by ·Comments Off on V/H/S/99 (2022)

Framing story starts out as some kid’s stop-motion army-guy video, nice.

1. Phony from top to bottom, a punk band goes to the basement venue where another punk band died in a fire three years ago on this very night, and gets murdered by ghouls. Director Maggie Levin “is a filmmaker with rock n’ roll roots” per her bio, argh.

2. Better: sorority pledge (girl from Synchronic) is buried alive as a hazing thing, cops chase off the aboveground girls as a rainstorm is coming through. Synchronic Girl meets a sinister ghost while buried alive while drowning while covered in spiders, oof, and all the other girls get supernaturally leaky-coffin’d next. Director Johannes Roberts made two killer shark movies and a failed Resident Evil reboot.

3. Some underlit Nickelodeon game-show called Ozzy’s Dungeon is Double Dare meets torture porn. Donna competes in a doomed wish-fulfillment game that nobody has ever won, then her surviving family turns the tables on the host, taking him into the victory cave(?) beneath the set to meet the fat-suit wishmaster, but apparently the girl’s wish was to explode the heads of her family members, like a cut-rate version of The Viewing. Directed by Flying Lotus themself.

4. Older brother Dillon of the stop-motion kid is a horny teen who films himself skating and doing pranks. Their friend Boner is an apocalypse prepper – this turns out to be unimportant, as focus turns to the hot medusa across the street who turns the boys into statues for attempting to install spyware on her new imac. Only good joke in the movie is the package delivery service being called DUI. Tyler MacIntyre also made the pd187-approved Tragedy Girls, and looking up the lead actress is how I found out someone remade Castle Freak.

5. Coven is doing a summoning ceremony, but demon Fircus interferes and drags the cameraman Troy and Nate to hell, where they meet Mabel the Skull Biter, the movie’s only good character, and scramble to return to the surface when the coven’s portal opens at midnight. Also the movie’s best segment, the only one that doesn’t look like shit on purpose, so I assume it made the top ten of Vulture’s ambitious V/H/S segment ranking… nope, Dowd got it all wrong. The Winters also made a haunted house livestream influencer movie starring Mabel.

by ·Comments Off on Oddity (2024, Damian McCarthy)

My second movie this week where someone runs a cursed antique shop – in this case it’s the blind sister of “Brian May” Ted’s murdered wife (Carolyn Bracken, playing both sisters, was my mother in You Are Not My Mother). On the anniversary of her sister’s death, Blind Darcy comes over bearing cursed antiques for the husband and his new hotgirl (“Do I look stupid?” “I have no idea what you look like. You sound stupid.”) Backstory ensues, the argument of whether Asylum Olin with weird eyes (who also had weird eyes in The Northman) or Asylum Ivan (The Hole in the Ground) actually did the murder is academic, since the husband definitely ordered it. The hotgirl and blind sister both die, the husband can’t help himself from ringing the little bell he was gifted, leading to the best final shot of the season.

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 Hardware (1990, Richard Stanley)

This is clever in its visual transitions and I like the early bits of the soundtrack composed of chill slide guitar (and Iggy Pop as a wacky DJ), but ultimately feels like a cool robot design with a movie loosely hung around it.

Dylan McDermott (also of future-robot movie Automata) and his sidekick Shades (of Jarman’s Edward II) bring the scavenged head of a self-healing military attack robot to Dylan’s off-again girlfriend Jill (Phantasm II). She puts on some Ministry before integrating the head into one of her artworks (Spielberg would use the same band to convey dystopian junkyard aesthetics a decade later).

Three guesses which one is Shades:

Unfortunately the robot was built as part of a government program to kill all the humans, and it reactivates to complete its mission. First it lets the girl’s creeper neighbor (Wm Hootkins of Death Machine) make a slow fool of himself before it megakills him. Jill lowers her body heat to undetectable levels by jumping into an open-door fridge for five seconds, then they throw the robot in the shower and it does the whole “I’m melting” bit.

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 The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra (2022, Park Sye-young)

While a young couple is having their trite relationship drama, flesh-eating fungal tentacles are literally hellraisering inside their mattress. This movie has stop-motion tendencies, and a lot of fabric-level textural views with insectoid rumbling audio. Death Bed meets She Dies Tomorrow: many other movies have aimed for this synthwave cronen-core vibe and missed.

by ·Comments Off on Final Destination 6: Bloodlines (2025, Lipovsky & Stein)

Good twists on the formula, becoming both prequel and sequel while still leaving the series open to infinite new premonitions. Kaitlyn has been having someone else’s deathdream, that of her hot young gramma Brec “Iris” Stargirl. She tracks down Iris, who saved so many people that death took forty years to rube-goldberg each of the restaurant survivors and is now coming for their families who never should’ve been born, Back to the Future style.

But Death is catching up fast: Uncle Howie gets lawnmowered at the picnic, which is as full of death-bait as a gymnast’s balance beam. Tattoo Parlor Erik survives a fan-chain attack and shop fire, then a garbage truck compacts his sister, then he’s killed by an MRI machine while absurdly trying to flatline Peanut Allergy Bobby in order to escape Death. That’s right, they’ve learned the Death Rules from Tony Todd (who finally gets his own lore besides just being the Harbinger Coroner), though it never seems to help. The three survivors retreat to grandma’s fortress, but it explodes and everyone dies. The most suspenseful bit was when someone almost says the words “clear river.”

The directors are following-up their live-action Kim Possible movie, and one of them made a 2010s Leprechaun sequel, jeez. Sequels that are named Bloodline(s): Final Destination 6, Hellraiser 4, Wrong Turn 5, Tremors 5, a Rosario Dawson Wonder Woman, and Pet Sematary 4 (which features “Bad Moon Rising” just like this movie does).

by ·Comments Off on Heretic (2024, Scott Beck & Bryan Woods)

“That South Park musical kinda makes fun of us.” Hugh Grant invites in a couple of mormon girls who don’t quite talk like real people, but maybe that’s the point. He quickly proves to be weirder than they are, with his dogeared bibles of all religions and specific theological questions they can’t answer, his never-seen but oft-mentioned wife, the metal in his walls preventing cell signals. Hugh puts on a Hollies LP and calls the Book of Mormon a “zany regional spinoff edition” of the Bible over “The Air That I Breathe,” then drops the gentle facade and locks them in his Barbarian basement with an apparently dead woman. Resurrection, afterlife, and simulation theory are proposed, the girls realize they need to outwit Grant at his own theological game and call out some inconsistency in his story, leading to a final showdown which kills Sophie Thatcher (of the new Companion), leaving only the quieter Chloe East (Wolf of Snow Hollow) alive to escape, no thanks to Elder Topher Grace who’d been searching for them. Decent movie, we should cast Hugh Grant as a verbose psychotic in more movies.

by ·Comments Off on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)

Two siblings and three of their buddies take a lil roadtrip to see if their slaughterhouse grandpa got dug up in the reported wave of grave robbings. This is something I’d completely forgotten: they’re not lost tourists, the Leatherface family is their own family’s next door neighbors. Of course they’re still new-age hippies who’ve lost touch with their roots, but they’re not such sheltered city folks that they won’t stop and pick up a freaked-out and bloody hitchhiker.

Leatherface sits down and takes a breather:

Kirk (sledgehammered) later did set decoration for The Craigslist Killer, Pam (slaughter-hooked) became a catalog foot model, and Jerry (also sledged) left the movie business. Wheelchair-bound Franklin, who sits nice and still while being surprise-chainsawed, was in the next year’s Race With the Devil. With a half-hour left, his sister Sally is the last one alive, getting subdued by a gas station guy with a broom and brought home for dinner before her famous escape. Sally was in Tobe’s Eaten Alive, the hitchhiker became a voice actor for Power Rangers, only the gas station guy returned for the sequel, but all of them – especially Leatherface Gunnar – were haunted for decades by the fangoria fanbase.