You’ll Die at Midnight (1986) (Italy)

aka Midnight Killer/Die at Midnight/Midnight Ripper/Carol Will Die at Midnight

⭐️⭐️⭐️

A violent argument comes from the discovery of a wife’s infidelity and the husband, Nicola, is soon suspected of murder when the woman ends up very dead at the hands of a black-gloved assailant. Nicola storms out of the flat after assaulting his wife when their loud name calling leads to physical abuse and causes the woman to stab him in the hand with an ice pick. Inspector Piero Terzi (the always welcome Paolo Malco) likes the detective with a drinking problem and a violent streak for the murder and he enlists the help of a psychological profiler to aid in proving the man’s guilt. The profiler, Anna Berardi is not convinced of Nicola’s guilt (she knows the man and loved him in the past and she doesn’t believe he has it in him. He’s also already come to her begging for her help.) and thinks that a supposedly dead serial murderer may not have perished in a fire some eight years ago. The inspector highly doubts a ghost could be behind these murders but a growing body count and a twist or two keep him on his toes. Things best get figured out soon because Inspector Terzi’s daughter (and Anna’s student) becomes a target after Berardi shares her suspicions with her students. The killer with an ice pick is also keeping busy with the attractive female population in between stalking targets of with character relevance. Familiar faces abound throughout Lamberto Bava’s perfectly adequate giallo that lacks the splatter one would expect from an Italian 80s genre picture and relies more on the mystery befuddling our heroes. I don’t know if I’m just softening in my old age, but I’ll take that trade even if it doesn’t make for an exactly thrilling time.

Blood of the Werewolf (2001) (USA)

⭐️⭐️

A dirt-cheap werewolf anthology shot in the backyards, backwoods and lazy streets of Michigan or the side streets of New York and released straight to video in the early aughts is something that makes this old heart sing. Don’t worry. I’m fully aware that I am, in fact, the problem. Blood Reunion starts things off with writer Edward Sparrow reluctantly coming back to his hometown looking up an old classmate by the name of Jane Radford following his divorce. He’s disheartened to find the young woman is still under the tyrannical eye of Granny Radford. She warns him that Granny should be home soon and she’s so worried about it she tries to sneak him out before the old bag can see the gentleman caller. Granny is a real bitch and ain’t happy at all that there’s a man in the house. The man takes his leave as the hag pisses and moans. A brief flash of a rubber-mask werewolf follows some in-camera POV effects. The local sheriff stops by the hotel where the writer is staying to question him about a string of animal mutilations going on. Edward being a horror writer and arriving just in time for the mutilations has the sheriff suspicious. Jane stops by soon after. Local drunks/idiots crack middle-aged jokes at Jane as she walks home and the one who looks most like an uncle (in a fucking Red Dog hat, to boot!) stumbles off alone and is quickly mauled. More questions come the sarcastic author’s way from the sheriff and he’s told to not leave town. He and Granny have a confrontation when he comes by to check on Jane and grandma shares the tragic story of the girl’s birth and talks about a family curse and the “sins of the flesh”. It’s like Michigan by way of Bible Belt. Edward decides to leave town and Jane tries to stop him but he’s convinced her grandma is filling her head with bullshit and has had enough. Edward’s love and lust for the woman is just going to lead to tragedy and the revelation of a delightfully cheap lady werewolf. It’s a stretch getting to the climactic amateur bliss but well worth the bland trip. It closes with needless exposition and a cameo by a New York (maybe Michigan) prostitute. Next up is Old Blood and it’s about another doomed romance, except some bible-thumping granny ain’t around this time to put a stop to all the tomfoolery. A lesbian couple consists of one supernatural predator and a mortal woman who wants to join her lover in lycanthropy. The wolf-woman doesn’t want to put that curse on her girlfriend but she is persistent about joining the pack and gaining power she’s only ever dreamed of. Relationship struggles are discussed and conversations about the awfulness of the curse play out like it’s the most interesting thing to ever be caught on camera. The eager idiot ends up regretting her choice and once we see what the beast looks like, we can sympathize with her because I feel bad for anyone who has to wander around looking as stupid as she does. There’s talk of a ceremony and breaking the curse… there’s alot of talk in this one. Everyone is awful and nobody deserves a happy ending. The final segment is Man Beast and features a man being chased by two hunters through the woods because of his “curse”. We hear his inner monologue and then watch as the hunters briefly become the hunted before becoming the hunters again. There’s some butt-metal music playing throughout the extended chase. Camouflage and middle-aged dad adventures play out in some dreary stretch of wilds. The twist is so poorly set up that I don’t know if anything this telegraphed could technically be called a “twist”. And this one just keeps on trucking along. The whole anthology strives to be something deeper than it is and the viewer certainly pays the price for this movie’s pretentious ambitions. What could have been a stupid monster flick starring people just a bit too old to be making stupid monster flicks sinks into a boring stew of character studies with a focus on nobody cares about and action that exists in a realm consisting of material cut for being to dull from a teenager’s home movie. The local aesthetic is right up my alley and the cast of uncles in the bookends makes me very happy. The cheap monsters are also my kind of fun but are barely featured. Stupid enough for one viewing but they’ll be no revisits.

Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965) (UK)

aka The Night Caller/Night Caller from Outer Space

⭐️1/2

Those damn mutant humanoids from Ganymede are after our women! Their species is nearing extinction and they are grabbing Earth babes to breed with… well, they just need the blood I believe… and not even alot of blood or anything! Damn those Ganymedians… Ganymedes? Watching an unknown object enter Earth’s atmosphere and somehow not burn up and more impressively changing course, Dr. Morley, Dr. Costain (John fuckin’ Saxon) and Ann Barlow offer their scientific help to the military crawling around the area where it landed. Instead of the large object they are expecting to discover, they come across a freezing, basketball-sized sphere and probing it with x-rays after bringing it back to their lab, it’s discovered to be mostly hollow, free of radiation and made up of an unclassified silicon composition. Sexy Ann stays late to work on some documentation and is beset by a clawed hand belonging to something that must be rather large and had to have emerged from the sphere. Alien energy bullshit is believed to be behind the impressive transmission of matter and whatever the hell that gnarly hand belongs to manages to kill one of the doctors and steal a military jeep in order to escape the base where the sphere is being studied. A growing number of kidnapped young women points to a sinister plot in the works. These supple young women who have gone missing were answering an add placed in a “Bikini Girl” magazine and it looks like that crazy alien is using the oldest trick in the book to get their claws on some English knockouts. This is how Ann ends up planting herself in harms way to get some answers about the threat currently plaguing London. Incredibly stuffy and talkative exercise in boredom has a bout 20 minutes of dialogue for every scene with a rubbery a monster hand not doing much of anything. John Saxon delivers science jargon much to my everlasting delight and Patricia Hanes is very easy on the eyes as the only female character with any depth (as barebones as it may be) but a 60’s monster movie about an alien using a bikini magazine to kidnap girlies should not be this bland.

Blood of the Vampires (1966) (Philippines/USA)

aka Curse of the Vampires/Creatures of Evil/Whisper to the Wind

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Visiting their father’s estate in a small Filipino village, two siblings learn that their father has changed his will. Papa suffers a heart attack on the night of a ball being hosted at his home when his daughter bursts into the room to tell him about screams she heard coming from the family crypt. Eduardo and Leonor are confused as to why their dear old dad has ordered them to burn his whole damn castle to the ground at the time of his death, especially since the son was promised the vast estate. Eduardo figures out why when he’s shown a secret passageway by his ailing father and is horrified to see that his dear old mother has become a vampire thanks to a family curse. It’s all too late to do much of anything but harm because mama eventually bites her son (he foolishly believes he’s safe around the monster) and he begins to get up to vampiric shenanigans (poor bastard is still reflecting in mirrors so he can see his fangs show up). The fresh vamp attacks and takes a bride on a late-night stroll. He even puts an end to his papa’s life when the family patriarch kills the woman who started all of this. His sister enlists the help of her boyfriend Daniel (who really doesn’t like Eduardo) to attempt an escape but it doesn’t go all that well. There’s a shockingly heavy focus on generational trauma that I was not expecting at all in a Filipino horror flick from this decade but it adds a nice level of weight to the genre dynamics. We still get ourselves some torch-carrying villagers and pointy fangs to hit the familiar notes and a fucking ghost to add a layer of weirdness. Doomed romance, whips, chains, fog and some lovely gel-cap usage keep it all rolling. It drags in spots and holds a bit too closely to the supernatural storytelling that came before it but it’s still a truly unexpected treat for a low-budget vampire flick.

Brain of Blood

aka Brain Damage/The Brain/The Creature’s Revenge/The Oozing Skull/The Undying Brain

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

A dying benevolent Middle Eastern leader has his brain transplanted into the body of a mentally challenged and disfigured (burned with battery acid by some drunk bumpkins) behemoth by the name of Gor (with a name like that, he was doomed to be a hulking monster and of course he’s played by John Bloom) at the hands of a doctor working on the cutting edge (i.e. bullshit) of brain science, Dr. Trenton (Kent Taylor from Brides of Blood). Things go very wrong because that’s just inevitable and eventually a brutish beast with a new but failing brain is causing a problem for more than a few people. You see, what Trenton was keeping to himself and far from the concerned compatriots of the beloved leader from the made up nation of Khalid, is that for the transfer to work the body needs to be very fresh… like, we gonna have to murder somebody fresh. That goes wrong because the corpse of the burglar/probable-rapist Gor tosses from a building is in no condition to be of much use, which gets the doctor thinking Gor is his best option as the clock winds down on his ability to successfully pull off his bs science and laugh in the face of all those fools who doubted him. That’s not all that’s working against things because possible political bullshit, definitely fatal scheming and the malicious sleaziness of Trenton’s dwarf assistant (Angelo Rossitto probably best remembered from Freaks, although I’ve seen him in at least a dozen other things) have further complicated matters, it’s almost like transplanting brains illegally is a business that just calls to untrustworthy lunatics. Her loveliness Regina Carrol (lovely in a 60’s backup lounge singer way, that is) is around as the fiancée of the unfortunate leader (also his top secret agent) who gets called in by her future husband’s personal physician (holy shit, it’s Grant Williams from The Incredible Shrinking Man) after he manages to escape an assassination attempt. Everything goes to Hell because you just can’t trust anyone. Al Adamson unleashes some more drive-in fun with this mad scientist trash classic featuring chained women, an evil dwarf, an unlikely dungeon, a science gun that looks like it belongs in a movie from two decades earlier and Count Dracula himself Zandor Vorkov! That’s a big deal if you’re as big of a fan of Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein as I am. The drag is felt at various points as dungeon exploring, low-budget spy movie hijinks and plenty of chatter drag things to a halt but we’re always just a few minutes away from Regina Carrol’s humongous hair (Al Adamson’s most impressive special effect), low-rent laboratory tomfoolery and dangerous science.

Eye of the Beast (2007) (Canada)

⭐️⭐️⭐️

A scientist from the National Oceanographic Research Agency (James Van Der Beek) comes to a small fishing village, looking into the depletion of aquatic life in the area. There’s a local monstrous legend supposedly calling the lake home and when a young man is pulled out of the water with a story about a monster attack, the government egghead begins suspecting some weird shit is going down. The fishermen are hiding something and prefer blaming the awfulness on the local Native Americans and are obviously pieces of shit. Van Der Beek teams up with and falls for Officer Kat Thomas, a fishery officer and the only law in town following the sudden death of the sheriff. As the bodies pop up, Kat closes down the lake which has the local fishermen upset. The higher-ups disbelieve Van Der Beek’s conclusion and Kat saw the beast take her daddy when she was little, so most of the town thinks she’s a nut-bar looking for validation. When the main fisherman gets his ass attacked, racism gets put on the back burner and the hunt is on... more death follows. The significant lack of monster action definitely detracts from one’s enjoyment but there’s enough character development to keep ya are interested... if you’re into that sort of thing. The giant tentacles are delightful and mostly all you get to see which is both sensical and practical but still disappointing. James Van Der Beek fights a giant cephalopod... you’re either sold or you’re not.

Pick Me Up (2006) (USA/Canada)

⭐️⭐️⭐️

The under-appreciated Larry Cohen works from a David J. Schow (the man who coined the terms “stalk-and-slash” and “splatterpunk”) script for his serial killer outing in the Masters of Horror series. On a desolate patch of mountain road, a bus breaks down and its passengers make a few dangerous choices. Cautious and tough Stacia (Fairuza fuckin’ Balk) decides to walk the 12 to 14 miles to the nearest hotel, Birdy and Danny decide to hitchhike with a helpful and possibly insane truck driver (Michael fuckin’ Moriarty) and a paranoid wife and her frustrated husband decide it’s safer to stay with the bus driver until help comes. A charming hitchhiker comes across the bus and all the pieces are in place for an unexpected turf war between two serial killers and a handful of strangers who just had some truly terrible luck. Paths are crossed at the tiny motel where Stacia is staying unfortunately sandwiched between a truck driver who is following the trail of bodies and the hitchhiker who needed a place to torture his latest victim. Cohen does what he does best by allowing some interesting and flawed characters to breathe in the hands of some very good character-actors. Schow’s script may be a little scattered and silly but it creates enough space for the antagonists to prosper, unfortunately the protagonist kind of gets the short end of the stick. It’s still a good time. The wonderful Michael Eklund shows up as a rest stop cashier who gets to be the focal point of Moriarty’s acting chops. Lucky.