Werewolf Shadow (1971) (Spain/West Germany)

aka The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman/Shadow of the Werewolf/Walpurgis Night/Blood Moon /Satan vs The Wolf Man 

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2 

On the grounds of the estate being rented by Waldemar Daninsky (uh oh) the gravesite of the Satan-worshipping vampire/witch Countess Wandesa (uh oh) can be found. Two sexy college girls (oh no) are searching for said final resting place and, thanks to being lost and low on gas, manage to stumble upon Daninsky’s homestead. He invites them to spend the week (after all, the nearest town is twenty miles away and his handyman will be by on Sunday and can take them into town) and the girls accept. Elvira is a bit wary but Genevieve is all about going with the flow. The girls are ecstatic to discover that their thesis subject is in fact buried on the grounds and upon digging up the Countess, Genevieve not only removes the silver cross lodged in the skeletons chest but manages to bleed on the skull (UH OH!) Before you can say “God damnit Genevieve!” Countess Wandesa is back and doing what them vampires do. Unfortunately she’s not the only issue plaguing the Daninsky residence. There’s an old curse which causes poor Waldemar to transform into a werewolf during the full moon. His slightly insane sister has been managing to chain him up during the transformation but thanks to her recent murder at the teeth of the newly vampirized Genevieve, Waldemar is running around doing what them bloodthirsty hairy beasts do. Of course he and Elvira fall hard for each other which is quite convenient considering he can only be killed by the hands of his true love, thus ending his cursed existence. But before he can be put down for good, he’ll have to take care of that pesky vampire woman who wants Elvira as her slave to keep Daninsky in check. Paul Naschy is at his tortured best and there are plenty of boobs and blood to keep ya occupied. There’s an excellent atmosphere and the Barbara Steele-esque Patty Shepard is a wonderful visual presence as the evil Countess. An unnecessary subplot with Elvira’s police detective boyfriend coming to the rescue doesn’t distract that much but feels a bit tacked on. Nonetheless, this one is justifiably revered and a classic of monster cinema.

Blood Song (1982) (USA)

aka Dream Slayer/Premonitions

⭐️⭐️

Frankie Avalon plays psychopathic killer Paul Foley. Paul escapes from the institution housing him and starts dropping bodies on his path across America leading him to an inevitable confrontation with a young girl who received a blood transfusion from him years back. For some reason this has caused a psychic link with the young lady who is now witnessing his crimes in her mind’s eye. Avalon plays a mournful tune on his flute, something he’s been doing since as a kid he witnessed his papa take a gun to his mama, her lover and then himself. Tough break. High schooler Marion not only has these visions fucking with her head and causing the camera to zoom in on her eyes, she also has to deal with her hardass/abusive papa Richard Jaeckel being a real dick and hating on her seaman boyfriend Joey. I’m guessing it’s misplaced rage at himself because his drunk-ass is the reason his little girl has a leg brace and why a blood transfusion was necessary. Sure hope he’s not supposed to be the hero of this. Anyway, Paul rambles on, murdering anyone that dislikes his skills as a flutist. Eventually Marion stumbles across Paul burying a corpse in the woods and now she’s on his radar. Bad news for her friends or at least it would be if the movie had any interest in entertaining its audience. If non-threatening flute music and extreme close-ups of a girl’s eyeball are your thing, well that’s kind of unsettling but you should probably watch this. “Mild” is probably the best word I could use for this one. The lead is cute but none of the victims-to-be (our hero included) are all that memorable. Luca Brasi is there as a ship captain and that was nice to see. There’s also some hatchet violence to keep things a little interesting as it shambles to the close.

As Above, So Below (2014) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

A young woman carries on her father’s work searching for the Philosopher’s Stone, slipping into the same obsession that eventually drove him to madness and suicide. After a close call in Iran, she gets some info that could get her further than her father ever managed. This leads her to Paris which eventually leads her and a small group of people into the catacombs deep under the City of Light. Caught on camera thanks to her being the focus of a documentary, we get a POV look at the fate which befalls the poor young folks as their journey takes them into Hell itself. Claustrophobic and creepy, the film smartly does some shooting in the actual catacombs to build the atmosphere. There’s some shocking violence to add a nice jolt to the proceedings and it plays out intriguingly enough to raise it above the usual found footage humdrum.

Reap of Evil (1994) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A one-sided conversation about taxes leads to snakes burrowing in the face… but it’s all a dream! A group of friends play gin rummy and the mortician of the group discusses some particularly nasty cases and then they discuss the nightmares they’ve been having. They sound horrifying but since they’re being explained and not shown by a group of guys who are better-suited to ring you up for your 1 AM beer run, the impact lands somewhere short of effective. Mark (who looks like me if I were your dad in the 80s) has recently lost his wife and the grief is leading to suicidal thoughts. His friends are worried about him… hit those words of reassurance and discussion between significant others. Mortician dude has a wife and child and he’s concerned about Mark. Mark’s sister pays him a visit and mentions a priest that’s been stopping by her work at the hospital (?), possibly an asylum. More low-fi nightmares hit. Footage of ducks in a pond pops on the screen and in the corner an intertitle reads “3rd day”. Thank god they let me know! We rejoin our priest in a meeting with a couple other men of the cloth (one of them in an old man mask) and he’s concerned there’s a coverup going on. Two holy men are dead and one has been institutionalized. The Six Flags priest (MORE ABSTINENCE! MORE FUN!) dismisses him and then cryptically mentions an inevitable horrificness on the horizon. The next scene has a demon rip off a priest’s head. It’s all quick cuts, muddy darkness and indecipherable red lights… it’s pretty awesome. Off to the morgue and a graphic autopsy on a less than convincing body. The woman wakes up while her chest has been opened up… it’s another nightmare! The fourth day hits and a building explodes in New York City. We’re treated to real unedited footage of a disaster. The priest has visions of a demonic face in the middle of an electronics store and almost faints. More talk! Someone’s husband is dead and the mortician guy knows the wife. A coin flip decides who has to call her. The woman goes to the morgue (which more than resembles a kitchen at a fast food joint) to see her husband, mortician dude walks in, tries to talk to her and eats a shovel for his troubles. A blonde pays a visit to the priest and seduces him but he’s able to resist. We’re only a little more than a half-hour into this and things are just getting muddier. There’s another demon attack and (I think) a baby in a trash bag, this is immediately followed by a skeleton coming to life and molesting a sleeping woman. Said woman nonchalantly pushes the corpse off and goes to calm her nerves in the bathroom. While sitting on the toilet, she explodes. I’m exhausted. The world slips into impossible-to-navigate darkness and all hell breaks loose. This means maggots, face-ripping, dismemberment, a whole lot of exposition from a demon reading from cue cards which sort of explains things and a climax which brings to mind a lethargic Olaf Ittenbach set piece. It’s like an analog stream of consciousness acid trip that’s edging out your heroin overdose and populated with people you lost contact with after high school. Stop-motion monsters, nasty basement violence, and audio recorded in a paint can left in the depths of Hell are all wrapped up in a needlessly complicated but charmingly enthusiastic package. I loved it but I’m not sure if I’ll ever watch it again.

Flight to Hell (2003) (Italy)

⭐️⭐️⭐️

I don’t want to believe that this was a labor of love from Alvaro Passeri but I’m at a loss to see where he thought there was any profit to be made in this film. It was three years before Snakes on a Plane would be a surprise box office hit and outside of the obvious Alien franchise love, some nods to The Thing and creatures that come off as a somehow less believable version of those flesh-eating “turd-ants” from the Canadian zero-budget masterpiece Things, I’m just scratching my head at how this was anything but a project born of love. But this is not love as we know it. This is a love corrupted to the point of rot. This kind of love does not inspire poetry or song, it inspires a trip to the clinic to get some bloodwork done. Captain Don wakes from a horrible nightmare and realizes he is running late for his flight. He rushes through his routine and heads to work. He captains the Roulette One. It’s a private flying casino owned by a dude named Mike who has everything rigged to swindle rich high stakes gamblers who prefer to lose their cash in the sky unlike all us other poor schmucks who go broke on solid ground. The rest of the crew consists of two technicians (who work as game riggers/handymen), an irresponsible co-pilot, and two stewardesses and all of them are in on Mike’s scheme. The clientele for this trip is two rich dudes and their trophy girls. Every one of them is going to come to regret getting on this flight. While the usual hijinks of the horny crew play out, something odd is happening in outer space. There’s been some kind of hatching and the plane is on course to fly through a strange neon green fog filled with spores. The spores make their way into the plane and in almost no time there is a green goo over all the important things that keep the Roulette One operational. Mechanical malfunctions begin to cause problems but the worst has yet to show its ugly face. Seems the green slime is full of eggs and these eggs are ready to hatch. The shit really hits the fan when the plane becomes infested with computer generated little lizard-bug things that can morph through solid objects, turn invisible and infect humans. One technician is unfortunate enough to get one up his nose and eventually bursting out of his eye! The leaping little bastards aren’t the only threat either, there’s also a big puppet thing residing in the cargo bay and munching on anyone unfortunate enough to cross its path. Yeah, there’s quite a bit going down in this stinky piece of Italian cheese but if you have no sense of humor ya best just look away. I’d say almost eighty percent of the set is green screen and it never comes close to looking believable. We get “lucky” with some digitally rendered special effects but most of the stuff is brought to life with piss-poor cgi. The acting is awful all across the board (it was performed in English [maybe with some hope of international sales] so all the dialogue sounds a bit off) and none of the gore really hits thanks to crappy SFX. If you’re in the right state of mind you may just have a blast with it but there’s very little to recommend if you’re hunting down some serious horror shenanigans. It’s complete crap but the disturbing idea that it was a passion project makes it easier to swallow.

Party Night (2017) (USA)

⭐️1/2

Three couples ditch the official after-prom party and have their own celebration at the secluded lake house of one of their uncles. In between all the angsty teen dramatics, a large bohunk in a blank mask with a big-ass machete starts picking ‘em off. It’s your standard stalk and slash with the added bonus of completely unlikable protagonists. The kids stick around waiting for their friends to turn up, plenty of red stuff spills and the mystery behind a string a disappearances in the area is solved. A dull 70 minutes.

fuji_jukai.mov (2016) (Japan)

⭐️⭐️⭐️

A team doing a report on the disturbing amount of suicides that take place within a beautiful forest under the shadow of Mt. Fuji come across a discarded cellphone. The footage from said phone is edited together with eyewitness accounts to present a full length feature. Teenage Ami journeys out to the Aokigahara Forest, planning to take her own life. A truly gorgeous location to put an end to the unfathomable sadness that some people cannot escape from. Two other teenage girls, Mi-tan and Hinata, join her after she invites anyone who is curious to come and see her take her own life. The whole plan being for them to upload her final footage for her. Mi-tan seems a bit excited (and slightly insane) and Hinata has a real quiet sociopath vibe to her but I think Ami is just content she won’t be alone in her final moments. The three girls trek through the woods, getting to know each other and building a dynamic that just feels off. Well, obviously because all of them are there for pretty awful reasons on the awful reasons spectrum. The deeper they travel into the vast ocean of trees, the more things begin to feel off, besides the natural offness you would expect to find in a place so beautiful yet soaked in that much sadness. Eventually, the inevitability sinks in and something it begins to feel like there’s a purposefully obscure layer running just out of grip behind this trek in the woods. The discovery of a corpse destroys some confidence and curiosity takes a backseat to fear. It also causes the girls to flee from their path, which sucks when there’s so much woods to get lost in. Night falls, a village deep in the forest is stumbled across and the truth comes out. The main crux of the footage is shot on iPhone and it works pretty well, interviews with locals and people familiar with the location add a nice bit of backstory to things that our main characters couldn’t have offered up without feeling completely out of place. It builds a solid atmosphere to the slow-burning dread and hits a few disturbing notes… that livestream moment is a fucking cringe-inducing heart punch. The film offers up a lot more than expected at 84 minutes but it also drags as it lulls in some spots. Thankfully the setting is a major advantage and makes it a bit easier to look past a plot that can’t really fill the runtime and is plenty familiar. It also doesn’t fumble the ending which is a worry that comes along with all found footage and mockumentaries.