Reviews

It's very hard to imagine any big studio greenlighting a premise as absurd, goofy, and gory as Basket Case, so it's admirable that the filmmakers decided to finance and make it themselves. You can tell they're using every resource they have to string this together and it's a delight to watch so many spirited people having such a great time trying to tell this story. There's an excellent gritty and grimy NYC vibe that you can't replicate with a big budget. The story is inventive and the effects, while amateurish, are jaw droppingly creepy and nightmarish.

Everyone wants to have the perfect family, but Jerry Blake would kill for it. Literally. He's already killed his last family and he's about to kill the single mother her just married and her nosy daughter because they haven't lived up to his Leave It To Beaver-esque fantasies. As suspenseful and frightening as the film can get, The Stepfather has the smart to add in a little tongue-in-cheek humor to spice it up and keep it from being unbearably brutal. Terry O'Quinn's performance is one for the ages. His ability to go from warm and wholesome to cold-blooded and psychotic in the blink of an eye is award worthy.

It's hard to imagine an opening sequence generating more tension, unease, and fear than the opening 20 minutes of When A Stranger Calls. By itself, it works as a self-contained short film - a ghoulish urban legend or campfire story come to life. With Fred Walton's sharp direction and Carol Kane's expressive eyes, they're able to work wonders with very little. Anything coming after that can't help but disappoint and, unfortunately, When A Stranger Calls turns into a typical police procedural for the rest of its runtime until the final 15 minutes which are at least somewhat effective.

Thought by many to be Dario Argento's last truly great and inventive thriller, Opera borrows liberally from the classic Phantom of the Opera story by having the deranged fan of an ingenue opera singer being stalked and forced to witness the murders of her friends and colleagues. The suspense set pieces are sharp with beautiful cinematography throughout. As with most of Argento's films, the script and acting do suffer and the epilogue seems a little tacked on.

Demons is a candy-colored sprint through someone else's terrifying nightmare complete with pulse-pounding rock music, inventive camerawork, tons of gore, and some really impressive effects work. What it does lack is a coherent script, but the film keeps things moving so quickly that you don't have time to notice all the loose ends.

Not known as one of Dario Argento's best, Sleepless still provides a much welcome return to form with the kind of striking and stylish murder set pieces he hasn't put on screen since Opera. It has pacing problems and the two main leads and their romance are uninteresting, but it has enough twists and turns to make up for it.

Every time a teenage boy has a dream, another woman in a small New England is viciously attacked and it's up to a reporter and a doctor (played by, of all people, John Cassavetes) to figure out what's going on.

The ick factor is laid on pretty thick right from the beginning of The Incubus as a young woman is separated from her boyfriend and attacked by an unseen creature in an abandoned shed and we meet our film's hero as he gazes at his teenage daughter's nude body as she towels off after taking a shower. It's only nastier from there, but it's mostly evenly paced and has a real jolter of an ending even if it could have been better executed.

I believe the greatest compliment one can give a film is that there's nothing else quite like it and that's certainly true of Mulholland Drive. It does share some themes and elements from other Hollywood horror stories such as Sunset Boulevard and it has that quirky sensibility found in other films by David Lynch, but never has Lynch made a film so emotionally investing and narrativly complex and fascinating. Naomi Watts has never been better as Betty, a perky stars-in-her-eyes actress coming to Hollywood to find fame and fortune and being tossed into a complicated mystery like none other.

As family films go, The Witches is easily one of the darkest and most frightening. That's not to say there aren't many fun moments sprinkled throughout, but the tone more alligns with other traumatic family favorites like The Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Anjelica Huston is having the time of her life vamping it up as the witch to end all witches and her transformation from glamour girl to misshapen ghoul will probably cause many children to hide behind the couch in fear.

While not featuring Michael Myers proved fatal for this movie at the box office, in hindsight, it ended up being a smart decision that brought some much needed life into the franchise. There are elements of Season of the Witch which could be considered silly such as that whole business with Stonehenge, but the concept itself is strong and darkly amusing and Tom Atkins is always a delight to watch on screen. The music score by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth is some of their best work.

Slashers are usually known to be pretty brain dead and there are some where you actively root for the bad guy to take out all the ill defined characters. Halloween is usually a little above that, but this is unfortunately an example of a brain dead slasher film. None of the characters talk or behave like human beings which makes it next to impossible to get invested in their fates and Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode spends the whole movie in a hospital bed delivering bad first year theatre student monologues about the nature of evil and how Michael has "transcended."

As story goes, The Dorm That Dripped Blood might not be anything memorable, but there's a rag tag low budget energy that radiates from every frame and it really makes you root for this little movie that could. None of the acting is that great, some of the lighting is impossibly dark, but the death scenes are all very brutal and crackle with a certain intensity that's very unnerving.

A well-done update of Rear Window with a news reporter believing her creepy neighbor across the street is the rapist and murderer who's been going around attacking women which puts her blind sister at risk. Eyes of A Stranger wisely focuses more on the suspense and characters than it does the slashing, but when the time comes for that, Tom Savini's gruesome effects deliver. There's a nastiness to this movie that, in less skilled hands, could be off putting in a bad way, but it only adds to the danger factor of the film. It's also nice seeing Jennifer Jason Leigh in an early role as the blind sister.

As a sequel that continues the mood and vibe of the original, Halloween II succeeds with flying colors. I'm convinced you could splice the two of them together and, besides a rather appalling wig on Jamie Lee Curtis, you wouldn't be able to tell it wasn't the same movie. Where it doesn't succeed is with the story. It ends up becoming an atmospheric, but empty re-telling of the same story but with a few silly twists thrown in towards the end that only work to make it less frightening and paint the franchise into a corner. That said, there's a creepy vibe throughout that's irresistible and many of the kill scenes are inspired.

Most people would probably agree that Hitchcock's Psycho didn't need a sequel, but during the 80's slasher boom, it seemed like a good idea to dust off the cobwebs and catch up with Norman Bates. I'm glad they did, because Psycho II does what any good sequel should do and expands the story in a thoughtful way, making it feel more like another season of a TV series than a shameless cash grab sequel. Perkins is as great as ever and he's helped out by Meg Tilly, Dennis Franz, Robert Loggia, and Vera Miles (who's deliciously vengeful and bitter here). As expected, there's more gore this time around, but it's always used in place of suspense, story, or character.

Even though the film has the annoying habit of overloading itself with jump scares (though, some do work), Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh isn't as lousy of a sequel as one might expect. It certainly can't hold a candle to the smarts of the original, but the New Orleans locations are well utilized, giving the film a lot of mood. The concept is solid, but there are a few moments in execution that don't work as well as they should and the actor playing Ethan has the emotional range of a soggy saltine and kept taking me out of the movie every time he appeared. Veronica Cartwright steals the show as a boozy fallen southern socialite with a dark secret.

Inspired a little more by the American slashers coming out at the time, A Blade in the Dark is a solid and sometimes intense slash fest about a film composer trapped in an isolated estate where everyone around him is being murdered. The murders themselves are grisly, especially one involving a bathroom, a hand, some shampoo, and a knife. There are a few lags in the pacing here and there, but it all leads to a memorably bizarre finale that makes up for it.

There's a lot of charm in House of Death (or Death Screams depending on which version you watch). The film feels like a homespun passion project where all local community theatre performers and fame struck locals came out and had a good time trying to make a movie. Charm will only go so far and, while House of Death excels in creating a believable and quaint small town atmosphere, it fails at supplying any memorable chills. Some of the death scenes are inspired such as a moment where a young woman is attacked on a deserted merry go round or when another unfortunate soul is sliced in half after falling through a rotten staircase, but the killer's big reveal happens so quickly and is lit so dark that you'll have to rewind to figure out who they were.

Frankie Avalon would be a lot more terrifying if he didn't carry around a flute with him everywhere he goes. Without that, his performance might be considered one of the more effective teen idol to creepy character actor performances. Some of the death scenes are effective and the last act chase sequence between Avalon and his final victim works really well, but there's something a little too calm and leisurely about this to ever really get one's juices flowing.

If it weren't for the insanely dull middle section of The Prowler, it'd probably be one of the most effective slashers of the early 80's. All the other ingredients are in place and are well utilized with Tom Savini's grisly makeup effects stopping the show every single time they make an appearance. As light weight as the story is already, it could have probably used a few trims to cut it down to something more like 70 minutes.

Maybe 2020 wasn't all bad if gave us a film like Anything For Jackson. It's smart, somewhat funny at times, and sports a surprising number of creepy moments that get under your skin. It pulled me in right from the first shot. The final few moments of the film could stand to be a little more exciting, but the ride up to that point has been so excellent and engaging that it doesn't really matter. I'd recommend this to anyone looking for a clever, intense, and entertaining low budget horror film.

For a no-budget slasher, Mrs. Claus could be a lot worse than it is. Most of the actors are competent even if all they're given to do is to scream and make small talk in living rooms in between death scenes. The death scenes themselves are executed with a suitable amount of passion and excitement and there are a few surprises that make this one stand out a bit from the other cheap slashers clogging your Amazon feed.

A bunch of idiots break down on the side of the road and decide to break into a mansion and things, predictably, don't end well for them as someone who lives there starts killing them one by one in the most uninspired and bland ways imaginable. When all a horror film has going for it is a decently atmospheric location, you know you're in trouble.

I love Meg Foster, Wings Hauser, slasher films, and Greek locations, but the script for The Wind never rises to the occasion and everything feels bland, predictable, and uninspired. It's as if everyone involved just wanted a vacation to Greece so they throw this script together over a weekend to give them an excuse to go.

Caught somewhere between Porky's and Friday the 13th, Cheerleader Camp has about 50 tone shifts throughout the run time, but if you're in the right state of mind you might enjoy seeing the campers of the titular establishment being taken out one by one in a variety of grotesque ways. The shears through the head might be my favorite.