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

With a title like TerrorVision, a movie can go either way, but it won’t be mediocre. The very first shot is a close-up of the monster, which reminds me equally of Audrey II and the one-eyed creature from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. What we have here is a bonafide monster movie, which greatly tickles me. No plodding POV shots. No hiding in the shadows. Just front and center, for better or for worse.

In the cold open, an alien civilization disposes of something, which unsurprisingly finds its way to Earth. Cut to: the opening credits, which are accompanied by an 80s pop song designed specifically for the movie. It’s not a particularly good song, but it suggests TerrorVision is the kind of movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously. In other words, it’s right up my alley.

The Puttermans have just installed a tacky satellite dish on the edge of their property. Satellite receivers back then were the size of SETI dishes and were usually nestled between above-ground pools and broken trampolines. Grampa (Bert Remsen) thinks it’s a World War II era radar dish; when the family turns on an old war movie, he shouts, “Troop movements!” and tightens his grip on the loaded gun that never leaves his side.

The Puttermans’ little boy idolizes Grampa while the daughter is an MTV-obsessed mall rat. Mr. Putterman (Gerrit Graham) drives a Porche with the vanity plate MR. COOL and pursues the swinger lifestyle with his vain wife (Mary Woronov). While the couple is preparing to wife-swap, Mr. Putterman puts on his disco-flavored gold chains and complains that his daughter’s new boyfriend “looks ridiculous.” The boyfriend, by the way, is played by Jon Gries of Real Genius, The Monster Squad, and a hilarious death in Get Shorty.

What the Puttermans don’t know is a monster, which is later described as an energy being, has made their TV system its new home. Grampa and the little boy are the first to discover the terror in the television and waste no time arming themselves with military-grade weapons, stockpiled in the old man’s bunker beneath a confederate flag (of course). The monster begins picking victims off one by one and the movie doesn’t go amiss until it attempts an extended parody of E.T.

The acting is so over-the-top it goes well past the point of being funny, becomes downright obnoxious, and finds its way to funny again. Its sitcom-quality sets enhances the actors’ intentional goofiness as it takes a boiling hot piss-take on the superficiality of suburban life in the Reagan era. Terrorvision is a refreshingly fast-paced horror film which currently holds a 0% on the Rotten Tomatoes. Sure, it’s stupid, but it’s not stupid, if you know what I mean.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

First the series lost Kevin Bacon. Then it lost Fred Ward. Then I stopped giving a shit. Fast forward several years later and Netflix recommends I watch Tremors 5. Hey, why not?

I’ll tell you why not: Jamie Kennedy. As soon as I saw him put on a helmet so that his stunt double could ride a motorcycle around the opening credits for five minutes, I almost turned the movie off. Here’s an actor who sucks so bad, instead of trying to make better movies, he made a documentary to attack his critics. What a crybaby.

You’re probably thinking: Surely he’s an expendable character, right? Surely no one thought they could replace Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward’s chemistry with Michael Gross and Jamie Kennedy! Unfortunately, Kennedy really is the sidekick. Here’s a character who says “dome” because he thinks it’s funnier than just saying “head.” The rest of the time you won’t know if he’s referencing famous movie lines or outright ripping them off. Either way it’s fucking terrible.

So is the addition of piss humor. This movie seems to think piss is hilarious. Getting pissed on, drinking piss, singing while spreading piss all over your body. These things could be funny in a better movie, but they’re not here. And while Michael Gross still seems mostly genuine as Burt, the filmmakers think they can make us laugh simply by having him do little more than speak military jargon. Are words like “rendezvous” really that funny? (Let me suggest Nick Offerman for the inevitable reboot. While we’re dream-casting, move Kevin Bacon to Ward’s part.)

At best the movie is kind of entertaining and, at worst, it isn’t quite bad enough to turn off. Considering it’s free for anyone who has Netflix, the price is right if you don’t value your time. Frankly, I think the franchise derailed with the addition of ass-blasters. Credit where credit’s due: Tremors 5 has some of the best CGI I’ve seen in a straight-to-video movie and the camerawork is surprisingly good, too.

Considering some of the other stuff I’ve recommended this month, maybe I’m being a little too hard on it. I don’t know why I expected more. If you liked the last few, you might have a good time with this one. At least until they reveal… eh, I won’t spoil it for you. Best to let you throw popcorn at your TV, too.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

A mission to Haley’s Comet discovers a gigantic derelict spaceship hidden in the corona. Once inside, the astronauts are shocked to discover two men and a woman preserved in see-through capsules. After transferring the bodies to their own ship, the human aliens are brought back to Earth for experimentation. Just as they begin to dissect the female specimen, she wakes up and sucks a scientist’s life force right out of his body, leaving him a decayed shell of his former self. The woman escapes the facility in the nude and manages to evade the police as if that’s not an APB every cop in the country would respond to.

While the main characters are trying to track the woman down, the corpse of the man she drained unexpectedly comes back to life and steals the life force of another victim. The scientists later discover that people who’ve been drained in such a manner always come back—via awesome animatronic effects—and if they don’t get life force they explode. London is the center of this pandemic. The military quarantines the city and prepares to quarantine it with nuclear weapons. The aliens, however, have other plans.

What’s strange about Lifeforce is I enjoyed the movie tremendously, but have little desire to talk about it this month. Maybe it doesn’t belong in 31 Days of Gore despite the fact it has plenty of gore, bitchin’ animatronics, and more nudity than a porno. None of that stuff is presented in an exploitative way. It’s probably the most tasteful movie I’ve featured all month.

I’m slipping. I’ll do better, I promise.

Sexuality aside, Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce has more in common with a modern blockbuster than it does with the horror film the marketers wanted to promote. Which is probably why it bombed: the people the ad campaign targeted expected something more terrifying from the guy who brought us Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both movies are great. I wish this one was better known.

The acting is solid. The special effects are bombastic. The Blu-Ray edition was well worth the wait—and I did wait because the DVD edition I obtained last year was presented in 4:3; meanwhile the Scream Factory edition goes for over fifty bucks on eBay. If the plot made a little bit more sense (or any at all) it likely would have found more love from critics. It’s just not very compelling when all the aliens want from us is humans’ life force, represented as mystical blue stuff that might as well be fairy dust.

This is a very serious film. Tobe Hooper has made something unique, which makes it hurt all the more that he’s making cheap movies like Djinn today (I confess I have not seen that one yet, but it looks awful). Considering movies are rarely made for adults anymore (I guess that’s what TV’s for these days even though it’s often a poor substitution for production value), it’s hard to imagine a time when movies with such overt sexuality would be marketed to summer crowds. If you ever wanted to see Patrick Stewart get possessed by a feminine creature and make out with another man, here’s the movie for you.

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.

Say the opening credits: Original Idea by Charles Band. I’m not sure about “original.” If you’re expecting anything other than a throwback to 50s monster movies, you’re gonna be disappointed. You might be disappointed anyway. Movies like this are only as good as their mad scientist. The scientist in Seedpeople could’ve been great—he’s a kooky drunk with UV lights taped to his head and arms—but he’s relegated to explaining the plot, which really isn’t complicated enough to warrant as much dialogue as they give it.

Before we go any further, I just want to point out the greatest thing Seedpeople has to offer is the following line, spoken by a not-too bright farmer who’s just stumbled upon an alien spore, Blob-style: “What in the ding-dong-heck-a-ma-doodle is that?” It may be the dumbest line in movie history. And I love it.

The film is set in a remote town called Comet Valley. Conveniently, there’s a single bridge which leads in and out of the community. Even more convenient: it’s about to be closed for maintenance. The main character arrives just before they close it down. He’s a geologist (or something) who’s still in love with an ex-girlfriend who now runs a bed and breakfast. She’s also dating the town sheriff, who hates the main character in a junior high school kind of way. Which is to say nothing about the main character’s childish advances on his old flame: he pursues her with a persistence that’s downright creepy.

I’m a fan of Full Moon movies, but I just can’t recommend this one. Although there’s plenty of cheese to enjoy, the movie itself is boringly routine. But that’s the great thing about horror movies: the bad ones remind you to cherish the good ones.

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.

Teenage metalhead Brodie moves in with his aunt and uncle after his mother is jailed for meth problems. His cousin is an obnoxious jock, who enjoys beating the snot out of outsiders like Brodie, and Brodie’s only two friends are a couple of tabletop roleplayers. When Brodie is caught pining over a beautiful classmate, his new friends tell him to dream on: chicks like that, they say, only go for assholes like Brodie’s moronic cousin.

Sound cliché? Yeah, but I’m doing a bad job of selling it. Deathgasm is aware that most of this stuff is familiar ground. Considering how often it steps outside the boundaries of “normal” tastes, it’s probably a good thing it has these tropes to keep it anchored. Even at its most predictable, it’s somehow fresh. And when it goes full speed insane, it’s at its best.

Brodie’s only refuge is the local record shop where he meets Zakk, an older metalhead who’s been expelled from school. After bonding over metal albums, they make a blood pact, napalm the schoolyard, and start a band called Deathgasm. During this time, Brodie almost manages to swoon the girl, who discovers a love for heavy metal she never knew she had.

The earlier portions feel a bit too much like Detention, which was an enjoyable if not scatterbrained movie that diluted its horror elements with a lot of… well, “spoilery” stuff I won’t mention here. Then Brodie and Zakk discover an ancient score which literally raises hell when played on their guitars. That’s when the movie becomes unabashed horror, tossing Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson references left and right.

There are two kinds of a horror-comedies. Those which make fun of horror and those that have fun with horror. The second is what Deathgasm is—and it’s one of the best examples in a very long time. Some of the jokes are too obvious, but most of the time I was either smiling or outright laughing at the mayhem. Look, beating people to death with sex toys is old hat now, but it’s the look on the characters’ faces that sells it.

Deathgasm has some great actors, memorable characters, and bitchin’ filmmakers who will go on to bigger movies. Let’s just hope they retain what was awesome about them when they inevitably end up in Hollywood. Great horror, great comedy, great fantasy. Fuck yes.

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.

I’ve heard a lot about Rock N’ Roll Nightmare. My imagination built it up to be a very different movie. I thought it was going to be a horror version of Flash Gordon involving an 80s hair band descending into hell. I hoped for Gwar theatrics and scenery resembling a heavy metal album cover. Conversely, I’d never heard of the movie prior to the mid-2000s so I suspected a fledgling DVD distributor found an unseen piece of garbage and was attempting to push it as a cult classic in close-out stores and truck stops.

Both my positive and negative expectations were wrong, which is another reason I try to learn little about these movies before I actually watch them. Rock N’ Roll Nightmare is deserving of its newfound cult status even though I’m convinced Synapse Films marketed it as a cult classic long before the cult actually existed. If this movie really did have a cult following in the 90s, how is it possible the MST3K guys never featured it? (Apparently there’s a RiffTrax, but that came out after the Synapse release.)

A band drags their uninterested girlfriends out to an old farm, the barn of which has been converted into a recording studio. The caretaker tells the band’s manager that the barn-studio was previously used by Alice Cooper and, if my ears weren’t deceiving me, “Bob Stewart.” The last ten minutes of the flick are brilliantly unexpected, it’s as if the filmmakers threw their hands up and said, “Eh, fuck it. We were making that movie, but now we’re making this movie. So enjoy these flying squids and homemade pyrotechnics.”

The first half of the movie is so tame and wonderfully cheesy, the characters act more like a Christian youth group than a heavy metal band. The sex takes place entirely off camera… until suddenly it doesn’t. Because you were lured into thinking this was PG-rated content, an unexpected sex scene involving a flickering tongue-kiss is jarringly hilarious. Why they wouldn’t cut away before that happened, but take care to show almost none of the violence, is beyond comprehension.

If you’ve heard of Rock N’ Roll Nightmare at all, you probably heard about how awful it is. Sure, the “demons” in the film are little more than sock puppets. Not only is the acting atrocious (intentionally so, I’m sure), the audio is rarely in sync with the footage. But the movie was shot in seven days and, considering it was little more than a vanity project for its lead (a pretty interesting jack-of-all-trades according to Wikipedia), it’s way better than it has any right to be. It’s charming, funny, and endlessly entertaining.

I’ll admit it if no one else will: the music’s not bad at all. Cheesy, yes, but that’s what we all came for, isn’t it?

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.

I had no idea what to expect from Ghost Town. I went in blind because I’m a sucker for a desert setting in horror. Highway to Hell, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, Tremors, and Full Moon’s Oblivion were all oddly compelling western mashups. Speaking of Full Moon, Ghost Town was released by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, the precursor to Full Moon Productions. It’s well known this was a superficial name change in lieu of bankruptcy; Ghost Town was among the last batch of films that would carry the Empire name, along with Robot Jox and Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death.

A sheriff (Franc Luz) tracks a missing woman (Catherine Hickland) to a literal ghost town. Early on there’s a great bit of fantasy when a gnarly-lookin’ corpse bolts upright out of the ground and begs the sheriff to save his town. At first you’ll be thankful the movie doesn’t exhibit many of the horror clichés that drag down most movies like this, then you quickly realize it’s only because it trades in horror clichés for western ones. The stunts, by the way, are only as exciting as what you’d see at a western theme park.

The sheriff soon finds out the damsel in distress (who you might recognize from small appearances on CHiPs, Airwolf, and three episodes of Knight Rider) was kidnapped by an outlaw ghost named Devlin, who conveniently wears black to remind us that A) this is a western and B) he’s the villain. Devlin is alternatively kind of cool and lame as a villain. He and his gang crucified the town’s original sheriff a hundred years ago, but not before the sheriff shot a bullet through one of Devlin’s cheek and out the other.

Whereas most of the ghosts look like normal people, Devlin looks like a zombie. Why? I don’t know. I don’t think the filmmakers know, either. And none of the ghosts seem to know why they haunt the town or how to lift the curse… that is until the movie closes in on its climax, at which point a bartender tells the hero exactly what he has to do to dispatch the villain, which is oddly specific for a character who, up until then, didn’t even seem to know she was dead.

Other offenses include a serious take on the old Bugs Bunny routine where the wascaly wabbit would plug Elmer Fudd’s gun with his finger to make it backfire. Then there’s the blind character, whose actor wears cloudy contact lenses in the first half of the movie, then resorts to just trying (and failing) to keep his irises tucked behind his eyelids. Yikes.

I’m being harder on this movie than it deserves. It’s decent enough fun and I’ve raved about movies here which weren’t as well made. But there’s much wasted potential here as desert horror is almost always funner than this. It’s just a mediocre western with a handful of horror elements tossed in as an afterthought.

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. 

“I wrote it to democratically offend every group on the planet,” says screenwriter Roy Frumkes. I’m not sure if he manages to offend every group on the planet, but if you’re a man, a woman, or human, you’ll probably be offended by Street Trash at some point. It’s a movie which plays the kind of dopey score you would expect from a bad slapstick comedy even as it deals in gang rape, necrophilia, and castration. The severed penis, by the way, ends up becoming the subject of a game of hot potato.

When the unscrupulous owner of a liquor store finds a long forgotten case of booze in his basement, he decides to sell it to the local bums on the cheap. What he doesn’t know is the stuff is toxic. Anyone who drinks it melts spectacularly. Street Trash is part of a small subgenre called “melt movies.” (The 1988 remake of The Blob is probably the most mainstream melt movie. 1985’s The Stuff was one of the first horror movies I remember ever seeing in my life.)

Soon, a curiously psychotic policeman begins investigating the rash of mysterious deaths. When he beats the shit out of a suspect, leaving the assailant unconscious, he doesn’t just kick him and shove his head into a urinal. The cop finger-forces himself to puke on the back of the man’s head. There’s a violent, punk rock energy about Street Trash, and it keeps the picture swiftly moving despite the fact there are way too many characters for a movie like this, too many plot angles, and very little to do with the toxic hooch that causes the human meltdowns.

That’s not a complaint. Merely an observation. This is easily one of the wildest movies I’ve ever seen. It’s just really fucking weird.

Nothing’s off limits in Street Trash. Although it treats the homeless with all the emotional complexity of a Smokey and the Bandit sequel, you can tell Muro feels a kinship with the marginalized group. The hobos aren’t just there for him to poke fun at—they’re the heroes of the film, the people we’re supposed to be rooting for… and in some cases against. I rather like that the villain of the film is a dishonorably discharged vet who carries around a knife fashioned out of a human femur—but what we end up with is a movie which ultimately scrambles to give us closure for each of its many characters before reaching its hilariously bonkers climax.

If you’re into sleaze, you’re going to love Street Trash, too. It’s the Troma movie Troma never made… and probably would have made if they weren’t so damn cheap. “Don’t drip on me, man!”

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.

A Japanese television host receives a genuine snuff film in the mail. Instead of forwarding it to the authorities, she and a handful of others decide to investigate the location where the video was shot. Once there, the characters quickly split up so some can have sex and many can get picked off, one by one. Evil Dead Trap wants you to believe it’s a standard slasher film, but early on a character is impaled in such a manner it’s impossible to believe a single human was the culprit unless he or she possesses supernatural powers. The strange happenings increase in frequency as the movie progresses, but each time we see the killer on screen, he’s clearly depicted as a powerless man.

One thing that’s unique about EDT is the stylized horror: you’ll either appreciate its attempt to tighten the tension, one millimeter at a time, or be bored to death. It employs a surreal, dreamlike pacing that makes the 105-minute movie feel much longer than it actually is and not necessarily in a bad way. Characters stumble around backwards all the time. One even sprains her ankle on the flattest of terrain. It’s the plot devices of a nightmare—and about as coherent as one, too.

This is the hardest movie review I’ve ever written. Will you like Evil Dead Trap? I’d have an easier time predicting whether you prefer vanilla or chocolate. There are certainly things in it that are enjoyable, and a few that aren’t, but its attempts to defy formula should be commended even though many clichés are present. Looking at the picture in retrospect only makes it more confusing… and somehow more likable?

The camerawork and lighting looks great. It’s obviously made by talented filmmakers. There’s something that’s genuinely unsettling about it, too. Why can’t I give it a more positive review? I dunno. If I ever watch the sequel, it won’t be this month.