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.

“20 years ago this place looked like a Nazi prison camp, but it wasn’t our fault. The program was young… things went astray. It was time for the superman. We dubbed it Project Nietzsche… after the philosopher. Back then, a lot of young minds were destroyed by something which, if used properly, could increase mental powers.”

—A mad scientist moments before getting punched in the face

Hellmaster opens with the Nietzsche quote “God is dead,” but if you’re expecting a thoughtful examination of the human condition in modern society, I must remind you that this is a blog in which, just yesterday, I praised a movie because it had a lot of boobies in it. The quote, conveniently truncated to remove all nuance, isn’t employed because Hellmaster is about to get philosophical on our asses. The film uses the quote because the filmmakers saw it in a magazine or something and went, “Huh-huh, cool….”

In the opening scene, David Emge (“Flyboy” from 1978’s Dawn of the Dead) is writing a letter to his wife, Lovecraft style, about horrors he has recently uncovered. A gaggle of zombie-ghouls shuffle into the room, one of whom is his wife. The man is presumably killed off screen and the film jumps forward six months, introducing the Kant Institute of Technology. The institute is a bare looking university (likely filmed during a real university’s Christmas break) in which the students don headsets and gather in a study hall to telecommute with their professor. The professor isn’t off campus or anything, he just prefers to do it this way.

When one of the students refers to a “mad man” living in the abandoned church on campus, it’s revealed that the so-called mad man is Robert, the character who was presumably killed in the opening scene. Robert is gathering the evidence to blow the whistle on the institute’s drug experiments, which turned a class of students into superhuman ghouls in the 1960s. The faculty faked a church fire as part of a coverup and… look, this is a pretty basic setup and I’m getting sick of explaining such things. All you need to know is that mad scientists create bad guys and good guys have to fight ’em.

And the bad guys, adorned in fun but merely decent prosthetics, are actually kind of interesting even though they seem heavily inspired by the cenobites in Hellraiser films. Led by John Saxon, who insists on being called Papa, the small group of mutant killers have recently wiped out a church camp group, hijacking their school bus which has a big creepy crucifix wired to the grille. Saxon himself is uncharacteristically weak here, though that seems more of a screenplay issue than an acting one, and his evil scheme is as routine as it can get. Emge, in his final film role, is quite good as the capable, crossbow-wielding hero. He seems to be having a blast, too, providing the film’s very best scenes.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with Hellmaster. For my money, the only thing it’s really lacking is an insane Italian director at the helm, who could have easily leveraged its dull moments into equal parts art and shock entertainment. It has all the makings of a supernatural giallo, but little of the fearless exploitation seen in those films. With its off-screen kills and premature cutaways, it just needs a little extra umph. Gnarly in concept, not so much execution. A cute picture, but not very good.

Psycho isn’t the type of movie I would normally feature on 31 Days of Gore. Don’t get me wrong: I love it, it’s a masterpiece, blah-blah-blah. Really, what more can I say about the film that hasn’t been said a million times before? The fact that it’s the first mainstream film to show a toilet is a bit of movie trivia so tired that kids know it (and it’s not even true). People who’ve never even seen the film already know that Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane is dead meat, just as everybody knows Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. I just want to watch Psycho sequels this month, which are the type of movies that belong here, but my OCD prevents me from starting with part 2.

So yeah, Marion dies early on. That shocking twist is why theaters were required to refuse entry to latecomers. In 1960, when movies were considered as disposable as a Readers Digest, people used to wander in and out of theaters whenever they damn well pleased. The rule allowed Hitchcock to pull off something far more interesting than the fact that he killed his lead actress off. He forced moviegoers to sympathize with a psycho.

Of course, first-time viewers would not have known they were rooting for the psycho. Until the end of the movie, they believed Norman’s mother had killed Marion. Hitchcock pulled a fast one, not just with a protagonist swap, but by leading viewers to believe Norman was taking care of a mentally ill woman. They would not have accepted a murderous protagonist, but a young man covering up the crime of his beloved mother? That they could accept. I can only wonder how many people, in an age when TV couples slept in separate beds, consciously examined why they felt a tinge of suspense when it seemed as though a car full of evidence wouldn’t sink into the swamp during Norman’s cover-up. And that’s what the best movies do: rewire an entire generation’s brains.

Like I said, the film has been analyzed to death. I have nothing new to offer on the subject. The fact of the matter is I just really like Anthony Perkins, especially in this role, so be sure to come back each Monday this month to see what I have to say about the sequels.

So why does this relatively tame slasher film score a 3 out of 4 on the gore rating? Because the way Hitchcock juxtaposes the knife against his actress’s tender flesh is the absolute high mark of an artist subverting the censorship of the time. You don’t see it cut her flesh, but you certainly feel it.

The marketing for Wolf Creek looked like more of the same boring shit we were getting too much of in the early 2000s. I wrote it off, as I did most mainstream horror movies in that era. When I saw Grindhouse two years later, I took notice of the fact that one of the Death Proof cars careens through a marquee with Wolf Creek’s title on it. Was that a nod or a dunk? I wondered. Either way, the filmmakers had something to say about the movie so I made a mental note, right there in the theater, to check Wolf Creek out for myself sometime. Nineteen years later, here I am.

What’s immediately striking about Wolf Creek is how effortless it feels. Three twenty-somethings buy a beater station wagon and drive across the outback. The two girls are English tourists. The boy is Australian, born and raised. The girls think the boy is cute, but they take a moment to decide which one will hook up with him so they don’t sour their friendship. I actually liked this trio and the (presumably) improvisational filmmaking that made their dynamic feel grounded and real. I was frequently reminded of The Blair Witch Project, which employed similar acting techniques. In fact, I actually started to dread the inevitable moment when they would take a wrong turn into a horror movie—not because I cared about the characters, but because I tend to dislike this type of movie.

This is all to say I’m probably not the right person to review a Wolf Creek film.

The wrong turn comes halfway through the movie when they find their car won’t start after a hike. For some reason their watches stop working, too, but that detail is never mentioned again (I thought the movie was introducing some kind of environmental battery drain or something, but a couple scenes later they have perfectly functional flashlights so… WTF?). They accept a tow from a charismatic stranger by the name of Mick Taylor (a phenomenal John Jarratt). Mick is reminiscent of the old man in the first two Texas Chainsaw Massacre films as he quickly puts the kids’ suspicions at ease with his quick wit and folksy banter. He tows them miles away from their intended path and lets them set up camp in the abandoned mining town he’s made his home. When the kids wake up, they discover they’ve been drugged and bound in the middle of the night.

The torture begins, psychological as well as physical. One of the girls manages to free herself and get her hands on a rifle. What follows is one opportunity after another to escape or kill the antagonist, but she screws it up each time. And while that’s par for the course for many movies of its type, it’s especially frustrating here because this film demonstrated so much promise early on. Had the first half been shit, I wouldn’t have been so disappointed by the routine “I’m gonna catch ya” stuff. The moment these bright young women become helpless morons for the sake of the plot, I couldn’t wait for the whole thing to end… and at that point it had like forty minutes left.

I’m well aware I’m probably breaking rank with most horror fans on this one (I wasn’t a fan of The Descent, either, though I often hear it referred to as a classic). By comparison, I find The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original, not the aforementioned remake) to be a brutally thrilling film, but its first half is its weakness. This one follows an opposite curve, though it’s not the fault of the performers. They’re firing on all cylinders, especially in that superior first half, and I admire the director even though I disagree with where he ultimately goes. On the other hand, I enjoyed it more than literally any Saw film I’ve ever seen and I suppose I’m not entirely opposed to seeing the sequel someday. I just hope they go the TCM2 route and amp up the goofiness.

Underworld, aka Transmutations, is the first feature length screenplay by Clive Barker, who reportedly hated the finished product. There’s no word on whether he has commented on (let alone seen) the version I’m reviewing today, which is the extended cut containing eleven minutes of footage not found in the poorly received theatrical version. Although I haven’t seen the film before, it’s immediately clear which bits have been spliced back in because they stick out like a sore thumb. The 35mm film from the theatrical version was scanned for the restoration, but all the extra stuff existed only on an old VHS. (Curiously, the same thing happened when Barker himself was involved with early restorations of Nightbreed.)

This patchwork of film and shitty VHS footage sounds more jarring than it actually is—and not only because the bitchin’ synth score ties it all altogether. The restored bits make Underworld more interesting from a technical point of view while slightly improving on the neo-noir mood the director was trying to establish. Above all, it’s an intimate look at what an editor actually does, showing how much freedom they have in shaping the final movie. We’re not talking about merely restoring some missing cutaways. There are entire conversations, scenes, and bits of character development restored here. Above all, the extended cut shows just how short-sighted the producers were to go through the trouble of hiring top-tier talent, just to turn around and attempt to normalize it for maximum profits. Worse, their edits were probably demanded for a shorter runtime, so I wonder: Why didn’t they cut the long bits where the hero plods through the least convincing sewer set in history?

All that meddling didn’t help. Though Clive Barker would work again with director George Pavlou on the superior Rawhead Rex, the experience ultimately led him to become a director himself with 1987’s Hellraiser. If anybody’s gonna screw up his work, it might as well be himself, right? Still, I think there’s just enough of Barker’s personality in Underworld to make it worthwhile for his completionists. Like too many supernatural detective films, this one is at its best before the mystery reveals itself disappointingly early on. Underworld’s noir elements are fine. Its horror elements are not.

The film opens with the kidnapping of a high class prostitute, which leads a rich business mogul to hire a private investigator to find her. It turns out that the detective is the prostitute’s old flame, which is hard to believe considering he’s so reluctant to take the job. Similarly, when the detective and his love interest reunite (the first time they share any screen time in the movie), their chemistry is anything but convincing. In fact, the hero has a stronger chemistry with another prostitute whose advances he keeps turning down.

The private eye, with his oddly streaked hair, bears some resemblance to David Vanian, frontman of The Damned, particularly during the group’s brief transmutation (see what I did there?) from punk to goth. No, he’s not a particularly strong actor, but he’s serviceable as a prototype for Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour, the hard boiled detective played by Scott Bakula in Lord of Illusions. Another point in the film’s favor is that, even forty years ago, Barker was drawn to the denizens of his fictional underworlds. An early strand of Nightbreed’s DNA is woven throughout, particularly in the film’s dreamlike opening sequence and the comradery among subterranean freaks.

Among the supporting cast of character actors (Steven Berkoff, Art Malik, and Miranda Richardson) is Denholm Elliot. He’s easily the best actor in the film, but he’s reduced to playing a mad scientist who doesn’t gel with Barker’s more recognizable sensibilities. You’d expect themes of sadomasochism, bondage, and identity, not a routine villain with a grandiose plan to… well, what the hell is his plan? To get streetwalkers hooked on a drug that will ultimately deform them? That’s, uh… I fail to see the scientific merit in that, much less any kind of financial or power gain. Even so, the film’s goofy premise does explore something Barker is very much known for: body horror, but it just isn’t horrific enough to warrant interest.

Don’t let anyone tell you it’s an uninteresting movie. It’s not. Undercooked, perhaps, but it still offers a fascinating if not crude glimpse into Clive Barker’s psyche as a filmmaker. Check it out if you’re a fan of the writer’s early work. Skip it if you’re not.