aka The Atomic Monster/Monster of the Marshes
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Outside of town, in an ominous mansion, disgraced and reclusive Dr. Eric Vornoff (Bela Lugosi, naturally) uses atomic power to turn people into super humans. At least, he’d like to. So far all he has going for him is a pile of corpses, a mute monster/servant named Lobo (Tor Johnson, naturally) and a gigantic octopus. I mean, I’d be content with those things but I’m a simple man. Reporter Janet Lawton decides to do some snooping and connect the high strangeness unfolding at the mansion to the string of disappearances befalling men in the area being blamed on a supposed monster hanging around a the neighboring swamp (called Lake Marsh… come on now). She gets kidnapped (following a car accident on her way out there) by the mad doctor and her detective fiancé, Dick Craig, goes looking for her. A professor (who was brought in to assist the Scottish government with the Loch Ness Monster) is also out hanging around the swamp, intrigued by the stories of the monster. Janet is kept under Lugosi’s hypnotic spell anytime she gets testy and Lobo gets whipped anytime he gets annoying. Secret labs, immobile cephalopods, stock footage and actors with the talent of dry lumber should make you smile unless your heart is cold and dead. Lugosi brings the histrionics and it’s pretty wonderful to see him being utilized this close to the end of his life. Ed Wood gets a bad rap but he’s become a bit more appreciated as a fine purveyor of schlock by fans nowadays. Hell, his work is better than 75% of the shit I’ve sat through on Tubi from the 2010s - 2020s and 100% better than 200-million-dollar-budgeted The Eternals… so eat a dick, Marvel.
aka Evil in the Swamp
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Stacy Keach is a photo-journalist on his way to California via the backroads of America. Somewhere in Nowhere, TN he comes across a young boy wandering the side road with a heavy bag and gives him a lift to his farmhouse in the middle of deep south wilderness. Well, this is the seventies and as seventies backwoods films have taught me; no good deed goes unpunished. A stalled car and bad storm gets him postponing his hasty exit but he won’t be leaving anytime soon anyways. The farmhouse is home to a gang of orphans and they’ve decided Jimmy Wheeler is the perfect man to be their new father figure. Samantha Eggar is stuck there as well, playing the mother figure and obviously terrified about her situation. Jimmy realizes how serious these kids are and that the string of men who have refused or failed at playing the part are no longer walking this earth. Dogs and violence keep the “parents” in line. Keach takes the role of strict father eventually but he’s still planning on making his escape. The group of children is led by eldest son Peter, a young John Savage (looking both youthful and old at the same time) who is just as intense as he’s ever been. TV terror is family friendly but still weird enough to work, which you can say about a surprising amount of television horror from the time. Hell, I was even rooting for a happy ending, a strong cast is to blame for that and it may be cheesy but fuck it. That 1974 release date had me expecting the worst.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Hey! It’s Dario Argento and he’s doing stuff. The last time he did stuff was a decade ago and it involved Count Dracula transforming into a giant praying mantis… I should rewatch Dracula 3D because that is honestly the only thing I remember about that movie. Anyways, Dario is back and he’s brought his daughter with him. Asia Argento has been in things, she was in Land of the Dead but that may have been Michelle Rodriguez, I’m not going to double check because I’d rather be fisted by an un-manicured polar bear than even think of that piece of crap again and I’m also lazy. So what’s Dario unleashing on the world now that he’s gotten the praying-mantis-vampires out of his system? Well, he’s going a bit standard. Following a solar eclipse, a killer is garroting prostitutes in Italy. One high-end escort, by the name of Diana, manages to escape him but unfortunately is blinded in a car accident during her flight. This accident takes more than her vision, it also claims the life of a young Chinese boy’s father. Fortunately for the youth, he was safe from any harm (physical, I guess… I’m sure mentally there’s gonna be a few years of night terrors and adult bed wetting) in the back seat. Diana wakes up in a clinic with a slim chance of ever regaining her vision. The little boy has no chance of regaining his dad. Diana goes home and soon meets Rita, an instructor sent her way from The Association of the Blind and Visually Impaired played by Asia Argento who is aging like a fine wine. Diana adjusts to her new situation and gets herself a badass guide dog named Nerea. Diana also takes an interest in the 7-year-old boy she kinda orphaned (his mom is in a coma but she probably won’t be waking up) and he runs away from the orphanage to wait with her for his mom to get better so he can avoid going into the foster system. It’s a smart move. They bond and the masked madman begins stalking the prey that got away. Detectives investigate but you know it’s gonna be up to our hero and her child sidekick, Chin, to put a stop to the horrors. Black gloves, red blood, a thumping score and a few well-composed visuals mingle with shaky acting, “interesting” character choices and even more “interesting” plot points (friggin’ water snakes, man) but that’s nothing new for this flavor of cheese. It’s kinda lame but after whatever the hell Dracula 3D was, I think I’m ok with lame. I like Asia Argento, I ran into her once at a hotel bar and she was really personable and talkative once she realized I just wanted to drink and talk about POGS… although, it may have been Michelle Rodriguez.
aka Dead of Night
⭐️⭐️
Sara suffers from the scuzzy treatment of her abusive boyfriend Bobby. She finally leaves his awful ass after taking a beating when she finds him in bed with another woman (a highly effective scene that plays out over a black screen with the thankfully brief audio awfulness running over it) and goes to stay with her older sister April and April’s boyfriend Dick. Fortuitously, April recently received a book on black magic from a friend at a party (a party that you can tell just reeks of cigarettes and cocaine) and Sara gives a go to putting it to good (justifiably evil) use. She actually mages to conjure up a dark spirit from a mirror and it proceeds to possess her meek ass, turning her into a seductress who focuses her murderous appetite on horny men… good for her! She takes to the streets of Los Angeles and peruses the kind of poorly-lit dives I’d frequent, picking up despicable men with little effort. Sure makes her violent work easy and with the spastic dance moves she shows off it’s understandable. I don’t think it’s seduction, it may be awful men thinking they have an easy mark in a skanky person who may be intellectually disabled. Awkward lovemaking leads to awkward murders and budget makeup provides something that was supposed to be frightening but only comes off as charmingly daft. Sara doesn’t remember what she’s doing when the spirit takes hold and her sister and Dick try to figure out what the hell is happening. Very special effects bring some much-needed laughs but don’t get featured anywhere near enough. There’s also a bicycle-riding exorcist named John Smith and the dark spirit’s name is Sura which had me giggling for some reason. When not blasting our ears with the intense synthetic beats, the score sounds like something that would have been playing over an add for hemorrhoid treatment (when the sufferer is finally able to ride a tandem bike with his wife again) and it fits well with a film that seems to be the work of a commercial director who thought they’d give a go at horror. I had to check multiple times that this wasn’t some lame-ass Italian export made to launder Mafia money, it’s American but it’s got that vibe… it still may have been used to launder Mafia money. Dangerous Seductress would do it waaaaaay better in a few years.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Following the death of his mother, recovering alcoholic Sean Martin returns home to put the woman to rest. Judging by how he spits on her corpse when left alone with the body, he had a contentious relationship with the recently departed. This is further proven when he purchases webcams to place inside the coffin to make sure the woman is, indeed, dead. He throws the salesman off when he demands the cameras run for twelve months instead of the standard four because who would want to watch a loved one decay. Money talks and he gets the salesman to set it up for a year. Sean’s mental stability is crumbling as he begins seeing some of his mom’s elderly friends hanging about and his buddy may have his best interests in mind but Sean is resistant to any kind of meaningful relationship. The past physical and mental torture he underwent at the hands of his mom and her creepy friends goes a long way to explaining why he’s built up his defensive walls and also why his underlying nightmare pertaining to the concrete evidence of his mother’s passing is slipping into obsession. The uncomfortable situation gets downright creepy when it appears there may be something supernatural at play or Sean may just be going off the deep end. He has nightmares that come off as art school short films and then creepy shit amplifies. Darren McAree delivers as the troubled man who has earned his coldness which is good because he’s center stage throughout and it would be damn-near unwatchable if he didn’t make this rightfully unlikable man at least sympathetic. It’s an eerie concept on a limited budget that works thanks to a strong lead and an intriguing foundation for a macabre situation which is just as likely to be mental illness as it is the unknown. Unfortunately it falls apart a bit as Sean plays stage drunk (which is never convincing), melodramatics take away from the atmosphere, it runs just a bit too long to maintain its trajectory and gets lost up its own ass. Still, a strong first half helps and it doesn’t offend with how it closes things out.
⭐️⭐️
Back in 1969, guru Timothy Bach (Ratt’s own Stephan Pearcy) holds a hypnotic hold over his hippie disciples at the Northern California commune they call home. Peace and love takes a turn when something snaps in Bach and he systematically slaughters a handful of his followers. Opening text tells us most of this and then grainy footage stretches on through the credits as Bach watches over a bunch of hippies that definitely look like aughties Californians playing hippies and doing stereotypical hippie nonsense. So, nudity and drugs. Some thirty years later, a group of “teenagers” head out to the area for a “camping extravaganza” well aware of the twisted history the place carries. Two spoiled idiots, their doofus girlfriends and odd-woman out new girl all roughing it in the woods with no tech allowed. New girl Dee Dee mentions she was adopted during some character-building on the way to the woods and my warning bells begin to sound. There’s hiking, goofin’ around, doobie passin’ and general horniness as the group search out the site of the massacre and get on each other’s nerves. A forest ranger ogles one of the girls who goes searching for fire wood and warns them to be safe. We get a brief retelling of the slaughter over a campfire (bad acid seems to have been the cause and Timothy Bach was never caught) and then the “youth” wax poetic about the hippie mentality. Night one passes slowly with a lot of blue balls and talking. Stock-bro Vesper gets up to take a morning leak and gets a rock to the back of his noggin. His girlfriend worries and her friend Gretchen sends her boyfriend out to find their missing member. It takes no time to discover his corpse but it’s set up to look like he fell and hit his head. Ranger Rodgers agrees with the accidental death assessment by teenage football star Lance. Rodgers goes off for help and takes Vesper’s body with him. Rodgers soon joins Vesper in the afterlife. With no help coming it becomes a lot easier for whoever it is creeping around the woods to take out the dinks. The inevitable is revealed, the message is hammered home with all the subtly of repeated kicks to the dick and the climax takes up way too much time. If you know me, you know this era of low-energy horror is my wheelhouse thanks to grabbing whatever straight-to-DVD nonsense made its way to the video store shelf. So no matter how lame it may be, it’s fortunately right in my comfort zone. The story comes off like a repurposed porno script by some burnt out former hippie missing the sixties who really wanted to make a slasher flick but was too lazy to write his own. There’s a bunch of set up for sex in the woods that never happens and the slasher shenanigans are nothing special but there’s a certain charm to it that maybe me and a dozen other idiots can get behind.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
The undead cop is back (Robert Z’Dar, lookin’ pretty decayed) and he makes short work of the two officers who handled him the first time around (Campbell and Landon back briefly to get themselves murdered). After he gets that unfortunate business out of the way, Cordell ends up in the company of local serial killer Turkell (an impressively bearded Leo Rossi in a role originally planned for Joe Spinell which is a god damn tragedy… nothing against Mr. Rossi), who has been spending his time picking off strippers. Detective Sean McKinney (Robert Davi, great to see him playing a protagonist) and police psychologist Susan Riley (Claudia Christian… where my Babylon 5 fans at?!) begin looking into things when they realize the unbelievable has become reality. Turkell gets kinda needy (he comes off alot like a dangerous Charlie Kelly and it’s pretty damn funny) while Cordell lands on getting revenge on the prisoners who took his life in the prison shower. The always welcome Michael Lerner is the scuzzy commissioner breathing down the necks of our heroes who doesn’t want to hear that the “Manic Cop” is back in action, Charles Napier hosts a crime show and the coolest dude around Clarence Williams III shows up as a prisoner along with Shelly Desai and Danny fuckin Trejo. Lustig and Cohen reunite for a surprisingly solid sequel that doesn’t really take an easy path and prefers to stir up the waters instead of treading easy. Davi and Christian have a nice chemistry that keeps us rooting for our protagonists which helps because even though the story may hold interest, it never really comes off as all that necessary
