⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Folks gotta stop dumping bodies in haunted lakes! A young girl is raped and murdered thanks to the richest man in town’s daughter being in love with her fiancé. He forces her and her father to leave their home and then sends out his goons to go be goon-ish. Just so happens the water where the wronged woman is dumped had been the final resting place for a cat-centric witch who terrorized the village 100 years prior. Now the kitty witch has a vessel for revenge and is about to come a-knocking for every asshole. Cat attacks from off screen, wire work and stuffed animal stand-ins make for an interesting time. There’s plenty of despicable humans to root against and the ghostly witch with claws is an excellent bit of nightmare fuel.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean have created a giant radioactive octopus and now said creature is causing problems for the U.S. Navy. If Uncle Sam hates anything, it’s something fucking around with his interests. Naval commander Pete Matthews has an encounter with the creature while working on a state-of-the-art atomic submarine and comes to the conclusion of what the mystery beast is after bringing in a couple prominent scientists. The Naval command does not believe them at first but the sinking of a ship by the colossal cephalopod forces them to come around to the identity of the threat. Just in time too, because that big-ass beast is hungry and has left its familiar feeding grounds to grab a meal in San Francisco. Pete and the scientists race against the clock to figure out how to stop the beast. It’s a bit too slow-going for its own good but manages to just be above average when it comes to these 50’s creature features. Plus, Ray Harryhausen provides the awesome creature effects and how the hell am I not gonna be in love with a giant fucking octopus attacking the Golden Gate Bridge? Kenneth Tobey is his usual leading man greatness and the stock footage is impressively utilized to add to the story.
⭐️
As idiots are known to do, a trio of high school graduates wander out into the vast forests of Washington and are never seen again. One year later, mine excavators recover a camera and some answers come from the footage recovered but there’s also some troubling questions birthed from the last actions of the friends caught on camera. Ken, Eric and Logan are the right age to annoy the ever-livin’ fuck out of me and they get right to it after the opening text lets us know they are no longer living… at least we know there’s a happy ending. Why these three dopes are pulling a Survivor Man for a month can be blamed on youthful ignorance but these dudes are definitely ill-prepared for the excursion into the wilds. They probably wouldn’t have made it, even if the creature from Internet folklore wasn’t wandering around. The annoying cameraman is complimented by the annoying everyone else to create an excruciating experience that doesn’t even last an hour but feels like it’s at least the length of the Das Boot director’s cut. The incessant yammering of our cameraman poisons our ears in between stories that have some importance to the plot and I’m beginning to think that fifty minutes is not short enough. Unfortunately, the cameraman makes it through night one and discovers Logan is missing. Like a true professional, he starts freaking out and the two remaining idiots wander deeper into the woods. Something that makes high-pitched screaming noises starts stalking them and it needs to get its pasty ass around to putting these dinks out of my fucking misery. The threat is cool, the setting is cool but the characters are an endurance test.
aka Thriller
⭐️⭐️⭐️
The world is full of morons. I'd say the majority of meat walking this planet is a moron. Nitwits hooking up with twits and creating more morons. These little morons do stupid things and this stupidity usually comes back around to bite these young idjits in the ass. Even in lovely Sweden. Two Swedish children have had enough with their physically abusive teacher. They plan on playing a little joke on the bully of a man and sneak up to his house one late night in October. Tossing in some fireworks, their goofy fun blows up in their faces metaphorically by blowing up all over their professor literally. The asshole burns to death and the two prepubescent dinks scamper on off. Twenty tears pass and things are not copacetic. After the incident, Steve and his family left Sweden for the sunnier shores of America. Steve's had a pretty successful life as a record producer (?) in Dallas. His old buddy, Eric, has not been so fortunate. His mental health seems to be diminishing and he's convinced that the teacher they pretty much murdered all those years ago is haunting him. He writes a letter to the man he hasn't seen in two decades, and Steve gets worried that Eric may be close to confessing their murderiffic secret. Canceling his vacation with his wife, Linda, Steve plans on heading home. Linda is (rightfully) pissed that the plans have changed and demands to go along. He eventually caves and the couple are off to Sweden. They find Eric a drunken and paranoid mess. He attacks Steve at first but eventually calms down enough to tell Steve that the dead teacher is back and is using hallucinations to drive him insane. Steve doesn't believe him but he soon starts seeing things and has to come around to his old buddy's side of things. Poor Linda gets swept up in it too and the trio are terrorized by the charred skeletal ghost who talks with a echoey monster-voice. Linda gets the bright idea (thanks to a scary book she read) to destroy what remains of the dead man's house and get rid of his ghost forever. Sure. Why not? There's a lot going on while nothing fucking happens. It's a confusing mix that luckily fits well with the atmosphere the movie is going for. Robotic performances and nonsensical dialogue add to the fever dream burning your brain as you’re lulled to sleep by heavy Swedish accents. It's not just poorly performed roles that give you the cold sweats. A chubby police officer shows up looking for a burglar and then gets suspicious thanks to the obviously-hiding-something Eric. A gang of lame-ass hooligans that belong in a bottom of the barrel Italian Mad Max rip-off take our heroes prisoner for a brief moment and then disappear as quickly as they came. Possession, a car chase and a knife-wielding ventriloquist dummy pop in for a brief hello and then exit faster than an Irishman leaving a party. I'm confused and a little dumber for watching this but (as I am one of the aforementioned morons) can't hate this weirdo bit of Swedish garbage. Oh yeah. It's wrapped up by a cowboy-hat-wearing, eye-patched punk explaining to the fat cop what happened at the former home of the burnt professor. Wonderful.
⭐️⭐️1/2
A small nowhere town somewhere in America gets hit hard with the scourge of vampirism after a sultry vampiress (it’s Lucy… No. Not from the Peanuts comics, from Bram Stoker’s novel) sets up shop to use her master’s blood and a geneticist’s talent to clone Dracula back into existence. He ain’t that happy to be back but the hunger gets him on the prowl anyways. The town full of conspiracy nuts is convinced the genetics lab is causing vampirism and… yeah… they’re kinda right but they’re still assholes. Dracula tries to get the scientist to reverse his curse much to Lucy’s chagrin and a fat sheriff roams around, doddering into one bad situation after another. A group of hikers get lost on a trail and wake up in a stranger’s home, wondering how the hell they got there. They don’t seem that concerned and enjoy some breakfast before searching for their host. “Macho” Hank annoys and everyone else in the group of idiots fails to really leave any impression. They eventually meet their host… Mr. Vlad and succumb to his vampiric ways. I guess it’ll be up to our husky officer of the peace to save the day. Overacting, underacting, non-acting and acting that somehow combines all three makes it feel like you’re watching a Shakespeare in the Park production you stumbled upon after suffering head trauma and Randal Malone pops up as a rhyming town coroner to remind you that you are definitely trapped in a low-budget hell. Its heart is in right place and there’s enough likable aspects to keep you floating just above boredom.
⭐️⭐️
Following a nervous breakdown and a concerning amount of goofy behavior (sleepwalking hilarity ensues), special investigator Lance O’Leary (Patric Knowles whose handsome ass showed up in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and The Wolf Man) is sent to the hospital to recuperate. Well, that’s not gonna be so simple as he gets caught up in a murder mystery with his nurse Sara (the lovely Ann Sheridan from Mystery House) who has a history with Lance and ain’t all that happy with him at the moment. But, personal issues are put to the side because a wealthy patient, who donated a fortune’s worth of radium to the hospital to treat his skin condition, has been slain and the radium has been taken. Sara and Lance can only trust each other because they were locked in the detective’s room together during the murder. There’s plenty of suspects thanks to more than a few motivations for mischief but I got a good feeling the quibbling duo of obvious lovebirds-to-be will be able to crack the case… just not before a few more bodies drop. There’s minimal enjoyment as comedy takes the forefront and the thrills are left to wander around aimlessly, wasting a semi-decent cast with a simple story that has some problems with its structure.
aka The Mystery of Hunting’s End
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Banker, Hubert Kingrey, has discovered someone in his business has forged company documents and stolen loads of money. Instead of reporting these findings to the government, the genius businessman invites his fellow company officers (including a very young William Hopper who would later star in The Deadly Mantis and 20 Million Miles to Earth and kind of looks like the crossbreed of Richard Gere and Leslie Nielsen) to a hunting lodge and proceeds to tell them what he’s come across after they deny him the opportunity to pull his business out of bankruptcy with all of their securities. To the surprise of absolutely nobody watching at home, he ends up shot to death. It’s made to look like a suicide but his daughter Gwen thinks that’s some real bullshit because unlike her father, she has a functioning brain. She seeks aid from her elderly aunt’s nurse, Sarah (knockout Ann Sheridan), and Sarah recommends bringing her detective boyfriend Bruce (Dick Purcell, who we have seen in King of the Zombies and Phantom Killer and also played Captain America in 1944 before dying of a heart attack at the age of 38) in on things. The detective isn’t initially convinced that there’s more here than a self-inflicted end thanks to the whole locked room setup but he’s travels to the hunting lodge after Gwen gets all the likely suspects gathered together. One of the guests supposedly commits suicide while out hunting and this causes quite a stir amongst everyone and then more bodies start dropping. Elderly Aunt Lucy keeps bitching that Gwen needs to mind her own business, everyone except the women and the detective act guilty as all hell and a barking dog seems to know more than anyone in the cast. The snowy setting comes with a nice and natural atmosphere while the simple mystery blueprint works just fine in the short runtime. It’s nothing special but the cast is pretty great and the dames sure are easy on the eyes.
