Death Walks at Midnight (1972) (Italy/Spain)

aka Cry Out in Terror/Death Caresses at Midnight

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Valentina, a gorgeous model (knockout Nieves Navarro) has a vision of the horrific murder of a woman via one nasty-looking spiked glove while she’s under the influence of an experimental drug. The journalist who put this whole endeavor together, Gio (Simón Andreu) assures her she will remain anonymous by giving her an eye mask to wear as he starts snapping pictures of her drug trip. Well, Gio being a male in an Italian horror flick, lies his ass off and publishes the story of the sexy model hallucinating a nasty murder while tripping balls, being sure to post her beautiful face all over his magazine cover. Valentina is rightfully unhappy, even more so when she heads to his office to tear him a new one and discovers the “doctor” who administered the hallucinogen to be the building doorman. Embarrassment and a loss of some work have caused Valentina to destroy some property but things are about to get worse because the vision of the young girl’s slaughter ain’t just a product of a chemical high, nope, some poor young lady has had her face smashed in by a spiked glove and now the creepy-ass killer (who looks like the offspring of Richard Lynch and David Gest) knows that there was somehow a witness. The crime in question actually took place in a neighboring apartment building some six months earlier which has Gio and the police thinking Valentina may have already known about it but as for any answers as to who committed it, they’re going to be of little help. Valentina is going to need to do some sleuthing to figure out who the iron-gloved culprit is because her life is on the line. Of course, there’s much more going on than just a needlessly complicated murder. Hanging around to add complications are Valentina’s mostly useless boyfriend Stefano (Peter Martell), some creepy dude (not the killer) trying to speak with Valentina but continually getting blown off and a dead woman’s sister looking for answers. Valentina (who gets her own song!) is a likable protagonist which helps the viewer as we navigate the purposefully convoluted opening acts as they stack question upon question and map out story progression into multiple dead ends. It’s all way too fucking long and not exactly worth the trip but entertaining enough to get a pass and the ridiculous rooftop chase/fight is pretty damn wonderful and stupid.

Escape from Death (1989) (Italy)

aka Blood Moon

⭐️⭐️

The unstable Ann (she’s spent some time in the old loony bin) claims to find her author husband Larry brutally murdered in the stables on their estate but the lack of a corpse has Ann’s psychiatrist thinking she may be having another mental fit and Larry’s secretary Mary thinking the woman may have killed her employer. Although, it would seem Dr. Marc wants her back in his care just as soon as possible and that Mary thinks Ann is a real bitch. To go along with the lack of a body, Mary and Dr. Marc discover a note from the supposed dead man claiming that he’s leaving, possibly forever because he can’t take the hellish life he’s been enduring with Ann. They decide it’s best to not get the police involved and just wait for the answers to come naturally. Italians, man. Larry returns a fucking year later but Ann is convinced that the Larry who is now in her home is not the man she married, even if it is most definitely the man in all the photographs around the house. We can’t say for sure because we’re introduced to the actual Larry getting his face blown to bits with a gun but the movie doesn’t really even try to hide the fact that something fishy is going on. Her shrink and Larry’s secretary attempt to assuage her doubts but Ann remains adamant in her belief of the man being an imposter. She’s receiving phone calls from someone claiming to be her real husband contacting her from the other side of the veil while also suffering from some horrific hallucinations. As if there ain’t enough shit going on to fill a few seasons of a lazy soap opera, someone with black gloves begins leisurely thinning out the cast. It’s an Italian genre flick from the late eighties so you can expect maggots, people acting like idiots, people acting like perverts, people acting like it’s their first time dealing with human emotions, needlessly complicated scheming that probably should have been better thought out and a good amount of the viewer just saying “Ok. But what?” A penis gets shot off (the sign of a true marksman!), a head gets chopped off, there’s a nice level of scuzz bubbling under everything and the movie thankfully doesn’t think you’re an idiot… like some of the best from The Boot, it’s just an idiot itself so it doesn’t know any better. A whole lotta chatter drags this one down but some fun can be had if you’re more forgiving of your Italian horror produced during the genre’s death throes.

Children of the Corn (1984) (USA)

⭐️⭐️1/2

Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton are a young couple who get trapped in a small Nebraska town taken over by a child cult who worship something hilariously named “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”. Years ago, little weirdo Issac rolled into the town of Gatlin and convinced all the kids to murder the adults. Poison coffee takes out a good chunk and then everyone else over the age of 18 gets their ass violently slaughtered. The young couple stumble into the nothing town to report a homicide after crashing into a kid with a slit throat. They come across a couple annoying youngsters (the little girl being a psychic or some shit) that don’t buy into Issac’s lunatic message about some kind of fertility demon wandering the corn fields and attempt to escape with them. Standing in their way is Issac’s loyal lieutenant Malachai and his gaggle of murderous children. R.G. Armstrong shows up as a mechanic not long for this world, Courtney Gaines is memorable as Malachai for all the wrong reasons, John Franklin stands out as Issac for all the right reasons (I mean, they’re still the wrong reasons… just better) and Linda Hamilton ends up crucified in a cornfield. This flick lacks any serious bite so it just comes off more silly than anything else and by the time it gets goofy, it’s too little too late. “OUT-LAN-DER!”

Die Gasmasken - Doppelt Halt Besser (2001) (Germany)

aka The Gasmask: Twice as Good

⭐️⭐️

Camcorder-shot garbage from Germany put together by a group of kids just having a good old time. A teenage boy finds a gas mask in the middle of the woods and soon his life is turned upside down by the evil thing. Some web-surfing (in real time!) uncovers the history of the mask but it does little to help as a gas-mask-wearing idiot with a sword shows up and brings on the below-low-budget violence. A lack of subtitles and the rapidly degrading tape quality my DVD was sourced from adds to the unsettling stupidity of this amateur oddity. It’s a thirty minute slice of backyard filmmaking which features chase scenes that look like an a-ha video lensed in hell, our hero running over a cat and an audio track that will have you begging for the sweat relief of deafness. Somehow, it’s really not that bad.

Eyes of the Werewolf (1999) (USA)

⭐️⭐️

I don’t know of any previous case where emergency eye surgery has lead to lycanthropy. I may be mistaken but I think it’s a first. Ya see, a laboratory accident has left a poor research chemist blind. The shady surgeon who decided to restore his sight through an eyeball transplant relies on an organ-snatching murderer to get his necessary stock. This murderer happens to get the eyeballs from a fucking werewolf. So… there ya go. Rich may have his vision back and the affection of his horny nurse (Stephanie Beaton) but he’s also slipping into some animalistic tendencies. He and his nurse fall for each other but as soon as he recovers, he heads back home to his wife of seven years… dick move, Rich. His wife isn’t all that happy to see him and leaves immediately to go bang his buddy. I don’t blame her. He confronts them, gets knocked out and is told to fuck off. Again… he pretty much deserves all of this. Rich heads home to sulk and transforms into a werewolf while watching television. His former buddy waits on the beach for his former wife with a bottle of booze and an acoustic guitar but instead of a sandy booty call, he gets mauled by a rubbery werewolf. The next day Rich wakes up disoriented in the middle of nowhere and comes across the home of a dwarf who is nothing but hospitable and helps him flee when the cops may or may not be searching the area. He’s questioned by a detective but since it looks like his friend was killed by an animal, she doesn’t pry that hard. As soon as she leaves, his author friend stops by to admit he saw him kill the poor sap on the beach. His wife stops by to be a jerk a little later and ends up wolf food. The detective finds her corpse and Rich ends up back in the home of the dwarf, who happens to be an expert on things unknown. Rich figures out that his current state has to do with the eye transplant and confronts his doctor about the garbage practice he’s running. He has to flee when the doctor calls his main goon to help. Luckily, he meets back up with his nurse and she helps him escape. They go back to her place and hit the bone-zone with the convincing eroticism of a couple of horny quadriplegic teenagers. Rich transforms but leaves her be and heads on out into the night and murders the unscrupulous doctor. The detective (who has the hots for the nurse) is after Rich and the author has plans to get himself a bestseller by interviewing an actual werewolf. Rich keeps digging, the black market organ dealer gets his and the werewolf loses his best bud. All this stupidity is peppered with some fun bits but everything around those lovely nuggets is so damn static it may just lull you to sleep. Porn quality performances, sex scenes about as erotic as watching two senior citizens french kissing (if you’re not into that, I mean), a wonderfully goofy werewolf costume and some hilarious splatter make the experience somewhat bearable.

The Museum Project (2016) (Australia)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A group of students focus on a spooky myth about a local railway museum and they plan on definitively answering the question if the place is actually haunted by a former conductor who became a serial killer and eventually met his end via splattering by train. Hell of a backstory for your haunting. Now, being students and having no sway on the workings of anything substantial, the trio sneak into the place after hours and record their findings after the museum head denies them the opportunity to come in after they close. There’s insurance purposes to consider, even in Australia and as interesting as a railway museum may be in the light of day, you’re not gonna find anything spooky while the sun is shining. That’s how this likable group of aspiring filmmakers get into the supernatural predicament when the building closes and they come into contact with something sinister. The ghostly activity starts off small and escalates as it always does but is nice and creepy given the setting. Three become two and the duo attempt to track down their missing sound man before fleeing the premises which are growing creepier by the second. I’ve never had much interest in trains but as my visit to a yarn museum taught me, museums make anything fascinating. So, we get a good chunk of time spent going through the sites and sounds of the place and I’m more than fine with that. Hell, it may not have the same atmosphere of an abandoned insane asylum but it’s way more fascinating. And you know what else is great about museums? They’re fucking terrifying when everyone has left. A solid forty-five minutes of found footage terror.

The Murder Clinic (1966) (Italy/France)

aka Night of Terrors/The Blade in the Body/Revenge of the Living Dead

⭐️⭐️1/2

In the late 19th century, a hooded figure stalks the dark at an isolated mental institution in the middle of the woods. The head of the place, Dr. Vance, is up to suspicious activities involving skin graft experiments so he’s hesitant about getting the local authorities involved in the string of murders. He’s already got a bad wrap after an accident left his sister deformed thanks to stumbling into a vat of lime during construction of the state-of-the-art clinic. The body count grows as staff and patients fall at the hands of the cloaked fiend. There’s plenty of strange suspects amongst the patients and staff and not just the hideously scarred woman and her up-to-something brother. Vance’s jealous wife, an elderly woman prone to violent outbursts when someone touches her stuffed cat (there’s a joke in there somewhere), a doped-up schizophrenic sure that everyone wants him dead, a head nurse with a stick lodged firmly up her butt, a bald servant who lurks just as well as every other bald servant in horror history and a horny handyman who just so happens to own a straight razor much like the one we’ve seen our gloved killer wielding. All there to raise suspicion. The clinic exists because after the accident that melted Vance’s sister’s face and a witness who claimed to have seen the doctor push the woman off a scaffolding, Dr. Vance had his reputation ruined and was forced to take on patients that no other place wanted. He now works on skin grafts with guinea pigs in his free time and hopes to restore his sister’s looks. A compassionate nurse (Mary, naturally) joins the staff just as the murders begin and the arrival of a scheming woman who is rescued by the doctor following a carriage accident sets things off into dangerous territories. This woman happened to stumble upon Vance burying the body of a murdered girl and, after failing at seduction, decides to blackmail the not-so-good doctor. She’s a real piece of work. Needless to say, there won’t be a lot of people breathing by the time the end credits hit. It’s a period piece proto-slasher that hits familiar story-beats from Euro horrors of the era. Eyes Without a Face being the obvious inspiration (as it was for many, many outings that followed and feels as if added as an afterthought to this) and mixed in with Krimis which would give way to giallo and the inevitable fierceness of the slasher genre. This one fits comfortably toeing the line of all three without being able to be pigeonholed in any descriptor. That’s not to say it’s a revelatory original script or anything, it’s all very familiar and it just adds and drops aspects of the film descriptors to make it so it’s kinda of everything and nothing all at once. It’s a bit stuffy and ambling but that doesn’t take away from the dark fun of the scheming (Françoise Prévost’s excellently awful blackmailer is a treat) and the eventual (admittedly limp) explosion of murdering that finally hits after chaos is brought to the secretive inner workings of the clinic. Beautiful women and some effective, cheap makeup effects also hit my sweet spot but you can tell it didn’t really have any idea of the cinematic stylings it actually had its hands on and fumbles everything. More interesting than entertaining.