by ·Comments Off on Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose)

Virginia “V-Mad” Madsen (Highlander II: The Quickening) is researching urban legends with friend Kasi Lemmons (Vampire’s Kiss), who almost sinks the movie as the rational best friend trying to hold back V-Mad from her suicidal quest. Rose and his Roeg-ian DP get some good light and imagery, but between the Philip Glass score and Tony Todd’s voice, the soundtrack is the star. Movie seems to get going when she’s beaten up in the bathrooms by a fake Candyman, but soon afterwards she awakens in Vanessa Williams’s apartment with a dead dog, a missing baby, and a knife in her hand, she’s on her way towards becoming an urban legend herself, starting with her faithless husband Trevor (a cop in The Guardian). Much is made of this movie’s themes of racial violence and gentrification, but little is said about how the backstory murder scene has Ted Raimi in it.

Fake Candyman:

Real Candyman:

It’s All For You, Damien:

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 31: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 1

Happy SHOCKtober 2025! This is only the fourth episode of The Last Ten Minutes to feature screenshots, but more to come.

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Silver Bullet (1985, Daniel Attias)

Holy cow, it’s Gary Busey, visiting a “wizard of weapons” (per narrator) who uses some pretty non-magical tools (just normal gunsmith tools) to create the titular bullet. Everyone is overdoing everything. Uncle Busey schemes to get rid of the kids’ parents for the full moon, the wolf attacks, they shoot it, case closed (didn’t realize until Trevor mentioned the wolf was Big Ed). Where’d all these 1980s people end up? The girl grew up to be Anne of Green Gables, the boy to be Corey Haim, and Attias won awards for directing prestige TV.

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The Dark Half (1993, George Romero)

Timothy Hutton doppelgangers face off kicking each other in the nuts while a flock of finches swarm the house and Amy Madigan (the witch from Weapons!) is tied to a chair somewhere. Isn’t “hero writer vs. villain arguing who gets to write a story ending” reused from Misery? Cop Michael Rooker arrives to untie Amy but more importantly he lets the finches in and they eat Evil Hutton (good fx as he’s reduced to a skeleton). Adapting this into a movie was a bad idea but the acting and overall look are higher caliber than Silver Bullet. Hutton was also in Ghost Writer and Secret Window, has a real thing for dumb movies about split-personality authors.

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The Mangler (1995, Tobe Hooper)

Here it is, the “king” of the shouldn’t-have-been-adapted stories, as three drunk(?) people think they’ve succeeded in exorcising the killer laundry machine, then it starts chasing them down some stairs. The priest-guy (also a priest in Hooper’s Night Terrors) gets mangled, Buffalo Bill (his voice!) escapes, and his girl falls into the hands of laundry-machine cultists. Movie got two sequels, I assume ironically. I watched this in the theater in ’95, maybe this is why nobody wanted to hang out with me.

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Sleepwalkers (1992, Mick Garris)

Angry Alice Krige (who specializes in playing witches) bites off Officer Ron Perlman’s fingers and twists off his arm, sets another cop on fire, knows exactly where to aim a pistol to cause cars to explode with a single shot. She kidnaps Shelley (in her Twin Peaks follow-up), taking her to dance with her mutant zombie son Charles in a house surrounded by cats. Turntable plays “Sleep Walk” by itself as Charles attempts to suck her soul. What is it with King and soul-sucking cats? But Shelley turns the tables (err, knocks Charles down and gouges out his eyes) and cats jump on Alice until she spontaneously combusts, but not before she makes time to kill one more cop. Mick’s first of seven King movies is set in Indiana, not Maine, disappointing.

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Watchers (1988, Jon Hess)

This was my favorite Dean Koontz book, and I think Watchers II (a remake masquerading as a sequel) was the better adaptation, but nobody’s got that for download. Supergenius Scrabble-playing dog and his boy Corey Haim are under assault by Michael Ironside, who claims to be a labmade perfect killing machine but gets immediately wasted by a couple of noobs. Now they’re attacked by an evil gorilla (psychically linked to the dog, if I recall?), and they waste it too, easy peasy. Director Hess went on to make Alligator 2: The Mutation, Corey’s sister was Frank Zappa’s niece.

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Humanoids from the Deep (1980, Barbara Peeters)

A girl with her tits out is beating a humanoid (seaweed-people with external brains) with a rock. The setting is a marina carnival on fire with a few-seconds-long tape of screaming citizens on endless loop. For some reason I thought this was James Cameron’s first movie (that was Pirahna 2: The Spawning). Doug “The Virginian” McClure and Vic Morrow and some pretty girls with short careers all survive.

Nice tile:

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Dog Soldiers (2002, Neil Marshall)

Are the dogs soldiers, or are soldiers just fighting giant dogs? Trevor: “The whole military seems to be made up of clones of Mike from Spaced.” Surrounded in a house with breakaway walls, the humans fight with pots and pans, aerosol cans, etc. One guy always has a blue glowstick in his mouth, and I know there’s gonna be a payoff… ah nope, he just likes glowsticks. If Brits call bathrooms “the closet” what do they call closets? Spoon gets eaten, another guy is starting to wolf out, so he stays behind and blows the cabin using the gas stove, still time for one more ugly-looking fight. Marshall went on to be one of those almost-cult horror guys making almost-good movies until he faded to Hellboy-remake status.

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Underworld / Transmutations (1985, George Pavlou)

Masked baddies shoot green gas into their own face, then onto our (presumed) mutant heroes. These guys are terribly incompetent villains – they keep pointing guns but not firing them, and end up sabotaging each other’s plans. Some glowy-eyed woman repeats “show me your dreams” at the baddie leader over and over again, then scans him to death, the music one shimmery note taped down on a synth. Was this an early version of Nightbreed? At least two of these actors were in Dennis Potter movies. Great color on the remaster, glad I waited forty years to watch the last ten minutes of this.

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Rawhead Rex (1986, George Pavlou)

Howard (of Stephen King TV movie Rose Red) finds a bloody man whose dying words might be the key to defeating the evil demon, then a priest yells for Howard to “get the fuck out” of his church – there’s the Clive Barker we all love. The church houses a hellish horror… oh no it’s just a rock. Rex looks deliciously fake with his light-up eyes, and since he’s a puppet and can’t move, the priest has to lean into him to get bitten to death. Useless Howard gets knocked around by the monster then a lady picks up the rock and unleashes its lady-magic in the form of 1980s light effects. Meant to be the first in a series of Books of Blood adaptations, but fortunately the following year Clive took things into his own hands with Hellraiser.

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TerrorVision (1986, Ted Nicolaou)

I kinda remembered this movie’s theme song, but it’s much less sinister and more new-wave than I recall, and the movie is more knowingly goofy and popping with color. Two kids with machine guns are busy defeating the monster with electricity when a spacesuit alien beams in to explain what’s going on, but a random party guest executes him and the monster eats everyone, haha. Wouldn’t have guessed that this would be the best-looking movie of the bunch.

by ·Comments Off on Clive Barker’s early shorts

Salome (1973)

Girl finds a mostly-nude boy in the catacombs, they start making out but he strangles her. The vibe is a murkier, cultier Jean Rollin, with light and fog effects so heavy they turn the actors into abstract imagery. It’s content to roll along in its slow dreamy way without getting caught up in story – I suppose if you’re familiar with the Oscar Wilde play you can follow along but I’m going by a few year-old memory of the Ken Russell version. Music sounds newer than 1973, like Coil Concrete – aha, this must’ve been recorded for the late 1990s home video release, which means I am free to listen to Secret Chiefs 3’s Horrorthon during the next film.

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The Forbidden (1978)

Horrorthon mentions Faust in the dialogue clips, and if you skip the “preview” first track and start the album with the movie, the circus music that plays when the nude man (Barker?!) starts dancing around is very funny. Barker made these films and his theatrical works before writing the Books of Blood – I always thought of him as a novelist who came to filmmaking late, but I was off. This has the most nudity in any Faust film outside the pornography realm. The image processed in negative, surfaces seem to glow. The opening mathematica and later full-body tattooing recall Book of Blood, and rotating light over pins/nails predict Pinhead and Leviathan at once.

by ·Comments Off on Books of Blood (2020, Brannon Braga)

This SHOCKtober we are counting down the days until the new Hellraiser Remake comes out, and starting the celebration with this Clive Barker adaptation. Seems odd that another Books of Blood semi-anthology TV movie would come out so soon after the last one, instead of like a Masters of Horror-style Books of Blood series, or a Weaveworld adaptation, or really anything else. Trying not to focus on the fact that this (smells like content) movie and the new Hellraiser are both “Hulu originals,” maybe there’s still hope.

Kicking off the anthology framing story, hitmen Yul Vazquez (War of the Worlds) and Andy McQueen (Clifton Hill) are after the Book. But we’ll get back to them in a bit – first, Jenna (Britt Robertson of Scream 4) is sad since her parents don’t understand her, is off her meds, runs away since mom is “sending her back to the farm.” Jenna’s x-men superpower is she can loudly hear the sounds of people eating. She stops in an internet cafe and books an airbnb (what year is this?) in a spooky house with hosts Freda Foh Shen (Ad Astra) and Cronenberg regular Nicholas Campbell, has a noise-cancelled sleep paralysis nightmare and pukes CG bugs, then discovers the walls are full of people (“we relieved them of their eyes and tongues”).

You’d be depressed too if you lived in this house without curtains:

Airbnb hosts:

Next, a professional fraud-debunker (Anna Friel, not of Stephen King’s IT, but of Pierce Brosnan’s I.T.) is confronted by a “speaker for the dead” (Rafi Gavron: Aarfy in a previously-unknown Catch-22 miniseries). This guy seems to be the real thing, and Anna is convinced until he drunkenly admits his scam. Alas, the dead have highways, and the boy gets cut up by ghosts, becoming the valuable “book” the stupid hitmen think they’re looking for. And the depressed girl from part one goes back to the spooky house to be relieved of the burdens of seeing and speaking and be buried alive in their floor.

Have I mentioned that the dead have highways?

From the producers of Stallone’s Lock Up, King’s Dark Tower, King’s Bag of Bones, the Barker Dread, Final Destination, Unstoppable, Cabin in the Woods, and Family Guy (those are all different producers). The director worked with a more distinguished cast than this one on the series Cosmos, aka that show everyone thought I was talking about when I used to recommend the Zulawski movie.

by ·Comments Off on Hellraiser II (1988, Tony Randel)

Some sequelly repetition here to be sure, but adding the mad doctor and the puzzle girl, then sending Kirsty and the resurrected Julia through the labyrinth with them, all great ideas. Overall made by people in sympathy with the spirit of the original, though that wouldn’t last through many more sequels. Too many flashbacks to the first movie, but in fairness you could never follow it without them. A powerful movie, never truly scary because you don’t quite buy it, but no acting missteps either. Leviathan, Lord of the Labyrinth should’ve played a bigger part in later movies, instead of continuing to obsess over Pinhead’s human origins.

Skinless Julia:

Stolen Skin:

Barker wrote the story, and screenwriter Peter “Martin” Atkins would write the next two, then Wishmaster, before turning to novels. Randel went on to make the haunted-clock Amityville sequel, the famously bad Fist of the North Star, and most recently a kids movie about a telepathic dog.

“Help my daughter”

Julia and Channard:

Poet horror lobotomist Dr. Channard is my dad’s age, was in Prospero’s Books and Hot Fuzz. Julia is in The House of Mirth which I also need to rewatch. Kirsty’s boyfriend Steve flakes off forever and is quickly forgotten, as Nurse Kyle becomes her sympathetic new guy: William Hope went from Aliens to this, then nothing, and twenty years later found his calling as a Thomas the Tank Engine regular. “Get them off me” guy was Oliver Smith – appropriately the same actor who played Skinless Frank.

by ·Comments Off on Nightbreed (1990, Clive Barker)

Hetero White Male Boone has been having bad dreams, getting calls from psychiatrist David Cronenberg, who is secretly giving his patients hallucinogens. Then a bagface knifes some kid’s parents. Boone’s girlfriend Lori does karaoke at a club. Crazy Boone goes to hospital, where he meets a cheery longhair who scalps himself. All this leads Boone to Midian, underground dwelling of monsters, whose prophet he will become, to the consternation of their gill-cheeked leader Doug Bradley. But there’s trouble before Boone can take his place as prophecised hero, because either he or Cronenberg (who works nights as the psychotic bagface murderer) leads the humans to the monster pit, and a redneck army destroys the pit, driving the monsters away.

Barker creates a fantastic bunch of characters (everyone except Boone) but maybe it’s best he stopped directing. The newly restored director’s cut doesn’t change how creaky and graceless everything is. Everyone talks like they’re in a movie, one guy even screams “nooooooo!” But I hadn’t seen this since the VHS days, was worth revisiting. Maybe I’ll see if I can find the comics.

Cinematographer Robin Vidgeon had shot the first two Hellraiser movies with Clive. Whole companies are credited with the foul crimes committed against movies: “20th Century Fox drastically cut this film at the last minute prior to its theatrical release,” and everywhere it’s Fox this and Fox that. I’d like to see the individuals listed more often, IMDB credits for specific studio execs who sunk the movies.

by ·Comments Off on Hellraiser (1987, Clive Barker)

First time I’ve watched this in HD.

Larry: Andrew Robinson, a regular on Deep Space Nine, formerly a soap opera star, bad guy in Dirty Harry, also in Pumpkinhead 2 and Child’s Play 3

Julia: Clare Higgins, apparently I missed her in season 3 of Downton Abbey

Kirsty: Ashley Laurence returned in three sequels, including Hellseeker which I don’t remember too well, also in a Lovecraft movie called Lurking Fear with Jeffrey Combs

Frank: Sean Chapman was in Barker’s Transmutations, and much later a Charisma Carpenter movie called Psychosis

Besides playing Pinhead, Doug Bradley has been in Pumpkinhead 3 and Proteus, and appeared in Nightbreed with two other cenobites.

Clive always claims to have a bunch of movies in development, but nothing has come out since the burst of originals in 2006-2009: Dread, Book of Blood, Midnight Meat Train and two (not great) Masters of Horror episodes.

by ·Comments Off on Lord of Illusions (1995, Clive Barker)

“I was born to murder the world.”

Watched for about the fifth time whilst trying to think of something to write about Johnny Guitar. It’s not a great movie, mostly because of pacing problems and dull dialogue scenes, but it’s better than most. Barker shoots plenty of shirtless men in S&M-inspired gear and he’s full of neat visual ideas, but needed about twice the budget (not likely for a Scott Bakula-starring horror) to pull it off. I still enjoyed it significantly more than Capra’s Meet John Doe, which I half-watched with Katy, the poorly-encoded soundtrack burbling out endless long speeches. Detective Scott Bakula was yet to achieve his post-American Beauty comeback, Magician Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor) would play Dr. Mindbender in the G.I. Joe movie, the girl went on to play Jean Grey in the X-Men movies, and evil baddie Daniel von Bargen is best known for having a cheesy line in The Postman.

by ·Comments Off on Dread (2009, Anthony DiBlasi)

Stephen (dreamboat Jackson Rathbone from M. Night’s Last Airbender and the Twilight series) is a black haired film student who meets Quaid (edgy dude who studies fear). Stephen’s editor is a vegetarian girl, and I remember what happens to her from the short story. Abby is a girl with a dark goth birthmark all over her face and body – I liked her best.

image

The ol’ “kid upstairs watches his family get killed by a maniac below” bit. Didn’t I see the same scene in Giallo last week? Everyone in this movie has tattoos and listens to teen hard-rock. It’s like the vision of underground youth culture put forth by 8mm or Blair Witch 2. Whoops, there’s my favorite M83 song over a clubbing/sex/film editing montage so I guess I’m guilty too. They hang up their fear-study flyers (on red paper, of course) among gratuitous ads for the new Dresden Dolls album.

A stupid, awful, violent little movie. Makes sense that the vegetarian-trapped-in-room-with-rotting-meat scene from the short story would make it to the movie intact. There’s nothing horror movies enjoy more these days than a psychological (yet gruesome) torture chamber. This also shared a hint of the ending of Martyrs, the torturer gaining enlightenment by staring into the dying eyes of his victim, but that movie somehow seemed both far more violent and less gratuitous. Stephen ends up killing everyone, gets away, ho-hum.

The writer/director has his hands on most Barker-related movies of the recent past and near future, including Midnight Meat Train, Book of Blood, something called The Plague and the upcoming Hellraiser remake.