The Mummy (1932) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Karl Freund’s Universal horror classic is a haunting tale about love beyond death. The discovery of an un-embalmed mummy on an archeological dig in Egypt spells doom for a small group of scholars in Cairo. After reading from the Scroll of Thoth, an eager young archaeologist awakens the dusty corpse and quickly goes insane. Ten years pass and a mysterious Egyptian (Boris Karloff) sets his plans in motion with his endgame being the resurrection of his lost love and he will kill anyone who gets in his way. Jack Pierce’s barely viewed mummy makeup is superb (and shaped many a young monster kid’s ideas of what a mummy looks like), Boris Karloff gives another wonderfully sinister performance and Hungarian-born Zita Johann is an exotically beautiful talent who was sadly underutilized during her Hollywood career. It’s a classic for a reason and it may bore those who have no patience for the creaky early thirties horror flicks but ya can’t please everyone.

The Sickhouse (2008) (UK)

aka The Host/The Prey 

⭐️1/2

After some plague bacteria is found in the soil samples from a dig site located below an abandoned hospital, archeologist Gina Philips is told the project is being shut down. The place used to be an old orphanage that housed some strange cult headed by a plague doctor. She decides to break in and explore a recently-discovered sealed chamber and releases something long dormant. A group of young criminals also get locked in the hospital when they flee the scene of a car accident. Creepy ghost kids, the plague-masked evil spirit and the plague itself begin causing fatal problems for everyone inside. The film takes the great idea of outfitting its villain in a plague doctor getup and completely fails at making it resonate thanks to annoying quick cuts and god-awful editing. There’s a gruesome bathtub scene with a messy “birth” and a dumb ending.

Ghost Ship (2002) (USA/Australia)

aka Chimera

⭐️⭐️1/2

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a surly salvage crew got their hands on a long-thought missing and definitely haunted 1960’s Italian ocean liner? I sure have but I’m strange and have a bunch of free time on my hands. What’s your excuse? Back in the early sixties, the extravagant cruise ship Antonia Graza hits some trouble when one hell of a violent set piece ends up dismembering a shit-ton of guests and crew. Mass death and splatter is not easily forgotten and has stayed burnt into my brain since seeing this bad boy in theaters more than two decades ago. Needless to say, all that trauma left more than just a blood stain and the troubled spirits still reside aboard the ship forty years on. Bad news for a salvage crew who are pointed in the direction of the ship by a pilot, who has found it adrift in the Bering Strait. Seeing one hell of a pay day, any concern is buried deep down and the small team decide they can’t pass up the opportunity, even letting the pilot come along for a reduced finder’s fee. Not a great call on their part. The rusted hunk is full of spirits but this ain’t just phantom footsteps and slamming doors, these specters are homicidal and manipulative to boot. Poor decisions pile up and the bodies follow close behind as some apparitions get downright nasty. It’s gonna be up to the surviving salvagers (and a helpful ghost girl) to pull their asses out of the fire and realize that millions of dollars ain’t worth much of anything if you’re fucking dead. There’s also a decades-old secret to uncover, crates full of stolen gold bars that tie into everything and trapped spirits because some evil entity called The Ferryman needs souls. A stellar cast of “Hey! They’re in this?! Fuck yeah!” helps carry along the iffy plot… I mean, Julianna Margulies, Gabriel Byrne, Ron Eldard, Isaiah Washington and especially Karl Urban could come into my house, eat my food, clog my toilet and slap me around a bit and I’d still thank them. The problem is, the script doesn’t care anywhere near as much about utilizing these actors as I do. Which is fine. I guess the haunted ship is the most important thing anyways… which is also a problem when your script takes its time getting to the point. Luckily, the abandoned liner set is pretty cool and the cast is more than capable even if not given a whole bunch to work with. It’s a shame that the best part of the damn thing is the buildup as the reveal ain’t all that great. The last-act flashback makes ya wish we spent more time in the 60s dealing with a far more interesting film (all set to music that sounds like something that would be playing in a church group’s presentation of a BDSM club because they could afford the rights to anything by Nine Inch Nails). In the right mood, you could add an extra half-star to the rating.

Crypsis (2019) (USA)

⭐️⭐️

Six buddies make a bet involving a remote island and the infamous creature that supposedly calls the place home. A chunk of money and bragging rights goes to the team that can capture footage of some bullshit dares on a list. Bonus if they manage to capture footage of the mysterious monster that has yet to be verified by modern science… at least, I assume that would be a nice, big bonus. An opening slaughter lets us know that whatever the hell it is ain’t some friendly throwback just looking to exist in tranquility with the woodlands. This opening stretch also lets us know that there’s plenty of history about the place and the thing roaming around. There’s also people very interested in the island dweller. So, we join our gaggle of idiots accepting the bet in a bar and heading to the off-limits island at the behest of the jerk who came up with the idea. He also takes their cellphones because I guess being an idiot goes along with being super obnoxious. That goes for all of them. The five dinks left on the island fight amongst themselves making us, the viewer at home, apathetic to their plight and begging for the monster to start picking the dudes off. Not a great way to start things. Unsettling sounds prove that some trepidations were correct amongst the group. The creature shockingly does not waste much time revealing itself to the gaggle of buttholes trespassing on its land, unfortunately it stays mostly offscreen until after the thirty minute mark. It’s a dude in a costume that looks like something that would have been featured on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I dig that. Monster POV is featured and the group’s biggest pud survives way longer than his ass should. TURN OFF THE FUCKING LIGHT, JOSH! This would have been a a semi-entertaining treat of a simple monster flick if it had a likable cast but unfortunately it does not and it sort of just sinks itself thanks to characters you don’t give a shit about or are actively rooting against. I’m all for bros getting eaten by something that looks like the offspring of Gollum and a crawler from The Descent, it’s just hard to spend all your time with nothing but bros.

Siluman Clurit Perak (1988) (Indonesia)

aka Demon With the Silver Sickle

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Un-subbed and of rapidly deteriorating visual quality, this movie is still more fun than a barrel full of dead monkeys. An evil witch raises hell in the village neighboring the cave she calls home. She zombifies some folks, possesses others and even bites the penis off of one unfortunate horny husband. A poor woman gets a stick in the eye and is then tossed off a hill for reasons unknown to me, maggots get eaten, a beefy man becomes the witch’s evil lover, a couple warriors show up to help (one of them has a fart-centric fighting technique), there’s a pocong, a man who transforms into a rapist bat (but he’s also a rapist in human form so good for him), a magical skull on a stick, a lot of floating, an elderly fighter with a giant and dangerous tongue, flying coffins, people riding flying coffins and then a goofy-eyed zombie shows up. It makes no damn sense and is as wild as it is stupid... which is fine by me. It runs a bit too long but the insane climax makes up for any dragging.

The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962) (Spain/France)

aka Cries in the Night/Screams in the Night/The Diabolical Dr. Satan/The Demon Doctor

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Jesús Franco has been haunting the catacombs of my mind for a long time. The man directed over 200 films in almost every genre. I am most familiar with his output in horror (shocker). Surreal, exploitative, insane and boring are all words that can describe his work. Sometimes, all words could be used to describe just one film of his. Franco treads familiar waters with The Awful Dr. Orlof, yet he does so in a way that it becomes something not often associated with Franco's work: classic. If one wishes to explore the deep ocean that is Franco's filmography, I would recommend you come to this film a little later down the line. It may falsely convey the notion of Franco as a master. I enjoy the majority of his films, I love a few and I avoid a good amount. His early output is stronger than what came later and The Awful Dr. Orlof remains one of my favorites (I still believe Miss Muerte is his greatest film). If he had carried on in this fashion he may have gone down as one of the most essential horror directors of all time, instead he hits more on infamous and carries a deserved cult icon status. I'd rather have him as the latter anyways. The film opens with a drunken woman stumbling and singing in the middle of the street. She makes it home and continues to sing as she shuffles around her room like me at my nephew’s birthday party. Unlike that classic time I was being awesome, she meets her end upon opening her closet, when Morpho emerges and strangles her. Morpho is a towering, caped and deformed gentleman who carries off the recently perished woman into the night. The tapping of a stick by some unseen person leads the blind beast in the proper direction. Our poor blitzed babe is not the first woman to disappear. A newly engaged inspector is on the case and is, sadly, getting nowhere. He is not privy to the same information as us; we soon learn that Dr. Orlof is the mystery man in control of Morpho. His night out with a beautiful lounge singer concludes with murder and more Morpho. Orlof is using the skin of his victims in an attempt to cure his daughter's fire-born disfigurement. I'm not sure how he is going about it. They don't explicitly show his treatments like they did in Eyes Without a Face (which is the definite inspiration for Franco's film), but it's not working. He decides he must use a living host in order for his treatment to be a success. As Orlof does his weird surgery thang, we spend some more time with the inspector. He's following clues and trying to piece together why his witnesses seem to be seeing two different murderers. With a helpful push from his fiancée (who just so happens to be the spitting image of Orlof's daughter) the inspector comes to the realization of the tag team murder scheme afoot. This still seems to get him nowhere. His fiancée, being the awesome woman she is, decides to go undercover to flush Dr. Orlof out. This all leads to a whole lotta death and a whole lotta Morpho. If you failed to notice, I fucking love Morpho. Ricardo Valle makes for an imposing "monster". His makeup is goofy as hell but he still manages to give me the chills after all these years. This is helped in a major way by Franco's atmospheric direction. In contrast to his later catalogue, The Awful Dr. Orlof shows an assured hand all the way through. You'd get moments of this in his later films but it was rarely frequent and it became noticeable Franco was getting bored with the humdrum expectations of the era. The familiar Franco aspects are also present but not yet prevalent. Breasts are fondled, jazz erupts, lounge/club numbers (although not as intrusive as they would become) appear and Howard Vernon is his usual wonderful self. Not as psychopathic as some of his other films, Orlof maintains its status as genuinely accomplished cinema. Find it and enjoy it but do not judge the man's work by it.

Beware the Woods (2022) (USA)

⭐️⭐️

Spring break in Colorado is even worse than it sounds for a group of friends who get themselves stalked by a masked psycho during a cabin stay in the (not-so) remote Colorado wilderness. Wait. Is that not supposed to be a mask? Holy hell! I think that’s supposed to be an actual grandma. Wow. Anyways, “granny” doesn’t take kindly to the youths hanging around and I can’t say I blame her. They’re about as likable as I was at their age. Lame deaths follow and one girl gets kidnapped by the “elderly” lunatic because she reminds her of her dead daughter. Her “definitely straight” boyfriend comes looking for her and lame action follows. Some trash acting made possible by limited casting choices amongst friends and family, the cringy awkwardness that said friends and family members bring to performances, some trash thrashing from musicians who accepted payment in brewskies, some polite chuckles made possible by inside jokes, dialogue based off of half-forgotten high school conversations and special effects provided by a Spirit Halloween discount rack all combine to bring up hazy memories of SOV garbage that came before… and this one has a murder-granny… so… bonus!