⭐️⭐️1/2
Teenagers refurbish an old opera house and are picked off by a murderous clown who ties into a past tragedy at the location. This tragedy was the murder of a lead actress who just so happens to be the birthmother (she never knew her) of one of the youthful idiots cleaning up the joint by the name of Kate. Kate’s been convinced by her friend (the super-cute Tatyana Ali) the way to cure nightmares she’s been having since learning about her mother is to work in the building where her mother met an untimely death. Sure. Whatever. It’s Tatyana Ali, so it sounds right coming out of her beautiful face. There’s a bitchy diva there, her football-stud boyfriend, drama teacher Margot Kidder rocks a necktie, James Duval plays an FX artist bad boy, a couple other likable theater geeks hang around and Christopher Plummer collects a paycheck and puts way more effort into his role then the movie deserves as the theater owner who fills the kids in on the troubled history of the joint… he also has a pretty big secret. Kate keeps getting visions of her mother’s death and freaks the fuck out. Sexy James Duval starts crushin’ on the possibly insane Kate and the old-ass high schoolers get locked in the building and get themselves perished. The Canio costume from Pagliacci is one freaky-ass look, there’s one of the laziest montages I have ever witnessed, followed by an incredibly lame sex scene, our hero sucks, the acting definitely fits the whole inexperienced-theater-kid vibe and Margot Kidder gets an axe to the noggin. It’s kinda lame and kinda enjoyable in unison and Plummer gets to cut loose as the film winds down.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Hammer excellence opens with British archaeologists unearthing the tomb of the princess Ananka and paying for it with their lives. An attempted warning from the devoted Mehemet Bey is ignored and after the desecration leaves the leader of the group insane, the tomb is eventually sealed by his son and brother. Three years pass and Mehemet arrives in England with the towering mummy Kharis. He uses the Scroll of Life to resurrect the mummy and knock off the violators. A wrench is thrown into the plan when the son’s wife is revealed to be the spitting image of Kharis’ love, Princess Ananka. Christopher Lee is my odds-on favorite mummy and definitely the most terrifying version of the shambling corpse. Cushing is perfect (as usual) as the young archeologist confronting the living dead but the whole thing is Lee’s show. There’s your customary flashback revealing the origin and an excellent atmosphere expertly handled by Terence Fisher. A classic.
aka Travis/Paper Dolls/Black Forest
⭐️⭐️1/2
A lake house party near the Canadian border leads to the deaths of seven local students. One year later, celebrating their high school graduation, Travis (who was at the party) and his buddy Nate embark on a trip through Canada. We know shit didn’t go well because following some recorded footage from the fateful party, we open with Travis in an interrogation room, laying out what happened on the trip. They were given a route into Canada down an old logging road by a creepy gas station attendant, which the adventurous Nate ate right up. Bad move. The best buds get their asses attacked by some big and hairy somethings. They grab Nate and flee when they set off the car alarm. Travis manages to get ahold of Nate’s brother, Chris, and tells him what went down. He makes his way back to the gas station and the weirdo attendant fills him in on the Sasquatch legend but Travis is sure they were just people in furs. Turns out the gas pumper used to be a professor and an expert on the subject and he shows him a video of one of his seminars (in a scene that gave me some Night of the Demon vibes). He had a theory that Francisco Vázquez de Coronado abandoned some slaves near Canada and they became what we know today as Sasquatch. Chris comes for Travis and they both head to the spot of the abduction, looking to find Nate. Chris gets got and Travis escapes in his truck... which brings us back to the interrogation room. One officer believes Travis is full of shit, the gas station attendant doesn’t back the boy’s story and Travis’ journal paints a picture of a disturbed young man betrayed by his best buddy and his girlfriend. There’s some iffy acting, which distracts slightly, but it still has a nice streak of originality pumping through its veins. It’s not great but it ain’t all bad either.
⭐️⭐️
Sam Mason seems pretty relaxed for a man looking into the abyssal eyes of death. His final seconds in the electric chair don’t seem to bother him much and it turns out there’s a good damn reason for that. He may have been prevented from killing the classically handsome Terri, but it would seem he was able to get his thirteenth victim to complete some kind of immortality-granting satanic ritual. Terri, now with aspirations to be a reporter, has agreed to write an article on Mason for a local newspaper in a macabre celebration of the one year anniversary of the serial killer’s execution. After watching a segment on the show Super Natural, she decides to attempt to catch the ghostly voice of the man that tried to kill her by placing a microphone’s tape recorder on his grave. Unfortunately, a scuzzy grave robber comes across the device and decides to steal it. He listens to the recording and is possessed by the undying spirt of Sam Mason. What follows is a sluggish chase that fills up the majority of the film. There’s some violence but we’re more-so treated to B-Roll and some of the worst delivered dialogue this side of a Canadian head trauma ward. There’s a shit-ton of padding but it is an interesting look at the gestation of what Hugh Gallagher would bring to the table with his essential Gore Trilogy. It also lacks that sexy insanity that the best of the brain damaged SOV would provide. It’s a little fun but all in all it could have used some cutting of nearly half the runtime.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Folks disappearing into thin air is a crisis plaguing national forests worldwide. I’ve read the books. Written by a man with questionable morals. So it all must be true. McKenzie’s sister Marylyn has become a number in that troubling statistic but McKenzie is not going to sit back and take “We can’t find her.” for an answer. Along with her brother Martin (a knockoff Stephen Dorff), Martin’s fiancée Darcy, Darcy’s brother Edgar who has just gotten out of the hospital following a manic episode and Gerrik, their British pal who supplies comic relief, the group journey into the Cinder National Forest to find the missing girl. Marylyn had left a journal behind which featured some odd claims about doorways to different dimensions and nature not behaving as it should. These claims are enforced by a local named Leon who knows a thing or two about the high strangeness of the area and was in communication with the missing girl before she apparently slipped into the void. McKenzie figures this all sounds insane and thinks it best to keep this from her search party companions. Leon provides a couple vials of red liquid which he says will fend off the hallucinations that are definitely in the groups future. So it’s into the wilderness and into the paranormal clutches of things we humans could not possibly comprehend. May the forest Gods bless a solid cast and gorgeous filming locations because it gives your film a nice head start while it works towards revealing its cards. Family drama, suspicious claims and mystery motivations serve as building blocks but the odd woods quickly begin to play with the group almost immediately after entering the park. Ghosts and monsters haunt ‘em all, starting with the unstable Edgar so the hikers have a reason to doubt the growing uncanniness at first. An unsetting sun, an opening murder, woodland sex (dirt and leaves getting where dirt and leaves should never be is not an erotic scenario), hallucinations of something inhuman, possession and a central mystery that works well enough to keep you focused while it picks apart our group of heroes. Yeah there’s some predictable bits and yeah the British guy gets on the nerves every so often and yeah there’s some questionable story paths and sure there’s some eye-rolling thanks to overblown melodrama but it’s more intriguing than grating and the paranormal threat is given some thought as opposed to just slapping a cgi monster into scenes and spraying blood on the wall. It’s like a tame Evil Dead with a science fiction twist produced by a disgraced CW writer as an extended two-part pilot for SyFy… and that’s alright in my eyes.
aka Dark Heritage: The Final Descendant
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Following the massacre of a bunch of campers on a Louisiana campground, reporter Clint Harrison is sent to the area to investigate. It ties into a thought-to-be-dead family by the name of Dansen. The clan vanished years ago leaving behind an old mansion and a bit of infamy. Clint and his buddies decide to spend the night and get to the bottom of things. Well, the Dansen clan didn’t exactly die out, they just went underground and years on years of inbreeding has led to deformities and a diet frowned upon by the general public. The trio of buddies have a natural charisma that only years of friendship can account for because judging by the wooden line delivery, they’re buddies first and thespians second… maybe third. But that’s fine by me, never bothered me this far outside of Hollywood. The night they stay there, Clint’s friends and equipment go missing and the local police are thinking Clint may have something to do with it. Clint is ordered to take a paid leave and forget about the story he was working on but we all know that won’t be happening, especially when a tape from the missing camera he had set up overnight turns up in his car. It shows one of his friends being dragged off into the dark. Clint starts reading up on the history of the Dansen home and meets two graduate students researching parapsychology and the three head out to figure out what’s rotten in Louisiana. According to local legend, the awfulness concerning the home and the area around it is always proceeded by a bad thunderstorm. Damn shame that violent weather is hitting. After finding nothing but large “badger” holes they decide to wait out the storm in a camper van that belonged to a couple of the folks murdered in the massacre. One dude gets his face torn up and Clint convinces the dead man’s buddy they have to bury the body because nobody will believe them and they’d probably go to jail. Instead of just leaving it all in the past and dropping the obviously dangerous investigation, the two goofs keep digging. Tunnels under a forgotten graveyard and a big family secret bring things to the inevitable conclusion. Lovecraft’s Lurking Fear gets another uncredited adaptation but this time it’s on a budget and wearing its regional horror heart on its sleeve. Yes. That is a compliment. I’ve had a soft spot for this one since stumbling upon it years ago at the local video store I haunted for decades. It just shows what enthusiasm can bring to an obviously strapped production. Everybody looks like somebody’s uncle and the rubbery monsters are a treat along with the sudden bursts of graphic violence and unsettling nightmares that work way more than they should.
⭐️1/2
Dirt-cheap horror hijinks filmed on location at Smokey Joe’s Cafe in Charlotte, NC follows the misadventures of a cannibal who runs his own shithole restaurant which serves people to people. But I’m getting ahead myself, first we travel back to the year 1386 and witness a trio of black-robed members of some brotherhood punish a high priest by feeding his immortal ass a potion which causes rapid decay and the only way to restore it is too eat human flesh. Got it? Good. Now you’re all caught up. So now undead cannibal Goza is taking his curse out on the world… by randomly killing idiots who happen upon his place of business. He’s got a big-old servant by the name of Blozor who collects victims and a wait staff that are a mixture of horny and rude. A young man’s gal goes missing and he finds her ring in his hamburger, when he raises his concerns, Goza has Blozor kick him out. The dude ain’t gonna give up that easy and he manages to convince a horny blonde waitress to help him out. Or so he thought, after they discover a room full of severed limbs, he ends up getting a large butcher’s knife to the gut care of the blonde waitress. Why? I’m not really sure… she seemed pretty terrified and I think she ends up dead soon after. Maybe it was hypnotism? The movie just kind of carries on like this for a little more than an hour as random folks are introduced and then get murdered and served for dinner. There’s live music, an endless awkward dance party, actresses that are definitely actual North Carolinian strippers, the kind of performances one would expect to find in a film called Gore-met, Zombie Chef from Hell, Goza waxes poetic to the camera, a crazy homeless man hangs around outside the restaurant warning people away and talking about the importance of a “book” needed to defeat Goza and the paint drying just beside your television may prove to be a bit more thrilling than what’s happening on screen. A librarian shows up and Goza gets the hots, she also steals a big-ass antique book from his mantle. Those brotherhood derps show up again, talking about fixing their mistakes and putting an end to Goza for goodza (thank you, thank you). I’m usually all about these backyard epics but outside of brief inspired moments, this bad boy just drags major ass. It’s got aspirations or maybe it’s just delusions.
