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Reviews
Terror Tract (2000)
Great Anthology
Unfairly dumped onto VHS by USA Home Entertainment (and a double bill DVD with Cherry Falls) in the early 2000's, Terror Tract has held up far better than most other straight to video horror films from that era.
Boasting solid performances by John Ritter and a pre-Breaking Bad Bryan Cranston, Terror Tract tells the story of a desperate realtor (Ritter) who takes a young couple to three different houses in a seemingly quiet and peaceful suburban neighborhood, but each house comes with a catch - something horrible happened there.
The stories range from undead husbands to killer monkeys to teenagers with psychic links to serial killers. Each story is well told and acted with the best being saved for last.
Even the wraparound segment, usually a thorn in the side of most anthology films, is well done and entertaining with Ritter turning in a memorably unhinged performance.
Husbands and Wives (1992)
Thoughtful and Funny
Woody Allen is a polarizing figure these days, but it's hard to deny his talent. When he's good, he's great and Husbands and Wives might be one of his greatest and most crowd-pleasing films.
4 middle aged friends have their lives torn apart when one of the couples announces they're getting divorced, which causes the other couple to wonder if they're really happy in their own relationship. Hilarity and heartbreak follow.
The entire cast is fantastic from top to bottom, but it's Judy Davis' icy and brittle Sally who steals the show. Her frantic first date right after her divorce is an acting tour de force - both heartbreaking and incredibly funny.
Savage Intruder (1970)
Unfairly Obscure
You have to thank the good people at Vinegar Syndrome for bringing Hollywood Horror House out of obscurity and into the light again. While it's far from perfect and came at the end of the "Baby Jane"/crazy old dame phase, it's one of the wilder entries into that subgenre with a surprising amount of effective gore.
It all plays out a bit like Sunset Boulevard if the Joe Gillis character was a serial killer who kills older women because they remind him of his mother. He latches on to a faded film star played by Miriam Hopkins and becomes her assistant, confidant, and perhaps her lover. As various people in Hopkins' life start to suspect this homicidal grifter of ill will, he kills them.
Hollywood Horror House appears to have a had a somewhat sizable budget given the sets, quality of actors, lighting, and special effects. After all, how many of these low budget films features a Christmas parade sequence with seemingly hundreds of extras? The film does lose steam towards the end and the ending isn't the most satisfying, but the journey to get there is wonderfully wild.
The Fog (1980)
100% Pure Mood
John Carpenter's The Fog is a masterful exercise in mood. It might not always make you leap from your seat with fright, but it sneaks up on you in the best way, making one feel like a frightened child afraid of the shadows in their room after dark.
The story takes place in Antonio Bay - an attractive seaside town in California that was founded 100 years ago when the town's founders caused a ship to crash and they stole all of their gold. It's the anniversary of this tragedy and strange things are happening all over town - car alarms go off, lights switch on and on, things move by themselves, and dogs bark constantly. Even stranger, there's a thick fog that appears after dark that contains more than just a little condensation.
With a stellar ensemble cast featuring the likes of Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook, and Janet Leigh, The Fog fills up its beautifully composed tableaus with familiar faces who ground a rather silly premise in reality. The tension escalates in the final act when the mysterious fog envelops the entire town until these murderous ghosts get what they came back for - revenge.
Even better, Carpenter seems to be trying to say something about how America was founded on violence and that our blood soaked transgressions might come back to bite us if we don't do anything about it.
Angel III: The Final Chapter (1988)
Resonable Sequel
Perfectly acceptable and fun sequel that does manage to add a few interesting twists and turns along the way. This time, Angel is avenging the death of her estranged mother who's been mixed up in a sex trafficking organization run by Maude Adams and is trying to save her long lost sister from being the next victim of the organization.
It's nice to see Angel's real family, the cast is pretty good, there are some exciting action set pieces, and funny bits of satire on the adult film industry. It breezes by with very few slow spots, which makes it a very easy viewing experience.
Basket Case (1982)
Low Budget Ingenuity At Its Best
Basket Case won't win awards for smashing cinematography or Oscar worthy performances, but it has a story it's so gleefully excited to tell that it catches you under its spell almost immediately and never lets you go.
A young man carries around his mutated twin brother in a basket and goes in search of the people responsible for breaking them apart when they were children and things start to get messy - very messy.
The joy of Basket Case is seeing how much fun everyone seems to be having with the material. Not everyone is a brilliant actor, but you can tell they're giving their all and, sometimes, that's enough. The creature effects are rudimentary and add to both the comedy and the nightmarish feeling of these sequences and the gore is more than plentiful and usually used for comedic effect.
Say what you want about Basket Case, but there's really nothing else like it and that alone is a major win.
Summer Lovers (1982)
A Pretty Good Time
Randal Kleiser brings some of that same kinetic energy he brought to his film version of Grease at times in Summer Lovers, but you have to get past a pretty slow opening act. It's basically the story of an attractive couple who vacation in Greece and the guy becomes obsessed with a woman who lives across the way from them. For a second, you'd be forgiven for thinking this would turn into some Hitchcockian thriller, but the film goes its own way and the mysterious woman and man end up having sex. The rest of the film is him trying to convince his girlfriend that he's not a bad guy and that they could have an open relationship. This mysterious woman soon moves in with them and they all become the best of friends.
No, this never leads to any hot lesbian action, bros, but there's plenty of naked flesh (male and female) on display throughout. The film has a great soundtrack, though (I shudder to think how much the music rights cost them) and the story is charming enough even if one can't help but think we're supposed to admire Peter Gallagher's character who cheats on his girlfriend the first time she leaves him to fend for himself. Get some self-control, buddy.
Summer Lovers is slight, but frequently entertaining if you're in the right mood and go in without expectations. It's not really moving or funny or sexy enough to stand out much from other 80's movies, but I've had worse times.
Little (2019)
Spirited Performances in a By the Numbers Story
Little is nothing spectacular, but it has its charms and I smiled throughout most of it which has to count for something. Regina Hall in full witch mode is always welcome. All the performances keep the film above water for longer than should seeing as this is just a slightly warmed over remake of Big with switched genders and races. Some of the "rediscovering humanity" moments in the final act where Hall's character realizes she's turned into a monster are a little forced and Disney Channel-ish, but the film is still mostly a good time.
It's not the kind of movie you'll remember much about as the weeks and months go on, but if you're stuck in a hotel room and it's playing, it's not exactly torture to watch.
Bleed (2002)
Worth Watching
This movie should probably suck a lot more than it actually does. It falls apart a bit during the finale, but up until that point, the script is decently plotted even if some of the acting isn't great and the whole movie looks like it was shot on a HandyCam. Debbie Rochon treats it like she's doing Ibsen or Albee and that's why we love her.
Rochon plays a woman estranged from her unsupportive parents (Brinke Stevens and Lloyd Kauffman in tiny roles) who begins dating a guy and is about to meet his friends. Because the guy is an idiot, he makes up a whole plot that his friends go along with about how they belong to a "murder club" where they've each killed someone who made them mad. Rochon is already on shaky ground, mentally, so this murder club idea sounds great to her and she ends up killing someone and telling her boyfriend. Like any normal person, he's horrified and it gets even worse when someone begins to stalk and kill his friends.
For a movie that looks like it cost $300, Bleed is at least pretty engaging for most of its runtime which can't be said of some films with 500 times its budget. If a movie can command your attention, it can't be that bad, right?
The Initiation (1984)
If You Like A Little Melodrama With Your Slashing
Vera Miles and Clu Gulagher slum it it in this competently made and better plotted than usual slasher film about a young coed (Daphne Zuniga in one of her earlier roles) who starts thinking the dreams she's been having since she was a child might have something to do with a deep, dark family secret and the crazed slasher running around and murdering everyone that she knows. She not only has to deal with that, but sorority initiation is coming up and they've decided to have their hell night inside her father's shopping mall, which is the perfect place to isolate everyone so that said crazed slasher can pick them off with bows and arrows, hunting knives, and garden tools.
While featuring more than enough gore to appease gore freaks, The Initiation seems like filmmakers actually wrote more than one draft before rushing into production and it shows. There's a nice emphasis on mystery and characterization. One character even gets an extended drunken monologue where she regales her contemporaries with stories of how she was molested as a kid, so the filmmakers at least seem to be trying to give everyone a little extra dimension than usual.
It all ends with a decently tense chase in a darkened mall and a well thought out twist that doesn't feel like a cheat. I definitely recommend this one!
The Silent Scream (1979)
Rooms For Rent
Rebecca Balding charms as the plucky bowl-haired coed named Scotty who is forced to rent a room in a spooky beachside mansion when she discovers that there's not a single room for rent in the rest of her college town. She quickly befriends the three other young tenants in the house as a mad slasher runs amok and kills them off one by one. Could it be the creepy matriarch of the home (Yvonne DeCarlo)? Or perhaps her unstable son?
A few pacing issues in the 2nd act and a mostly useless police investigation subplot might threaten to derail the film, but Silent Scream ends up on top as one of the better examples of the slasher cycle. It supplies all the requisite slicing and dicing, but still manages to give us a few decent characters to root for, a bit of atmosphere, and some Psycho-style plot twists and shrieking violins.