Writer/director Michael Dougherty is one of the writers behind Superman Returns and X2, which led me to believe this movie was going to suck. Not because those are terrible movies, but because the type of mind capable of engineering crowd pleasers usually doesn’t know jack shit about horror. (See: When Michael Bay got a wild urge to produce a Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, a movie I can’t imagine he ever actually watched, let alone liked.) Doughtery is an exception to the rule. Though Trick ‘r Treat looks like an expensive studio film, it doesn’t behave like one.

Nor does it look like a studio film from the 2000s. Consider what the average overproduced horror movie looked like at the time. Everything had an artificial slickness to it, greatly in part due to the recent advancement of digital color correction. Phony looking CGI was used out the wazoo, often to rob a practical effect of its punch. And it was the golden age of endless remakes, PG-13 ratings, and horror as tame as daytime television. Doughtery bucks the trends, making instead a film that’s equal parts whimsical and gruesome. There’s only one brief shot I clocked as gratuitous CGI. Luckily, it didn’t take me completely out of the movie. (I have a feeling CGI is used all over the place, but if it’s tasteful enough that I don’t notice it, who gives a shit?)

Told out of chronological order, the film cold-opens with a tasteful nod to John Carpenter’s Halloween before careening into a dark comedy featuring the wonderful pairing of Dylan Baker and Brett Kelly, the latter of whom played Thurman Merman in Bad Santa. This segment introduces the premise of the film: Halloween was a tradition designed to keep the bad things at bay, but because nobody takes the holiday seriously anymore, the bad things are slowly creeping back into the world. There are a lot of bad things in Dougherty’s world, from killer bus drivers to vampires who feel emboldened enough to kill in the middle of a crowded street.

One tale has Anna Paquin walking a wooded trail in a Little Red Riding Hood costume. Another features Brian Cox wearing a prosthetic nose that makes him appear as if he’s auditioning for Ebenezer Scrooge. Perhaps my favorite tale of all reveals why a group of local kids are collecting a specific number of jack-o-lanterns; there’s a tale within the tale, which is told in the manner of a creepy campfire story, sans campfire. The most interesting of all the creatures is the small figure which is seen appearing across every section of the movie, always watching from the shadows with a large burlap mask and a candy bag. This little bugger becomes considerably less interesting when it is ultimately unmasked, but I respect what Dougherty was going for here.

I was beginning to believe I had already seen every great horror anthology film. Trick ‘r Treat proves me wrong. The genius of it is the fact that not only are all these tales interconnected in amusing ways, Dougherty chews them up and spits them out into a traditional narrative rather than giving them the segmented pace that derails too many anthologies. Frankly, I don’t even know how it occurred to him to skip a horror host or a container gimmick. It kind of makes everything preceding it feel old hat. Most impressive of all is the fact that all the tales are equally entertaining. No duds. No bullshit. Just an extremely entertaining movie.

Last week I reported that Scanners II favored entertainment over interesting ideas, resulting in a noticeably inferior film to the 1981 classic. Scanners III: The Takeover abandons ideas altogether, but takes up the slack with fine cheese and a dynamite villain in the form of Polish actress Liliana Komorowska. The filmmakers knew exactly what she brought to the table and abandoned all pretense that this movie was about the purported hero. In fact, the hero is initially sidelined so that Komorowska can carry the bulk of the plot as both villain and protagonist. Scanners II may be the better sequel, from a filmmaking standpoint, but I much prefer this one because it gives the lizard brain exactly what it wants… and my lizard brain wants more Komorowska.

The film opens with a scanner psychically hurling a guy dressed as Santa Claus through a high rise window. A little girl walking down the sidewalk points to the sky and says, “Look, Mommy! It’s Santa!” At which point the man’s body smashes onto the pavement directly in front of her. (What also went out the window was my ability to review this movie in any kind of objective manner because this is the kind of movie I live for.) The scanner responsible for the accident is devastated that he killed his friend so he packs up and leaves America to do some soul searching.

So the original film featured a drug called Ephemerol, Scanners II introduced the variant EPH-2, and, in true uniform fashion, the third film in the series gives us EPH-3. (This reminds me of how the logo worn by the characters in Ghostbusters 2 is posing with two fingers as if its designer somehow knew they were living in a sequel. Or perhaps the logo itself is sentient?) EPH-3 now comes in the form of a dermal patch worn behind the ear. When Komorowska’s Helena Monet (Alex’s adoptive sister) learns that her father figure is planning to take the drug to clinical trials, she decides she can’t wait and administers the patch to herself.

The next day, the psychic voices that normally torment Helena’s scanner mind have suddenly become manageable. She feels good, in a bad way, using her telekinetic powers to explode an annoying pigeon. It isn’t long before she pays a visit to the mad scientist who abused her as a child, freeing his current test subjects and supplying them with enough EPH-3 that they become loyal to her plight. Unlike the lousy villain of the previous film, Helena’s pattern of violence is strategic. Eventually she installs herself as the CEO of her father’s pharmaceutical corporation to ensure a steady supply of the miracle drug.

Unfortunately for Helena (and for those of us rooting for her), Alex returns home after a two-year stay in a Thai monastery. As the older sibling, Alex poses a challenge to Helena’s control of the corporation. Yes, the movie feels like it’s veering into routine territory as it clumsily folds Alex back into the plot, but thankfully it culminates in an extravagant but swift finale. As Species knew that it was Natasha Henstridge’s movie, Scanners III knows that it is Komorowska’s. Hell, I think I enjoyed this one more than Species.

Three astronauts are exposed to a severe blast of radiation while orbiting Saturn. Only one of the astronauts, Steve West, survives. (They never explain how he makes the return trip to Earth in his rapidly deteriorating condition.) You know it’s serious when the attending doctor checks the fully bandaged man’s chart and the only thing it says is RADIATION in bold red letters. Thankfully, those bandages don’t stay on for long as the movie is eager to show off its makeup effects, provided by the legendary Rick Baker. Steve is a mess of a man, leaving behind a sticky residue on everything he touches. His ability to reason has melted much like his flesh. You’ve seen slime monsters before, but few as gross as this one.

As soon as the doctor leaves, Steve bursts out of his restraints, chases a nurse through a plate glass door, and rips off a nearby fisherman’s head, which ends up in the waterfall where three kids play. Those kids, by the way, are bad little shits, first introduced sharing a cigarette even though they’re not even out of grade school. One asks the little girl if she wants to play Doctor before putting her up to a game of Hide & Seek, which is really just an excuse to ditch her. And the aforementioned severed head looks so good, the camera lingers on it longer than necessary as it floats down the river and ultimately sails over the waterfall, smashing wonderfully on a rock below.

Dr. Ted Nelson, played by fellow Oklahoman Burr DeBenning, gets on the phone and calls an Air Force general to let him know Steve has escaped. The phone call reveals that not only is the general familiar with Steve’s condition, this very thing has happened before, only Steve “seems to be getting stronger.” It’s imperative, the men agree, that Steve is found immediately for reasons that will remain undisclosed until the final minute of the film. This task is of such importance that Dr. Nelson spends the next few scenes idly chatting with coworkers before heading home to eat lunch with his wife. That may sound like the movie plods, but it doesn’t, as Steve is a busybody when it comes to a-meltin’ and a-killin’. When at last Dr. Nelson picks the general up at the airport, you expect them to speed off in a serious manner, at which point Nelson immediately stalls his Toyota like a man who’s never driven a stick.

I use the word “cheese” a lot to describe the movies I feature here, but rarely camp. The Incredible Melting Man isn’t in the cheese camp. It’s squarely in the camp camp. That doesn’t mean it’s completely lacking cheese (not to mention a little sleaze in a scene involving a pushy photographer), but it has more in common with a movie like The Thing with Two Heads than it does yesterday’s Cannibal Apocalypse, which oozed cheese and sleaze. Camp is what filmmakers like William Castle and John Waters did. No part of it wants to be taken seriously. Indeed, the director has lamented that he shot a funnier movie until American International Pictures ordered him to make the kills more serious. As much as I hate studio interference, I assume that “funnier” picture was less funny than the one we got. Subtly poking fun at the genre is almost always preferable to a full-on parody, the latter of which often functions identically to a bad imitation while the actors wink at the camera to remind you that they’re above the material.

The Incredible Melting Man is somewhat tame for a melt movie in terms of meanness, but it delivers the gross even though there’s only one meltdown shown. It just so happens it’s a long, grueling meltdown that lasts the entire movie. Maybe it loses a little steam toward the end (I am utterly bored by how so many of these movies end with a foot chase through mechanical spaces), but the film closes with a shot of its violent aftermath, which is quite amusing.

John Saxon plays Captain Hopper, whose unit wipes out a village in Vietnam. When he discovers a pit containing a couple of American POWs, one of the men viciously bites him on the arm. It turns out that the men have been kept in captivity so long, they’ve turned into ravenous cannibals. Fifteen or twenty years later, Hopper is suffering from PTSD back home. One of the men he rescued is being released from the mental institution, a man curiously named Charles Bukowski. Played by Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who you’ll recognize from a number of Italian horror films including two other cannibal flicks, Charlie wants to have a drink with the man who rescued him, but something he says triggers Hopper’s flashbacks, who turns the offer down.

In literally the same scene, the girl next door (Cinzia De Carolis from Argento’s The Cat o’ Nine Tails) is trying her hardest to seduce Hopper. Initially he shoots down her advances, but ultimately succumbs. Overtaken by an uncontrollable urge, Hopper goes down on the girl and bites her. Though it’s probably the last place anybody would want to be bitten, the girl enjoys it… because this is Italian cinema at its finest. Meanwhile, Charlie finds himself unable to contain his own cannibalistic tendencies when he sees a couple getting frisky in a movie theater. After taking a chunk out of the woman’s neck, a mob chases Charlie into a flea market where he gets into a standoff with the local police.

It turns out Charlie and Captain Hopper have a virus that turns anyone they bite into cannibals. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s apocalyptic levels of cannibalism, but it certainly spreads rapidly enough to thoroughly entertain. Eventually, the only group left to root for are the cannibals themselves, who Hopper leads into the sewers as the cops chase them with shotguns and a flamethrower. It’s a refreshingly different take on the cannibal movie, which usually cast stereotypical tribesmen as the cannibals. If the film were made today, hobbyless losers would probably accuse it of being woke for its diverse cast of cannibals and the fact that director Antonio Margheriti seems to sympathize with them.

And now for one of the most basic bitch opinions I have: One of the reasons there are so many Italian cannibal movies I wouldn’t watch a second time, much less review for this blog, is because of the unsimulated violence toward animals that was so common in them. Cannibal Apocalypse, unfortunately, has a two-second bit of animal abuse involving the aforementioned flamethrower and what appears to be a live rat. I can’t say for sure it was intentional… though it seems clear the filmmakers didn’t care if it happened, either, as you can plainly see there were no precautions guarding against it.

Other than that one blemish, Cannibal Apocalypse is possibly my favorite kind of movie to review. Italian horror (when it isn’t killing real animals) is simply my happy place. I don’t know how to defend this stance to the uninitiated and I don’t know how to make converts of those who don’t automatically get it. I cannot put into words why I love the run-and-gun nature of their economic filmmaking, which is admittedly fast, crude, but not at all artless. The strangely written (often dubbed) dialogue, the awkward cuts, the lingering shots of gore, the upbeat Italo disco music… they seem more like dreams than movies.

Cannibal Apocalypse has no ghosts, no monsters, no supernatural things that go bump in the night. Instead it offers a couple scenes of gobbledygook to explain why a cannibal virus is running amok, almost as an afterthought, and just runs with the idea. Like the similar but higher octane Nightmare City, it’s a zombie movie without the zombies, a mad scientist film without the boring mad scientists. Just pure action, a lot of gore, and very little filler. Okay, so it’s light on the logic, too, but that’s not an issue here. And it almost grazes the very surface of what Vietnam veterans must have faced upon reintegrating into American society, but that feels entirely accidental.

At any rate, I’m considering starting a new feature to catalogue all the Italian cannibal films that don’t feature actual cruelty to animals. So look forward to that sooner or never.

I’ve been staring at a blinking cursor, wondering how to construct this piece without giving too much away. Those of you who have seen the movie will know my dilemma. Those of you who haven’t may wonder why I phrase things a certain way. That’s what One Cut of the Dead is like: there’s a little bit of “wait, what?” going on in the beginning, but that’s only because you haven’t been initiated into the club yet.

So… do you like Japanese horror movies? Here’s one that ultimately does something so unexpected, it will likely become a part of the subgenre’s conversation forever. What starts out looking like nothing special eventually reveals itself to be layered in a thrilling way. There were parts of it that made me think, “What the fuck is this shit?” And by the end, I was happily won over. I think most will be, too, even if they’re not fans of horror. It’s the rarest kind of movie that begs to be seen again as soon as possible.

Here’s the premise: a small crew of filmmakers are shooting a low budget zombie movie when they’re attacked by actual zombies. It turns out the director of the movie-within-the-movie has summoned the real zombies to get a better performance from his lead actress. Now he runs around with a handheld camera, popping out of nowhere to enthusiastically yell “Action!” whenever she’s being attacked by the flesh eaters. Never mind the fact that none of the director’s footage would be usable. The dude has completely lost it.

Thankfully we’re not watching the movie through the lens of the erratic movie director, who drops in and out of the mayhem as his insanity deems fit. Instead we’re watching the events as captured by a silent camera operator who, in real life, would be screaming their head off. Yes, everything I described is captured in one continuous shot, hence the terrible title. The end credits say it’s based on a stage play (no surprise there) with a much better title: Ghost in the Box… though there aren’t any ghosts in the movie so I suppose it’s a very loose adaptation. (I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen the play as I don’t live in Japan.)

I digress. There have been several such movies designed to look as if they were captured in one take. The result is often impressive, but the more it’s done, the more it becomes a gimmick. One Cut of the Dead is very much a gimmick, but that’s clearly by design. It’s a gimmick with a purpose. Shot on location at an abandoned water treatment facility (standing in for a top secret military installation), the scenery offers a dynamic playground for the performers to run around in. At one point an actor almost falls through the railing of a second floor balcony for real, but the movie, as it must, goes on. When you’re shooting like this, you only get one shot, no resets, so cut it some slack, will ya?

This is like professional wrestling: not everything is sold well, but it’s extremely entertaining, more so in its second half than its peculiar first. It’s so wild, I kept thinking: Wouldn’t it be great to see the behind-the-scenes footage? I have a feeling that stuff would make the movie, and what it accomplishes, even more impressive. So that’s all I’m gonna say about this one, which is one of the more exciting movies I’ve seen all month. What a blast.

Norman Bates has just been released from the mental institution, twenty-two years after the events of the Hitchcock film. Not only is Norman’s psychiatrist (Robert Logia) optimistic about his rehabilitation, a number of the locals are surprisingly friendly to the murderer, including the sheriff (Hugh Gillan). One of the people who isn’t supportive is the sister of Marion Crane, who has Vera Miles reprising the role. Also returning is Anthony Perkins, playing the infamous mama’s boy with charm and affability.

While Norman was away, the state took care of his property, installing a crooked manager (Dennis Franz) who’s turned the Bates Motel into a flophouse. Norman is shocked to discover drugs and prostitution are now the motel’s most desired amenities, so he fires the manager, turning the man into an enemy. Meanwhile, prank calls and nasty notes pile up in an attempt to make Norman snap. Perkins plays the role so well, you don’t wait for the excitement that comes from his inevitable backsliding into psychosis. Instead, you find yourself rooting for him to keep it together.

Enter Mary (Meg Tilly), the troubled young woman who moves in with Norman. The script takes care to establish that her character is an idiot (she even refers to herself as stupid), presumably to suspend the audience’s disbelief that anyone would be dumb enough to move in with a convicted murderer. While the gambit might have paid off in a better movie, the script has many more characters whose stupidity isn’t explained. The dumbest of them all is Marion’s sister, whose complicated revenge plot hinges on putting another one of her family members in danger. This is some wildly stupid stuff, but it’s entertaining as hell. You get the feeling that everyone involved is well aware it isn’t Shakespeare (or Hitchcock for that matter) and that’s alright.

Even if it is an uneven mess, Psycho II isn’t as blasphemous as Gus Van Idiot’s masturbatory remake of the original. It’s clear that Perkins took the assignment seriously, rather than looking for an easy paycheck. Even as the plot concocts one excuse after another to separate the delusional man from more reliable narrators (and witnesses), he’s a blast to watch… which is to say until the script calls for his full blown insanity, giving him little more to do than stare blankly while he monologues about murders he may or may not have committed. Fret not because there’s a wonderful sequence of events waiting for you at the end of this film, which knows it can’t top the original’s ending and goes for macabre humor instead.

One could pick at the plot holes for hours, but I won’t fault the logic in a movie that has none. This is the kind of picture in which people can be murdered in dusty basements and the perpetrator can scrub away all traces of blood, change into clean clothes, and establish an alibi before the cops investigate the scene of the crime only minutes later. There are moments when someone watches Mary through a hole in the bathroom wall and I still don’t know who was actually doing the peeping. And there are so many people sneaking into Norman’s home, I have to wonder: Where the hell are they parking? The Bates Motel is supposed to be in the middle of nowhere.

There are a few moments of gore, which feel like an intentional hybrid between Hays Code sensibilities of the 60s and 80s slasher trends, landing somewhere in between the two eras in terms of gruesomeness. At one point, a character falls down the very stairs where Martin Balsam died in the first film, only this fall is much more kinetic and ends with a self-inflicted wound, which is captured in a nasty close-up with grizzly sound effects. Even so, none of the imagery is quite as visceral as the moment when the very tip of the killer’s knife dimpled Janet Leigh’s skin in the first film… I don’t know why that bloodless image is so much more effective than anything in this film, which literally shows a wound spreading open on a victim’s face (which is a pretty good effect, by the way).

By the end, it’s clear that the entire film was just an excuse to get Norman out of prison and back in the motel so they could turn the character into an 80s movie slasher in future installments. I can think of dozens of slashers I like much less than Anthony Perkins in this role so I’ll take it.

In order to understand how Hard Rock Zombies exists, it helps to know about director Krishna Shah’s American Drive-In, a screwball comedy along the lines of Lloyd Kaufman’s Squeeze Play and Stuck On You. Shot on location at an actual drive-in, the movie eschewed a traditional plot for a string of unconnected comedy scenes. It contained the kind of “boys will be boys” humor in which the majority of the jokes were essentially “Look at how fat/gay/horny this character is!”

Rather than license an existing film, Shah set out to shoot key scenes of a fake movie that American Drive-In’s characters could watch whenever he needed a cutaway of the screen. As with most movies-within-a-movie, Shah’s would be a heightened parody, jampacked with a laundry list of horror tropes. Zombies? You got it. Werewolves? Why the hell not. Incredibly shitty rock music? We gotchu, fam. Then someone on the production had a brilliant idea: Why not make the movie-within-a-movie a feature length film? And so Hard Rock Zombies was born, somehow beating its parent film to release.

And if you thought my description of American Drive-In indicated questionable content, you’ve seen nothing yet. The heroes of Hard Rock Zombies are a sleazy rock band who make numerous comments about their underage roadies. One of their songs, written about a ~13 year old who the hero meets on the road, is as follows: “I’m so in love, but you’re so young. When you touch my hand, does that mean we’re in love?” I point this out not because it contains such content, but because the film seemingly endorses it. These are the heroes of the film, after all, and while I’m no stranger to movies featuring challenging characters for a good reason, this one plays out like an Anthony Kiedis documentary as directed by Brett Ratner.

There are admirable qualities to be found, too, provided you like DIY movies such as Video Violence and Rock N’ Roll Nightmare. The rock band is invited to stay at a secluded mansion where they are murdered by a family of ghouls and later resurrected through the power of rock. What’s most interesting about the film is it doesn’t seem to have a script at all. It appears they’re just dragging a camera crew out and winging it. No, the end result is nowhere near as good as This Is Spinal Tap, but it keeps the kill-to-fluff ratio surprisingly balanced. Even the fluff is entertaining in a gloriously stupid way. At one point the head patriarch of the family randomly removes a mask, revealing that he has been Adolf Hitler in disguise all along. Frankly, if you’re going to put Hitler in your movie, you should give him a much nastier death than the one seen here.

The hard rock zombies exact their revenge and return to LA where they audition for a hot shot record producer. Unfortunately, they’ve left a trail of non-rock zombies in their wake, which are now wreaking havoc on a small town of morons. At one point the morons hypothesize that, because zombies are the antithesis of intellectualism, zombies must be scared of human heads the way vampires fear crucifixes. So a group of survivors take to the streets, hiding behind giant faces of Elvis, John Lennon, and Marylin Monroe, only to get themselves predictably killed. This gag might have worked if the film didn’t have such terrible comedic timing. Much like American Drive-In, the whole thing devolves into one unconnected scene after another.

Like the extended cut of Underworld, which I featured last Saturday, the relatively new Blu-Ray edition of this film restores some of its censored content in the form of VHS quality footage. Unlike Underworld, the film quality is so janky to begin with, the VHS footage doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. In fact, I suspect many viewers may not even notice it. There is so little of this restored content, however, that the runtime of both versions clocks in at at 97 minutes. Even so, the vast majority of the gore is contained in that scant footage.

Knowing what I know now, I would probably skip it if I were you… but I’m not you. Because I’m me, I’d watch it anyway. Not great. Barely good.

Martyrs hits differently after the Epstein revelations. Now its depiction of a secret society of wealthy sickos getting away with horrifying crimes hits too close to home. Yes, there have been several such films dealing with underground organizations, usually as mere plot devices. Almost all were labeled “tortured porn” to dismiss their value. Martyrs, however, is more in the vein of Funny Games than a Saw film. More Straw Dogs than The Human Centipede. It’s such an electric piece of entertainment, I wonder how its director ultimately ended up making a film starring Jessica Biel, the Avril Lavinge of cinema.

First, a disclaimer: some may call shenanigans on my praise here due to my distaste for movies such as Haute Tension, a similar “New French Extremity” (a classification I find nearly as idiotic as “torture porn”). I’ve also made it known that I prefer fun gore to the realistic kind. That’s a preference, not the law. I don’t mind a dour movie if it doesn’t take itself more seriously than it deserves. Martyrs is as serious as a heart attack, but it’s well-made and thoughtful enough to earn it. If I had any complaints about its style, it’s that the kinetic camerawork stays so close to its subjects that it’s right on the edge of losing readability. Which is obviously intentional.

In the prologue, little Lucie escapes her kidnappers and ends up in an orphanage where she befriends Anna, a girl roughly the same age. Suffering from extreme PTSD and depression, Lucie finds herself incapable of telling the authorities anything useful. Fifteen years later, an adult Lucie invades the secluded home of the people she believes kidnapped her, armed with a double-barrel shotgun. The result is bloody and unflinchingly brutal. She calls Anna, who secretly loves Lucie, to help her in the aftermath. When it’s revealed there’s an additional threat in the house, you may be thinking to yourself, “Why don’t they just get the hell out of there? Why do they keep going back in?” But the reasons are complex and, halfway through the movie, become utterly obvious. A lesser movie would have saved this explanation as the big twist at the end. This film knows modern audiences are savvy and doesn’t try to hide it.

This is not a film in which women are abused just to exact their revenge for entertainment reasons, à la I Spit On Your Grave (which I would argue is great in its own right). It’s a film in which abuse becomes cyclical and violence begets violence. None of that violence is fantastical. None of it is easy to look at. None of it is fun. Yet the gore never feels gratuitous even though there’s a boatload of it. At any rate, there is a sickness on the screen and it is certainly not for the faint of heart.

There’s nary a bad performance. Even the villains’ farfetched scheme (my least favorite aspect of the movie) is acceptable at best and negligible at worst. I could talk about Martyrs at length, but doing so would necessitate the need for spoilers. I have been very careful not to give away what this movie actually is. You can praise the mainstream appeal of “elevated horror” all you want, but horror will always be at its best when it’s as polarizing and unapologetic as this.

It’s nearly a perfect horror film. I have zero interest in the American remake.

Brain Dead was a film I wanted to feature during last year’s 31 Days of Gore, but the only copy I had available at the time was the same crappy 4:3 edition that’s currently playing on Tubi. Starring Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, can you blame me for wanting to see it? George Kennedy, Bud Cort, and Patricia Charbonneau fulfill supporting roles in this Julie Corman production. That’s a good cast and a good producer so fuck it—I’m there, dude.

Bill Pullman plays a research scientist with a large collection of human brains. The extent of his studies, as far as I can tell, is prodding a brain that’s connected to a cadaver’s face. Pullman and his research assistant poke the brain’s wrinkles to see what expressions the face will make. Though the movie fails to convey the scientific value of such an endeavor, Bill Paxton, playing a corporate sleazeball, convinces Pullman to operate on a live human brain. The patient? Bud Cort’s character, a brilliant mathematician who was institutionalized before delivering a valuable equation to Paxton’s company.

<SPOILERS AHEAD>

Shortly after performing the surgery, Pullman is struck by a car while crossing the street. Spoilers, I guess, but I’m not ruining anything you won’t see coming from a mile away, anyway: everything that happens from that point forward takes place entirely in the hero’s head. You could show this movie to a child in an uncontacted tribe and they’d probably sigh and say, “It’s all just a dream, isn’t it?” I feel like the reason these movies were so popular at the time is because the filmmakers could do whatever they wanted, make no effort to give the film a coherent narrative, and end the movie wherever they wanted. None of this means anything. None of it is consequential. There’s zero suspense when you know exactly what it’s up to.

Movies like this can work when the character actively grows as he unravels the mystery, but Pullman is completely confused to the bitter end, having ultimately stumbled through one disconnected scene after another. In one scene his wife is cheating on him with Paxton. In the next, Pullman’s murdered them both. And in a scene shortly after that, Paxton has become an entirely different character. Don’t get me wrong: the actors are as good as they can possibly be in a movie like this. Bud Cort is particularly entertaining. Pullman’s performance, too, is noteworthy as always.

I’m not saying it’s a terrible movie. It’s mildly entertaining and I never got as bored with it as I did with yesterday’s Hellmaster. Frankly, I’m jazzed as all get-out that there’s a movie with my two favorite Bills sharing scenes. That alone is worth a look, but you really don’t have to finish the damn thing once you get a taste. With this cast and the inherited creepiness of humans poking around in brains, it should have been a whole helluva lot better. In fact, where are the good horror movies about brain surgery? I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head.