by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 33: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 3

Shocker (1989, Wes Craven)

Lawnmower Man-esque story of an electrocuted guy (Mitch “Skinner” Pileggi) who becomes electricity. Our hero (Michael “Tanner” Murphy) jumps inside the television to chase the guy through a montage of TV shows, like a crappy Sherlock Jr. Tanner harnesses the power of the TV Remote Control to gain the upper hand. Someone’s head goes through a TV set (two years after Dream Warriors) while I’m watching this wearing my Videodrome shirt.

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Deadly Friend (1986, Wes Craven)

First I had to rewind far enough to see Momma From The Train’s head get exploded by a basketball, presumably the main thing people remember from this movie. D.F. (OG-Buffy Kristy Swanson) dives out a second-story window to kill Tom (of biker flick Savage Dawn), then she attempts suicide-by-cop, melts into her true robot form and kills Paul (of Little House on the Prairie) offscreen. Murder-bots turning on their owners is a timely topic since I also rewatched M3GAN tonight – after that movie’s expertly uncanny droid, this one’s robot is just a girl wearing too much eyeshadow. It’s always remarkable how bad the ADR was in 1980s movies, like nobody knew what “sounding natural” felt like, or could replicate it using any existing recording equipment.

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976-Evil (1988, Robert Englund)

No recollection what this is about, maybe a blend between Pillow Talk and Unfriended? Mrs. Wilmouth is being devoured by her cats, then Big Hair Angela is molested by Mrs. W’s goblin child. The goblin is called Hoax – his cousin Spike (the only actor who’d return in the sequel) distracts the kid then tosses him into hell, which is in the backyard. I kinda like that every single line reading is awkward, makes the movie less generically bad and more specifically bad.

devil in a sweatervest:

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Fright Night (1985, Tom Holland)

Piecing together what’s happening based on having watched the remake five years back… the vamp Chris “Jack” Skellington is too dentally distorted to recognize, old Roddy McDowall is fighting him back but the nerdy boy Herman’s Head Charlie gets bitten after a really nice bat transformation, while in the basement his girl Amy has already turned vampish. Smashing the windows to let the sunlight in is also how they won in From Dusk Till Dawn, the green-burning vampire skeleton pretty sweet. Coda: everything’s back to normal, Roddy on TV, the kid making out with his girl, and vamps living next door awaiting the sequel. Hoax from 976-EVIL is in this, but either he’s dead by now or I can’t recognize him without the demon makeup. Holland is best known as codirector of The Timekeepers of Eternity.

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Prom Night (1980, Paul Lynch)

There are a lotta kids at this prom and I don’t care to figure out who they all are. Thugs beat up the prom king and steal his crown, then the movie gets its Carrie blood-bucket moment when the masked killer rolls the false king’s severed head out on stage. Hero vs. Villain fight ensues, awkward choreography but a nice disco song. The queen was Jamie Lee Curtis??

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The Kindred (1987, Obrow & Carpenter)

Hat Guy has arrived to collect his killer mutant baby or whatever, says the mutant beastie is John’s brother, but there’s no convincing John, who electrocutes the thing until it explodes and takes Hat Guy with it. Rubber baby beasties attack until Brad (The Hills Have Eyes 2) blows up the whole damn house. Fortunately his dead girlfriend Sharon (of Crawlspace) is somehow alive in the crawlspace. Very gloopy gloppy movie. Nobody seems to like it, but I remember it being good, oh yeah, I was eleven. The directors had made two others together, and separately Obrow did a Dean Koontz adaptation with multiple Twin Peaks actors and Carpenter did a Luke Wilson/Ken Marino ghost movie.

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Fiend Without a Face (1958, Arthur Crabtree)

“They’re becoming visible!” Stop-motion spine/brain creatures climbing trees, cool, apparently caused by “the atomic plant,” so Jeff is going to go blow it up. “Perhaps I can control them” says the professor moments before he’s killed by brains, which make funny sputtering ketchup bottle sfx when they’re shot. Post-explosion, the brains immediately melt – this is one of the goopiest 1950s movies, the Kindred of its time.

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Alucarda (1977, Juan López Moctezuma)

Bloody naked Justine savagely claws at a religious lady – they’ve come to a truce when the lady’s idiot doctor friend comes in splashing around beakers of holy water, J gets skeletonized and the lady bitten. As a result(?), young supervampire Alucarda speaks the magic words that cause all nuns to burst into flame. There is a lot of screaming! Al has a holy water protection field, and these bozos only had one idea, but fortunately Al is a girl, and these last two movies have demonstrated that girls’ reaction to horror is to scream and be useless to stop it, so Al goes mad from her own fiery destructive wrath and vanishes. Director made the also not-great Mansion of Madness, Al was recently in a netflix movie called Grumpy Christmas.

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Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento)

Uh oh, Jennifer Connelly is stuck in a maggoty flooded dead body dumpster, someone has been watching Poltergeist. The man chained up nearby breaks his own thumb to escape the cuffs (a common tactic lately) and attack Jen’s cackling tormentor, but Jen escapes on her own. It’s not an Italian movie until we encounter a horribly dubbed child, and this one’s got a scary face and a halberd. Jen’s terrified screams summon a swarm of flies that eat the kid’s mutant face off. She tries to escape by boat but is so technically unhandy, the boat explodes leaving her trapped in a ring of fire, then she’s saved by a razor-wielding monkey. Every line and edit and action seems a little odd – I think this is what makes Argento’s movies stand out, and I didn’t understand his vibe when I first watched this on VHS.

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Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson)

I remember this and The Machinist being a big deal, a hot new Anderson on the scene, but haven’t thought about either one in a long while and never watched his follow-ups. Gordon is lobotomizing guys through their eye sockets while dreaming that an imaginary labcoat guy is responsible. We’re doing the post-Fight Club pre-Shudder Island thing of revisiting all the past kills with the knowledge that our delusional protag was the killer all along. Seems like a just-alright indie movie in retrospect.

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Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988, David DeCoteau)

Think this was more USA Up All Night than Channel 11 Shocktober. Our intrepid heroes (a hotgirl and nerdy Calvin) are searching a foggy warehouse for she-demons, manage to clumsily set Evil Babs With Unidentified Accent on fire after she kills Nude Victim Lisa offscreen. Some more stuff happens, it’s not worth recounting. The lighting and acting are very bad – there’s boobs, but USA wouldn’t have shown them, so why did anyone watch this? We get a demon puppet, at least. Nude Victim was later in Puppet Master 3, Babs is from Slumber Party Massacre, and our heroes were both in Nightmare on Elm Street 4 the same year.

by ·Comments Off on Bring Her Back (2025, Danny & Michael Philippou)

People seem unhappy with this movie because it’s full of cliches, is All About Trauma, and it torments and abuses and murders children. But I had a pretty good time watching Sally Hawkins learn about demonic resurrection rituals on bootleg VHS then bumble around until her plan gets so out of control that she kills herself. Also fun because both Foster Mom Sally and her cat-strangler son are dangerous, and we don’t learn until late that she has got him possessed by demons and wants to do the same with her new blind ward Piper, painting P’s older brother Andy as a problem child to get him sent away. And her cat is named Junkman, pretty good name.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 32: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 2

Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985, Philippe Mora)

Last watched The Howling in 2007, and last watched Howling II on channel 3 at a Motel 6. Howling sequels are famously the worst sequels, but who can remember which is which? Christopher Lee speaks an incantation, but only in voiceover. Despite your sister’s best efforts to control him, Vlad makes a big show of wolfing out and rushing the captives, then some guy with a shotgun easily kills both Vlad and your sister. A woman wearing insane clothes (Stirba!) throws a prop demon at a priest, who turns into a Svankmajer head, then Lee punches her in the stomach and they both spontaneously combust. Now that the… demon cultist werewolf vampires?… are dead, our romantic heroes enjoy a Cars concert. “Punk group: Babel,” man, this is not punk, it’s new wave. Vlad was in two Dollman movies and Lynch’s Dune, seems like a cool guy, and the girl who gets naked was predictably cast 30 years later by Rob Zombie.

Enter Stirba:

Stirba and her demon friend:

Stirba auditioning to be in Rawhead Rex:

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Howling III: The Marsupials (1987, Philippe Mora)

Gentle scenes of Australians enjoying life surrounded by colorful birds, did I get the wrong movie? Lead guy (Bad Boy Bubby’s dad) is surprised by an old friend who says it’s safe to come out of hiding, so BBB’s dad moves to California to teach at a school where all the students wear the same shirt. The worst actor they could find drops in to reveal the secret identities of the professor’s long-lost marsupial friends. That night one of them wins an oscar and transforms into a possum-person on live TV. At least part two had demons killing priests and Christopher Lee and Stirba, I dunno what this is supposed to offer.

The Substance was just a Howling sequel:

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Night of the Demons II (1994, Brian Trenchard-Smith)

I was last disappointed by the original in 2006, pretty sure I’ve seen both these sequels before on VHS. A girl being sexually harassed by a demon gets rescued by… a nun with nunchucks, get it? This is the movie with the holy water balloons and super soaker, I assumed that was Fright Night. They defeat demonmaster Angela with the power of their faith (ugh) then she returns as Golobulus and they simply defeat her again. Cast members also appeared in: Nemesis, Tremors, Dr. Giggles, 976-EVIL 2, Leprechaun in Space, and Slumber Party Massacre 4. At least Angela is the same Angela in all three of these dumb movies, and the director works on Trailers From Hell so I can’t stay mad at him.

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Night of the Demons III (1997, Jim Kaufman)

Angela’s teeth have got crazier, and she’s making the same deal with the survivors to trade one for many, with the same CG snakes backing her up. Hitting her with a car doesn’t help, she just transforms into a sphere of pure love and light, but fails to escape the same way when the kids drag her into a sunbeam. Not one of the Kaufmans you’ve heard of, Jim made an emmy-nominated talking cat movie.

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Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977, John Boorman)

A whole bunch of Linda Blairs, and the priest is hot for a couple of them, while in a different location someone sets themself on fire. The Great Locust arrives and the house starts tearing apart as the priest (Richard “Dr. Faustus” Burton) gets his bearings and rips out Bad Linda’s heart with his bare hands, breaking the curse or whatever. “The world won’t understand… not yet,” says Louise Fletcher (Invaders From Mars) and we still don’t. I remember this movie being very bad – apparently there’s a new feature-length doc arguing that yes it’s bad, but at least it’s also interesting. I ain’t sitting through all that, but I did read the Reveal interview.

Mouseover to transform Linda Blair:
image

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Exorcist III (1990, William Peter Blatty)

Serial killer Brad Dourif and detective George C. Scott are playing Silence of the Lambs mind games in the psych ward – this is a restored version with VHS-quality deleted scenes reincorporated. Dourif has sent a demon-possessed catatonic nurse (she’s also a murderer in Creepshow) to murder Scott’s family. He gets home in time for the nurse to attack him instead, then she just stops, so Scott returns to the hospital to shoot Dourif with a gun, apparently an effective method of dealing with demonic possession. Did we know that before his Exorcist movies Blatty wrote the Tashlin romp The Man from the Diners’ Club?

Comin’ at ya:

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The Guardian (1990, William Friedkin)

While Exorcist III was in production, what was original Exorcist director Friedkin working on: an even worse movie about an evil tree cult. With help from the confounding editing, hero mom hits evil nanny Jenny Seagrove (also narrator of the New Order rock doc) with her car. The cops then tell the upset parents (nobodies, though dad was in House 1 and 2) that none of this happened. Sorry I missed Miguel Ferrer, not sorry Sam Raimi dropped out of this to make Darkman, and anyway the bloody man-with-chainsaw-versus-sentient-tree climax would be nothing new for Sam. It was all worth it for this review .

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Friday the 13th (1980, Sean S. Cunningham)

Looks like the last surviving camp counselor is fixin’ to get slain by Jason’s Mom. Nobody knows how to close doors quietly in movies. J’s M here’s-johnny’s her way into the hidey closet and gets a frying pan to the skull for her troubles. The showdown continues outside, where J’s M is cleanly beheaded by a machete. I don’t know much about horror movies so I’ll assume that’s the end of it! Oh, the (un)dead kid attacking her in a canoe afterwards was just a dream… or was it?? The mom had been in John Ford and Anthony Mann movies, and this was the director’s follow-up to a couple of kids-playing-sports movies.

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Friday The 13th Part 2 (1981, Steve Miner)

If the clumsy guy in the one-eyed cloth-bag mask is Jason, he sure grew up fast. I appreciate both movies using loon sounds whenever the action moves outdoors. Again the sole surviving girl fights back with superior weapons (a chainsaw), then tries a new tactic, putting on his dead mom’s sweater and threatening him maternally. Her friend Paul does not help her kill Jason with a machete, but he does gallantly carry her over a puddle afterwards. Ending is fun, macheted zombie Jason smashing through the window and grabbing her, then inexplicable half-minute coda where she’s fine but Paul is missing. These movies were not built to last, or to be viewed by adults – when Howling II looks better than your movie, you have fucked up. Miner went on to make House and Warlock and… Soul Man.

Comin’ at ya:

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Friday The 13th Part 3 (1982, Steve Miner)

Jason’s got his iconic hockey mask and is smashing up a barn trying to find the final girl who got away. She hit him with a shovel then lynched him, of course that didn’t work. A guy arrives and gets dismembered in under a second, then the girl finds an axe and gives the iconic hockey mask its iconic axe-hole. She wakes up in a boat the next morning to the sound of loon calls and gets pulled into the water by a zombie the cops didn’t see, precisely like the first movie.

Comin’ at ya:

by ·Comments Off on Litoral (2008, Raoul Ruiz)

Lost Ruiz miniseries, made between Klimt and Mysteries of Lisbon. Cortinez has been onboard the ship Lucerna all week without seeing any other crew members, they assemble and tell him their own (or each others’) ghost stories. “We’re here either to tell stories or to jump into the water.”

The captain grows horns whenever his wife has affairs, a sailor is set up with a woman who lives 70 years in his past. A demon sets a guy up in the business of selling dead men’s clothes. They might all be dead, or imaginary, or miniaturized on the toy boat of a rich man. “What you see in here, don’t remember it even in dreams.”

by ·Comments Off on Demon Pond (1979, Masahiro Shinoda)

Thirsty traveler (star of Tampopo) enters dusty village, finds a stream and nearby house, meets Yuri (a female impersonator, also of Yumeji) and coincidentally his long-missing friend Akira (of Samurai Rebellion), who has become Yuri’s reclusive boyfriend and the town bell-ringer who keeps away evil spirits. The traveler would like to see the local Demon Pond before returning to work in the morning and his friend offers to guide him. Seems like a restrained, traditional Japanese folk story so far, but I was underestimating it.

As soon as the girl is alone, a carp poacher spies on her until he’s bitten by a crab, then the movie turns suddenly goofy, the carp and crab transforming into costumed characters off to see the undersea princess (same actre(ss) as Yuri), the eerie score mutated into crazy electro music. The princess wants to see her lover at another lake but is trapped here as long as the bell is faithfully rung. Back in town the poacher gets an angry mob after Yuri, insisting the bell not be rung, realizing their mistake too late as the lake destroys the town. I enjoyed this more than Shinoda’s Silence. Carp also starred in Pitfall, and Crab was in The Eel (heh).

by ·Comments Off on Noroi: The Curse (2005, Kôji Shiraishi)

Found-footage horrors are rarely good – I’m thinking of Willow Creek and The Poughkeepsie Tapes and V/H/S and its sequels (which also suffer from being anthology horrors, which are also rarely good). If nothing else, the found-footage conceit is an excuse for shitty handheld camerawork, and we’ve got that here, and also clips from fake TV programs with insufferable narrators and graphics. Movie is also not nice to birds. Still, pretty good, I’d check out the director’s torture video Grotesque.

Ghost investigator on the trail of a kidnapped girl pieces together a documentary stitching various hauntings he filmed that turn out to be related. Doc guy Kobayashi pulls in haunted actress Marika and foil-hat “super psychic” Hori, and they have a blairwitchy experience at the dammed/damned lake where a village once existed. Apparently the village had a ritual to keep demons at bay, no longer being performed as everyone moved away, now wherever the demon-possessed abortionist from the drowned village goes, her neighbors are driven murderously mad from the sounds of her ghost babies. Our team tracks her down, the doc guy rescues her hostages, but fails to banish the evil, uh oh. Not to be confused with magic pirate revenge movie Noroît. The actors here also appeared in various Rings and Grudges, and two were in Kurosawa’s Retribution.

by ·Comments Off on Demon Knight (1995, Ernest R. Dickerson)

This has a cute intro sequence with John Larroquette and the Cryptkeeper to justify its Tales from the Crypt title, but really it’s a standalone feature with an excellent script and cast. I would’ve loved to see this follow the original Halloween model, an anthology movie series where every year a new cast of characters in a single location gets killed by demons to a pop metal soundtrack (I waited in vain for Sepultura’s “Policia”). That was probably the intention, but then Bordello of Blood starred Dennis Miller and nobody wanted to see that, and the dream died.

Pounder, Church:

Our location is a New Mexico hotel where Jada Pinkett works for CCH Pounder… angry fired postman Charles “Roger Rabbit” Fleischer and old-timer Dick Miller and prostitute Brenda Bakke are hanging out when the sheriff and Deputy Gary Farmer arrive to investigate a car crash. The drivers were Jesus Blood Defender William Sadler and Demon Lord Billy Zane, and soon the sheriff is dead, Pounder’s arm gets ripped off, and hunky latecomer Thomas Haden Church is challenging Sadler for command of the survivors.

Jada, Dick, Postman:

The Church-led brigade fails to escape through the ol’ abandoned mineshaft, but they do find a kid, who will later be possessed by a Tales from the Crypt comic book (unlike Dick Miller, possessed through a bare-tittied liquor fantasy). As more people get taken by demons, Sadler reveals his supernatural burden, passed on from a WWI buddy named Dickerson (haha), now handed off to Jada. Billy Zane (great in this) is hot on her trail at the end, eager to claim the blood key and start the demon apocalypse. Shot by Rick Bota (the three worst Hellraisers), Dickerson’s followup to a Most Dangerous Game movie with Ice T.

by ·Comments Off on Don’t Play Us Cheap (1972, Melvin Van Peebles)

A filmed version of his own play, which was a stage adaptation of his own novel, which he wrote in French then translated to English – he filmed first, opened the play with the same cast, then released the movie. Sounds exhausting. Instead of the final film in the Van Peebles box set, Criterion could just as easily have released this as a double-feature with To Sleep With Anger, each of them about a happy Black household infiltrated by forces of evil.

A couple of passing imps decide to stop in Harlem to ruin a party thrown by Esther Rolle of Good Times. Instead of going in together, Trinity arrives first and completely fails to wreak havoc then falls for the birthday girl. When he’s belatedly joined by Devil David (Avon Long, who discovered Lena Horne in the 1930s), they only succeed in chasing off the Johnsons, a late-arriving condescending couple and their giant son, whom everyone else is glad to see go.

It’s a musical, and I wish any of the songs was great – too gospelly for me – but there’s a cool bit at the end when everyone’s singing what’s on their mind at once, the whole party semi-harmonizing and semi-chaotic.

Lisa Thompson:

Van Peebles frequently overlaps two different images to make a contrast that is then commented upon in a third shot, such as on the dangers of evil or the inability to stay true to oneself. Van Peebles occasionally uses the same overlapping technique with sound, playing with dissonance and harmony as multiple characters sing their own signature parts, or a single character sings while the others join in a communal chorus.

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Three Pickup Men for Herrick (1957)

Herrick needs three pickup men, but five showed up. The white boss picks the one white guy, then the tough looking guy, then the young guy, and the rejects walk back home. No dialogue, Light humming and harmonica on the soundtrack.

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Sunlight (1957)

I think the pretty girl married someone else because the guy she danced with at the restaurant said you can’t get married without money… but I don’t think restaurant guy was the hat guy who robs some lady and is chased by the cops and ends up at the wedding… maybe the older guy at the wedding is a different hat guy? Try paying attention next time?

by ·Comments Off on When Evil Lurks (2023, Demián Rugna)

An ancient evil is going to be born into the world unless two dummy brothers can stop it (spoiler: they cannot). The movie is torn between needing to explain itself so we know the stakes, and wanting to withhold information for suspense. So we’re told there are seven rules to follow (that’s more than twice the number of rules for Gremlins so you know it’s serious) but one rule remains secret until the end. And since there are set rules for demon possession, and specialists with suitcases of equipment, and the local cops and government have procedures in place, we know this has all happened before, elsewhere, so if this particular demon gets loose it’s probably not the end of the world, just maybe of this town. But despite all this knowledge and procedure, the dummies keep losing ground, because (per Matt Lynch) “everyone in this forgets what’s happening to them every three to five minutes.”

Still it’s a good gruesome, apocalyptic time at the movies, and the actors are game for its grievous head injury theater.

Two attempts to shoot evil with a gun:

This is Argentina so of course somebody was in La Flor – that’s lead brother Ezequiel Rodríguez, a go-to demonic horror guy lately between Legions and The Witch Game. Brother Demián Salomón is right there with him, starring in Satanic Hispanics, Welcome to Hell, and Into the Abyss. Somebody needs to look into the current wave of Argentine horror. These guys discover the neighbor’s tenant’s kid has become demon-bloated so they drive it some hours away so it can become someone else’s problem. Too late: it gets to the neighbor, and to Ezequiel’s wife (who kills one of her kids) and dog (who kills another). The brothers drive off with the remaining (possessed, autistic) kid and their mom, pick up a demon hunter, and head to the Village of the Damned where they’d dumped the body. The spooky kids there defeat the exorcism plot pretty easily, barely even moving around much, a new evil is born, and the autistic kid eats his grandma.