. Bacall screeches her way through several baffling bad musical numbers (composed by Marvin Hamlish of all people) in between stalking sessions with the handsome Michael Biehn.

Interestingly enough, Bacall did star it TWO hit Broadway shows throughout the 70's and 80's. Sometimes, star power trumps singing range.