It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

With Adrienne Barbeau, Lisa Marie, Stuart Gordon, Lin Shaye, Barbara Crampton, John Landis, Joe Dante, and a couple of Troma regulars, the cast of Tales of Halloween reads like the guest list at a mega-sized horror convention. Hell, that’s not even everybody you’ll recognize. My only complaint about the casting? Nobody gets any more screen-time than a handful of minutes.

Barbeau, riffing on her role in The Fog, probably gets the most time in this anthology. Her narration serves as the glue for the ten stories, the subject matter of which ranges from aliens to demons and psychopathic children. At worst, the stories in Tales of Halloween are pointless, but more often than not they’re gleefully entertaining, not to mention funny. Even when the stories are pointless, they’re never boring.

In the first segment, a child wonders why his joyless parents confiscate his candy haul every year. When he’s supposed to be in bed, he sneaks out of his bedroom and discovers his parents perversely pigging out on the treats while he sleeps. That’s when he decides to carve them up with a meat cleaver. In another segment, a couple of idiotic criminals kidnap the son of a wealthy man. When they call to make their demands, the father says, “Not interested,” and hangs up on them.

What’s admirable about Tales of Halloween is how seamless it all is. While I liked The ABC’s of Death just a little bit more, that series was a quilted showcase for twenty-six different filmmakers whose wildly varying styles sometimes clashed with one another. Tales of Halloween, on the other hand, is a true collaboration, having actors from one segment walking through the background of the next.

If it’s cartoonish black comedy you’re looking for, Tales of Halloween brings it. It’s already one of my favorite anthology films of all time. You could do a lot worse on a Friday night.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next (and last!) movie.

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

So if there’s anything 31 Days of Gore taught me, it’s this: I’m a much bigger fan of Full Moon movies than I was when I was a kid. Sure, I said I disliked Seedpeople when I saw it a couple weeks ago, but I somehow don’t regret watching it, either, probably because it gave me exactly what I expected. And hell, maybe that’s why I like Full Moon movies more often than not: I’m never expecting much from them.

Like I said when I reviewed Shrunken Heads, I had no intention of featuring any Full Moon movies this month, but once the seal was broken, I kept getting drawn back to a poster I had seen for Head of the Family. Just look at how awesome the title character is:

I went into Head of the Family without the faintest clue as to what it was about, other than the knowledge the title was literal. I suggest you do the same if you’re no stranger to Charles Band films, but I admit it’s probably a harder sale for most viewers. Allow me to entice you…

Lance is the redneck owner of a small town cafe who’s fallen in love with the beautiful wife of the meanest biker in town. Her name is Loretta and, in perfect B-movie dialogue, Lance describes his love for her like so: “It’s like fucking a firecracker whenever I’m with her.” Lance isn’t very bright, Loretta isn’t either, and her criminal husband is probably dumber than the both of them combined.

All this is to say nothing about the Stackpools, an alien-like family of weirdos. They consist of a giant man-child, a freak with bulging eyes, and an unnaturally endowed woman played by a real-life pornstar. Later in the film Lance stumbles upon the family’s secret: the Stackpools actually include a fourth sibling, Myron, who’s little more than an over-sized head in a wheelchair. Stranger still, Myron controls his quadruplet siblings with his telepathic mind.

Myron’s also a mad scientist who longs to find a proportionate human body that can support his excess brain power. Like something out of a Roadrunner cartoon, the Stackpools barricade the highway with a sign that detours motorists directly to the front door of their mansion. Once there, the brute of the family knocks them out so that Myron can run human experiments in his basement.

So when Lance stumbles upon the family’s dark secret, he decides to blackmail them. The deal is this: he won’t turn them into the authorities as long as the family offs Loretta’s husband. The head of the family reluctantly agrees. When Loretta’s husband turns up missing as promised, she and Lance could live together happily ever after… or at least until Loretta tires of Lance and his cheating ways. Unfortunately, Lance gets greedy and tries to blackmail even more out of the Stackpools: an allowance of two thousand bucks a week.

This stuff isn’t Shakespeare, but compared to a lot of the movies I’ve watched this month, the dialogue goes above and beyond bare minimum and the acting is as good as it has to be in a B movie… and maybe a little better at times. It’s just a fun movie that I can only recommend to people who smile when they see a giant head rather than roll their eyes.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

In Tormented (aka Berkshire County) a teenage girl named Kylie goes to school one day to discover the chad she reluctantly went down on at a costume party not only video taped the entire thing, but shared the video with all of her classmates. Although the boy said he and his girlfriend had broken up, it turns out they haven’t (shocking, right?) and the girlfriend’s more pissed at Kylie than her douchebag boyfriend.

The bullying doesn’t stop at school. When Kylie gets home, it turns out even her mother blames Kylie for the video leaking. After all, this is a fairly generic horror movie: parents just don’t understand.

So what does this subplot have to do with the rest of the movie? I’m not entirely sure. I guess it’s about a bullied young girl having to choose between facing her fears or dying horribly, but Kylie’s already been through too much by the time the movie brings in its horror elements. Having a family of masked psychos break into the house where she’s babysitting a couple of kids seems needlessly cruel here. Maybe they were trying to make some kind of statement, but if that’s the case it’s little more than an after-school special tacked onto the beginning of a slasher film.

And I know teenagers are dumb (and even dumber in movies than they are in real life), but there’s a part where Kylie gets a chance to get away. She’s sitting behind the wheel of her car, keys in the ignition, when the 911 dispatcher tells her, “You’re better off staying where you are.” Kylie agrees before getting out of her car and going back into the house that’s under assault by masked maniacs.

I’m not saying I was a smart teenager (I wasn’t), but I know for a fact I would have groaned at that scene just as loudly as I did as an adult.

I think that’s the biggest problem with Tormented: you’ve got fine direction, a really good actress, and competent filmmaking, but a silly script. This is basically You’re Next Lite. There are a few surprises, a lot of boneheaded decisions, stupidly incompetent cops, and a twist ending which will surprise no one who’s ever seen a slasher film before. Even so, I’d be interested to see what the director and some of the on-screen talent could do with a better story.

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

Yeah, I know. Dead Heat probably doesn’t belong in 31 Days of Gore, but I felt like I hadn’t featured enough movies with Vincent Price. And honestly, how bad could it be?

Dead Heat, which stars Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo, opens like any other 80s action-comedy which attempted to cash in on the success of 48 Hrs. and Lethal Weapon. The problem with all the copycats is they could never quite strike the balance between action and well-written humor that the real deals had. Despite this, Dead Heat attempts to throw another genre into the mix: horror.

As goofy and clichéd as it is, Dead Heat opens with a fun energy that immediately drew me in… to an arm’s distance, anyway. Williams and Piscopo are an odd couple of cops who can’t seem to get fired even though they’re constantly reprimanded for their “crazy stunts.” In the beginning of the film they have a shootout with a couple of jewel thieves who just won’t die until one steps on a grenade and Williams rams the other one with an unmarked car.

When Williams and Piscopo visit the bodies in an autopsy room, the medical examiner says the bodies have been on her table before. When the cops ask what she means by this, she replies, “They’ve already had autopsies.” Their investigation leads the duo to a chemical plant, which is hiding a three-faced troll. The troll proves just as hard to kill as the jewel thieves in the earlier part of the movie.

You know what? The makeup effects aren’t bad. The movie itself is, and maybe this goes without saying, but it’s a good bad movie as long as you like dumb action and terrible one-liners. Just be warned the filmmakers seem to think Joe Piscopo is a decent substitute for Eddie Murphy, but he’s not… obviously.

Anyway, Treat Williams is gently killed and the medical examiner figures out how to resurrect him, Frankenstein-style. They soon discover Williams doesn’t have a heartbeat and can’t breathe although he appears to be in perfect health. Worse, Williams only has twelve hours to nail the bad guys, at which point he will decompose completely. Halfway through the movie a woman says, “You’re hurt!” To which Williams deadpans, “Lady, I’m dead.“

I don’t hate Piscopo, even though he’s not a very good actor, and I’ve always wondered why Treat Williams (playing a character named Roger Mortis… hardy-har-har) wasn’t a bigger star than he was. So I’m not going to mark off points for the miscast leads, even if they do have the chemistry of video game NPCs. Vincent Price isn’t in the film long, which is disappointing, but I suspect he was pretty unenthusiastic about horror movies considering this was his last one.

So is Dead Heat worth a watch? Let’s assume you’re really hung over and you want to be entertained, but don’t want to do too much thinking… if so, then Dead Heat is the film for you.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

I don’t know why I followed the development of Feast on Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Project Greenlight, but never actually watched the movie until now. In case you’re unfamiliar with Project Greenlight, it was a reality TV show in which the contest-winners got to make a movie in the Hollywood system. The first two movies produced by Project Greenlight sucked so the producers decided to go for broke and make the third a horror film.

Feast would be great if the shots were a little longer and the director didn’t try to be so damn cute. There’s a lot of exhausting wink-wink, nudge-nudge bullshit in the beginning of the movie, in which the filmmakers flat-out warn you they’re going to give you the unexpected. Unfortunately, when you’re expecting the unexpected, and you get the unexpected, then you were expecting it all along, weren’t you? If the film had lured us into believing it was a by-the-numbers horror film (You’re Next comes to mind), the unexpected stuff would have been much sweeter, not to mention a lot less self-congratulatory.

Never mind all that. Everything else about this movie is great.

Here’s the setup: there’s a bar in the middle of nowhere. There’s a ton of potential victims in said bar. It’s just an average night until a blood-drenched man with a shotgun bursts through the door and warns the patrons they had better fortify the bar on the double.

It’s not long before monsters arrive, draped in roadkill coats and cattle-skull masks. They’re gnarly-lookin’ beasts who’d just as soon yank your body through the slats in the window. In a misguided act of desperation, the characters attempt to stand their ground by dangling the monsters’ dead baby from a stick. This, as it turns out, only angers the monsters further. Henry Rollins’ character, who’s described as “a poor man’s Tony Robbins,” later admits: “Yeah, that was a bad idea.”

Most of these actors you’ll either know by name or recognize from other movies. Not only is this the second movie I’ve written about in a row which features Clu Gulager, it was directed by his son, John Gulager. After a success like Feast, John might be relegated to horror productions for the rest of his life. I hope he’s comfortable with that, because it’s clear he was born to make films like this and I’m interested in what else he has up his sleeves.

Feast is a helluva ride. It was obviously inspired by only the best kinds of movies I wanted to feature in 31 Days of Gore. I’m glad I’ve finally seen it. I’m not sure I’m ready for the sequel, though, because it’s a pretty exhausting movie.

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

When a movie has Vincent Price, Clu Gulager, and Rosalind Cash, you don’t need to do much deliberating. Just rent the damn thing. That’s what I did.

Then I groaned when I realized it was an anthology film.

I’m not saying all anthology films suck, I’m just saying even the best ones tend to have at least one shitty entry. The first segment in From a Whisper to a Scream is pretty weak, and it cops out by cutting away seconds before showing us what we all really wanted to see. Nevertheless, the second story tops it. Of course, that’s not exactly hard to do when you set the bar so low right out the gate.

These stories mostly adhere to the EC comics’ rule: something terrible must happen to an innocent person, and by the end the instigator must get what they deserve, usually in some grand, ironic manner. It’s a classic type of horror story, but there’s not much room for suspense. From a Whisper to a Scream tries to deviate from the pattern every once and a while, but when it does the outcome just seems needlessly cruel.

The container story begins with the lethal injection of a deranged woman. A reporter who witnesses the execution later ends up at an old library cared for by Vincent Price. Price tells the reporter the town’s haunted and he presents his case by showing the reporter four stories from various points in the town’s history.

In the first story, Clu Gulager plays the part of a hallucinogenic old man who falls for an uninterested younger woman. In the second story, a gunshot victim played by Terry Kiser (Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s) ends up betraying the swamp-dwelling man who nursed him back to help. The third story is about a woman who falls in love with a glass-eating circus freak who’s bound by voodoo to remain in the carnival for the rest of his life. Pretty standard stuff.

Then there’s the fourth story. Like I said above, it’s hard to play around with such a simple formula, but when you have a real piece of work like the evil protagonist in this story, you’ve got yourself a good throwback to Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt. This one reminds me of John Landis’s entry to The Twilight Zone movie and that episode of Star Trek where they find a bunch of kids running everything.

In it, the insanely prolific actor Cameron Mitchell plays a Union sergeant who doesn’t mind gunning down Confederates (or his own soldiers) even after he’s learned the war’s ended. He and his group of asshole soldiers end up captive in a town run by children. It’s later explained—and this is kind of spoilerish—that the children’s parents were massacred in the war so the kids decided to keep running things themselves and avenging their parents along the way. And when the children reveal the oft-discussed “magistrate” towards the end of the picture, it’s wonderfully bizarre.

As a whole, From a Whisper to a Scream is a pretty solid rental, even if some of its elements are structurally weak. Vincent Price doesn’t seem particularly enthused to be in it and three of the five stories aren’t exactly good. But the story in the swamp and the one towards the end are technical and creative achievements.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

Keanu Reeves plays a forty-something architect whose family has gone on vacation without him so that he can focus on a project for his job. Later that night, a couple of young women show up on his doorstep, seduce him, then refuse to leave his home. When he threatens to call the cops, they giggle and say they’ve got a good story to tell: “You want to check her ID?” asks one of the women. “She’s too young to have one.”

From that point forward, Keanu’s character is forced to take part in their sick games. After tying him to a bed, one of the women wears his daughter’s clothes and rapes him while the other woman videotapes. At various points throughout the movie, Keanu gets the opportunity to make a run for it, but he chooses not to, hoping until the bitter end that he’ll find some way to fix this problem and keep his wife from finding out about his infidelities.

I’d like to point out that I’m a fan of Keanu Reeves, who the internet seems to think is a joke. Not many movie stars would do a picture like this. Hell, most stars would have run the other way when offered The Matrix, especially after getting burned by the Johnny Mnemonic movie. Judging by some of the roles he’s chosen to do, he’s a genuine fan of genre films. Knock Knock is obviously not a movie he did just for the paycheck—the entire film budget was less than most movie star’s salaries. It’s a brave move to take a role like this and I’m sure his agent tried to talk him out of doing it.

Knock Knock is probably Eli Roth’s best-looking film, but it’s also the least entertaining. Maybe I would have liked it more if I had seen Death Game, which Roth apparently wanted to remake, but I missed the old Roth—the fun Roth—and he doesn’t get up to his old tricks until right before the credits roll. There’s actually a very funny bit towards the end involving Facebook. Had the rest of the movie been like that, I probably would have been able to recommend it.

My biggest complaint is the movie doesn’t seem to have a message. When you subject viewers to this kind of humorless violence, you should either have a reason or make it entertaining. This is like Funny Games without the point. I’ve always enjoyed Eli Roth’s films, but this one’s a misfire. It’s a shame, man. A downright shame.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

There are those who will tell you Mark of the Devil is a proto-torture film along the lines of Saw and Hostel. I’ve even heard it compared to films like Cannibal Holocaust and Blood Feast. Those people are wrong. This is no more a simple torture film than Passion of the Christ. It’s probably a lot less exploitative, too.

Mark of the Devil was certainly marketed as an exploitation film. The producers even drummed up publicity by having theaters pass out barf bags before showings. It was undeniably a cash-in on Vincent Price’s Witchfinder General (a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm), which came out two years prior. Unfortunately, I think too many reviewers are remembering the hokey way Mark of the Devil was promoted rather than the film itself. Here’s a movie that deserves a lot more credit than its reputation gets.

At the beginning of the movie, a man who’s been accused of witchcraft has his fingers chopped off before he’s tarred and feathered for the villagers’ amusement. Moments later, two more accused witches are burned on the pyre. The blasé man responsible for hunting witches in the village is known as “the Albino,” and business is booming until a traveling witch hunter arrives with his eager protege, played by Udo Kier.

The first time we see Kier’s character is when he humiliates the Albino for falsely accusing a woman (Olivera Vuco) of witchcraft simply because she won’t have sex with him. Naturally, Kier falls in love with the woman, which leads to one of the film’s major conflicts: Kier’s mentor also accuses this woman of witchcraft and temporarily convinces Kier he’s going against God if he doesn’t do the same. While Vuco’s official indictment is prepared, which will make her torture legal, the other accused witches are burned, stretched, and mutilated in various ways until they fabricate confessions which name future victims.

This is a film which is full of memorable villains and beautiful antagonists. To see Kier this young (one of his first roles) clenches the fact he was born to be a movie star. I’m very surprised some of the supporting women in Mark of the Devil didn’t go on to make dozens and dozens of movies like this. The photography is also masterful in its use of contrast, juxtaposing beautiful faces and images of horrific violence. If anything is a surefire sign this isn’t a typical exploitation movie, it’s the music, which isn’t the ominously droning theme you’d expect from a movie with a title like “Mark of the Devil,” but something softer, akin to Theme from a Summer Place. It’s clear the music is meant to underline the tragic love story, not the senseless murders and torture.

If you ever thought I was too insensitive to the subjects exploited by the films featured on this blog, A) you’re mistaken and B) here’s one that automatically makes my blood boil: witch-hunting, both literally and figuratively, not to mention the kind of mob mentalities that fuel these senseless panics.

A lot of films about literal witch-hunting are metaphors for modern issues. Mark of the Devil, though, is literally about witch-hunting, which was a long chapter in human history which should never be forgotten, much less watered down by panning the camera away from the unspeakable violence “good people” committed in the name of dearly held beliefs. Despite any historical inaccuracies or technical problems it may have, Mark of the Devil is one of the most effective films about any subject, period.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

Oh yay, yet another movie inspired by Ed Gein.

There’s a good chance I’ve seen Deranged before and completely forgot it. That’s because it’s completely forgettable despite decent acting, better-than-average camerawork (for a movie like this), and a wonderfully odd séance, which involves a lonely widow pretending she’s possessed by the spirit of her dead husband; his spirit, the woman claims, wants Cobb to “make her feel like a woman again.”

That’s the best part in the entire movie.

The movie opens with the following card: “The motion picture you are about to see is absolutely true.” I’ve never believed a movie when it went out of its way to tell me it was a true story, but I believe it even less when it feels the need to add the word “absolutely.” For added realism, the movie is hosted, 70s documentary style, by a man who claims he’s a real life newspaper columnist.

Uh-huh. Sure.

The newsman’s asides give the film a hokey Faces of Death feel, which is fun, but the filmmakers completely forget this character by the time they get to the second half, which drags like a tortoise in molasses. The first half of the film is actually promising. It’s a quietly bizarre affair that somehow makes a sympathetic character out of Erza Cobb, the film’s serial killer. Unfortunately, the only reason I didn’t fall asleep during Deranged’s second half is because I was hopped up on coffee.

Roberts Blossom, who’s probably best known as the sweet old man in Home Alone, plays Cobb the serial killer. In an introductory scene it’s made clear he loves his mother very much, so much so he’s trying to feed her pea soup even though her nose is bleeding all over it. When she dies he’s left heartbroken. A year later, he gets the brilliant idea to dig her up and take her back home. When the town sheriff pulls Cobb over with his mother in the passenger seat, the policeman mistakes the smell of a rotting corpse for alcohol on Cobb’s breath… and lets Cobb drive home anyway.

All is well for Cobb now that Mom’s back at home—other than the fact her skin is deteriorating. Well, no matter. He’ll just borrow skin from other women to keep her fresh. It’s not long until Cobb himself is wearing the skin of his victims, baiting far more women than he really needs to complete his restoration project.

Like I said, I really enjoyed the first half of Deranged, but the second half is stretching the taffy a little too thin. I like good horror movies and I like bad ones, but mediocre is unforgivable with material as inherently deranged as this.