When Stir of Echoes was in theaters, I begrudgingly went with a friend (he had a car and I didn’t at the time so… yeah). I’m not sure why I didn’t want to see it at the time. I ended up liking it, but this time I’m utterly impressed.

First of all, I’m a bigger fan of Kevin Bacon now than I was before. The guy has a lot more range than your typical name brand and he doesn’t get enough credit for the things he does with his voice. Bacon straddles the line between movie star and character actor quite evenly.

Here he plays a blue collar lineman whose dreams of rock stardom become more and more unlikely the older he gets. He struggles to smile when he discovers his wife is pregnant and about the only fun he ever has is getting drunk at block parties and high school football games. It’s at one of these parties that his sister-in-law (Illeana Douglas) puts him in a hypnotic trance with the intention of “opening his mind.” Unfortunately for Bacon, she’s pried it open a little too far and he soon sees things not meant for mortal eyes.

What we get is a supporting cast of believable characters played by a bevy of familiar faces. David Koepp’s word play make these people all the more likable. Outside of the magic negro trope, which seems ripped out of Kubrick’s The Shining, there’s rarely a misstep and I was glad I had forgotten enough in the years since I first saw it to be surprised again. This isn’t to say the reveal at the end is particularly good, but it’s not as bad as I remembered, either.

I think what’s most interesting about Stir of Echoes is that you’d expect it to be a lot more wholesome considering Koepp’s past work, but he pulls no punches. There’s not a whole lot of gore in the movie, but the imagery he pulls off is genuinely unnerving. So don’t let the gore rating give you the wrong picture: the stuff in this movie is way more effective than the kitschy kind of gore I designed the scale for in the first place.

If gratuitous sex and violence bugs you, steer clear of Nurse. Paz de la Huerta stars as a psychotic hospital worker who becomes infatuated, in a Single White Female kind of way, with a rookie nurse played by Katrina Bowden. You may remember Bowden as the ditsy blonde on 30 Rock or the smart blonde from Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. I think she’s a surprisingly good actress who deserves to be in better flicks than Nurse.

Huerta, on the other hand, seems universally hated by moviegoers. I don’t know why. I think she’s perfect for Nurse and what it’s trying to be. To be clear, it’s not trying to be much, but that’s part of the charm. I came this close to seeing this one in the theater, and had I gone I wouldn’t have felt cheated. America just doesn’t make movies like this anymore. It’s a wonder it actually made it into theaters.

The exploitation film is a dying breed. Anything even remotely resembling the bawdy fun of pre-blockbuster genre flicks is almost exclusively done ironically these days. Now, Nurse isn’t a great exploitation film, but it’s an honest one which is elevated by the fact there’s not a whole lot to choose from anymore. I’d rate it high above a late night 90s thriller and a little bit below Basic Instinct. Speaking of Basic Instinct: if the Sharon Stone leg-cross shocked you, Huerta will give you a heart attack.

I happen to love deadly women movies. In the first scene, Huerta is shown scouring a nightclub for unfaithful husbands. She finds one, seduces him, and leads him to the rooftop of a tall building. There she gives him a handjob before nicking his femoral artery with a scalpel. While he’s bleeding out, she gives a decent little killer speech and shoves him over the edge. Several stories below he’s impaled on an iron fence. Like most of the kills in the movie, there’s a strange mixture of practical effects and CGI, as if they originally planned to do it the right way, then decided to amp up the blood in post. It’s a cheat, but it’s a damned sight better than the entirely CGI stuff in Midnight Meat Train.

Kathleen Turner is in the movie for approximately thirty seconds and never seen again, Judd Nelson appears as a perverted doctor who gets the second best murder scene of the entire movie (not a spoiler as you can tell he was born to die from the very second he appears on screen), and Reno 911’s Niecy Nash plays a pretty good comedic relief. Dumb logic and unnecessary voiceovers aside, I quite liked Nurse.

There’s a scene near the end which is unexpectedly disturbing. It’s undercut by a Silence of the Lambs rip-off, but what Huerta does when cornered in a room full of bedridden patients is one of the most visceral things I’ve ever seen and, thankfully, the filmmakers don’t ruin that part with CGI. In fact, had they used no CGI at all, I probably could have given this one a four on the gore rating.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved Animal House, liked Blues Brothers, and kind of enjoyed Innocent Blood when it originally came out (I might revisit it soon). But, try as I might, I could never quite get into An American Werewolf in London. The last time I tried I returned the VHS to the video store before finishing it. Today I stuck it through and found out the best part of the movie is the ending, although everything preceding it doesn’t really connect.

Every time I stumble upon a John Landis interview I stop whatever I have planned and watch. I’d be hard-pressed to name three directors with the same gusto he has. Which is weird because that gusto doesn’t translate to An American Werewolf. It’s like Landis  unconditionally loves all movies except for his own. And even though Animal House is still one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, I can’t find the humor in this one… that is to say until the porno theater scene (the movie-within-the-movie is hilarious). Everything beyond that is actually quite good, but that’s only like the final tenth of the movie.

I was hopeful the movie would click this time around, but it just didn’t do it in time. I rarely get bored by horror movies, even the ones objectively worse than this one. Apparently, my enjoying this movie is just one of those things that weren’t meant to be.

A couple of backpackers are hiking across the English countryside. There they happen upon a tavern called The Slaughtered Lamb. It’s a record-skip kind of moment (though, thankfully, the movie doesn’t go there literally), and the locals kick the boys out when they inquire about the spooky, 200-year old pentagram painted on the wall. “Beware the moon,” are the locals’ departing words, as well as: “stick to the roads.”

Naturally, there’s a full moon that very night and the boys are attacked by a werewolf. It kills one and maims the other. The survivor, David, wakes up in a hospital and begins an unlikely romance with his nurse (Jenny Agutter, who co-starred with Michael York in Logan’s Run, one of my all-time favorite movies). When he’s released from the hospital, she offers him room and board (and sex) at her apartment. Around the same time, David begins receiving visits from his dead friend, Jack, like the Victor Pascow character in Pet Sematary. 

Jack’s ghost informs David he’s a werewolf now and that he should kill himself to break the curse. David’s holding out hope that he’s crazy because crazy is an attractive alternative to suicide. This is all very good on paper, but the execution is… I mean… is it supposed to be a tribute to older flicks or something? Because it never feels that way. It just feels straight-up like something we’ve all seen and watched before.

The special effects are great, but I have nothing else I want to say. It bums me out, too, because I find at least a few positive things to say about nearly everything I feature on here. But this one… I don’t know. It just doesn’t work for me until that wonderful ending comes along. Maybe I’ll try again in another decade.

I do have to give it a decent gore rating, though, if only because of that spectacular ending. I really wish the rest of the movie had been so far out of its mind.

In Dagon, two couples are vacationing on a yacht off the coast of Spain where a storm shipwrecks them all. The young couple, Barbara and Paul, race to the shore in an inflatable raft to get help. Once there, Paul enlists the help of local fishermen while Barbara seeks a phone at a hotel. Yet when the fishermen take Paul back to the shipwreck, he discovers his companions are gone and the water filling the boat is now red with blood.

Back on shore, Paul discovers Barbara has gone missing, too. When he inquires about her at the hotel, he’s attacked by a mob of locals. They all appear human, but their webbed hands give them away. It’s not long before he discovers they’re monsters wearing the skin of humans. I love mysteries like this, which often have the human characters repeating, “What the fuck?!”

The only thing wrong with Dagon is it’s cheap. Like, SyFy movie-of-the-week cheap. The sleek ugliness and the overall phoniness of the early 2000s is stamped all over it. You can tell the actors didn’t get much time (if any) to rehearse. Meanwhile, some of the CGI couldn’t have been more distracting if a child had finger painted it.

But look past all the superficial stuff, including horrendous dialogue, and you get a Lovecraft movie that’s almost as fun as Necronomicon or The Resurrected. I don’t think anyone would have blamed director Stuart Gordon for phoning this one in, considering the circumstances, but it’s clear he didn’t. Many directors who had to endure the misguided trends of the era gave up on making good movies, yet Gordon fights through it with enthusiastic energy that saves the movie from sinking. The editing ain’t bad, either, considering what they were working with.

The monsters are genuinely creepy and the premise draws you in. I love movies that allow mystery to drive the plot. I just wish it didn’t look so shitty.

Boston, 1942: a mother catches her son with pornographic material and wrecks his room in a fit of rage. With measured calmness, the boy axes her to death and hacksaws her head off. When the police arrive the boy is found trembling in a closet, making up stories about a killer fleeing the scene of the crime. The cops buy it.

Fast forward to the 1980s: a college girl is sunbathing on the grass as a figure stalks about the trees. We’ve seen this before: the figure will turn out to be a voyeuristic groundskeeper or a dimwitted boyfriend, but not the killer. You can rest assured there probably won’t be another kill for at least twenty or thirty minutes… in other movies. In Pieces, however, the figure leaps from the bushes and lops her head off with a chainsaw. In broad daylight no less.

The homicide detectives arrive and that’s when the movie becomes a serviceable whodunit. The pool of suspects include the dean, a handful of students, the groundskeeper, and an oddly composed professor. You’ll think you know who the killer is, but Pieces might just surprise you.

Let’s examine one of the best poster lines of all time: “Pieces… it’s exactly what you think it is.” More accurately, for fans of 80s slasher flicks, it’s exactly what we want it to be. Aging TV actors? Check. Hilariously stilted dialogue? Double-check. Thrills per minute? Check, check, and triple-check. All this with a heavy pinch of the Italian horror music.

Pieces is a stand-out in what was perhaps the most saturated year of slasher flicks. The reason it stands out is because it’s not what you think it is… unless you’ve somehow never developed a cold cynicism after being burned by the abundance of gratuitously slow, stupidly boring slasher movies. In fact, calling it a slasher movie is a disservice; Pieces is straight-up exploitation of the I-can’t-believe-this-got-made variety. It shares more in common with Hershell Gordon Lewis and Frank Henenlotter than Sean Cunningham and Wes Craven. I’m not saying one flavor is objectively better than the other, but this is the kind of shit I love.

With great special effects and an unwillingness to pan away, it’s one of the rare movies which lives up to its scuzzy promotional materials. That alone deserves accolades. Easily the purest and most enjoyable gore movie I’ve featured since Blood Rage.

Bradley Cooper and Leslie Bibb are a banging hot couple who live in a spacious apartment in the middle of New York City. This despite the fact Cooper is a struggling photographer and Bibb is a waitress at a shitty diner. Don’t get hung up on the unlikeliness of this setup or you’ll have an even harder time suspending disbelief later on. Yeah, I know I’ve raved about less believable movies than this one, but context is important and Midnight Meat Train wants you to believe every bit of it.

Early on, Cooper is introduced to a painfully shallow (and painfully stereotypical) art gallery manager, played by Brooke Shields, who informs him his art isn’t brave enough to interest anyone. Wounded by the critique, he roams the streets at night looking for the darkest, most dangerous photographs he can get. The first great photograph, according to Shields, depicts the attempted rape of a woman by subway thugs. Three more pictures like that, she says, and Cooper will earn a spot in her next gallery.

‘Kay.

Later, Cooper learns what the audience already knows: the woman he photographed boarded a subway train and never got off. It turns out a mysterious man in a suit and tie (Vinnie Jones) butchers passengers on the train every night. What is he doing with the bodies? Where is the train going? Who the hell is he? Those questions are kind of answered by the end, but the answers feel more like excuses than reasons—excuses for showing a bunch of mayhem without substance.

I only vaguely remember the original story from Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, which is odd considering I distinctly remember so many of the other stories from that volume. If memory serves me correctly, it was a good horror story squeezed in between a bunch of great ones. To be fair, I’m frequently underwhelmed by adaptations of Barker’s work even though I can’t get enough of them. I’m just curious why the filmmakers chose this story over some of the others in the series (cheapest to film, perhaps?).

This isn’t the first time I tried this movie. On my most recent viewing, I was admiring the adult characters and serious tone, trying to remember why I hadn’t finished it the first time. Then it happened: Ted Raimi makes a cameo (usually a good thing) in which the butcher hits him in the back of the head so hard it sends Raimi’s eyeball flying at the camera. Sure, that sounds cool, but the CGI employed here is about as convincing as the effects used in the Lionsgate logo. The problem is rarely the CGI itself, it’s the way it’s used… use it to show me something that’s literally impossible to film. Don’t use it to put practical effect wizards out of work.

When the movie isn’t going full Matrix with its gore, it looks great and the performances are better than this script deserves. I love these kinds of high concepts, and I love characters who are helplessly drawn to the shadows, but the story just failed to excite me. It’s a shame, too, because there are some very watchable moments here. I especially liked Bibb’s acting when she realizes her lover is going insane.

Growing up, there was Critic’s Choice Video, Blockbuster, and, eventually, Hollywood Video in town. When I exhausted the horror sections in all three, I turned to the video store in the local supermarket, which had a surprising number of underrated gems. (Some of the weirdest shit could be found in the grocery store, which makes me regret not taking advantage of it sooner.) Chopping Mall was one of them.

Fast-forward to today and the film’s been remastered by Arrow Video, which treats splatter films with the same care as Scream Factory and Grindhouse Releasing. I love VHS for what it was, but anyone who maintains it’s better than these HD re-releases is hopelessly nostalgic. This is the closest you can get to seeing this movie in a theater for the first time.

What I admire most about Chopping Mall is its elegant simplicity. A group of horny teenagers party in a mall after hours. Unfortunately, the mall is patrolled by futuristic security bots, which go homicidal after an electrical storm affects their programming. Dick Miller, playing a janitor, is one of the first to go; he’s angrily mopping up a spill when one of the robots decides to electrocute him for no other reason than our entertainment.

When the three robots discover the teenagers, they chase them through ventilation shafts, clothing stores, and staff-only corridors, shooting lasers from their head-mounted visors. This is the kind of movie where fully automatic assault rifles can be found at a sporting goods shop called Peckinpah’s. Even better: the restaurant in the mall is decorated with B-movie posters. Why? Why not.

Chopping Mall is fast, funny, and absolutely bonkers. At 77 minutes, the movie doesn’t even come close to wearing out its welcome. It’s amazing that, with a sub-million dollar budget, the film is so watchable and fun. Watch it with a group of rowdy drunks and have a grand ol’ time.

Two Evil Eyes sounds like a dream come true: a double-feature based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, one directed by George Romero and the other by Dario Argento.

I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie, but it manages to hold up after multiple viewings. The acting is sufficient and it feels like it’s aimed strictly at adults. Other anthology films, like Creepshow, attempt to soften the hokey-factor by addressing it with loads of humor. Two Evil Eyes isn’t entirely without humor, but it’s always refreshing to see a horror film that A) you can take seriously and B) doesn’t bore the ever-lovin’ shit out of ya.

Romero’s segment comes first. It stars Creepshow’s Adrienne Barbeau and After Midnight’s Ramy as lovers despite the fact Barbeau’s wealthy husband (Bingo O’Malley) is on his deathbed. Zada, who happens to be a hypnotist, puts a spell on the man to make sure he doesn’t leave Barbeau out of the will. (I’m simplifying here because the boring legalese is much more complicated than it needs to be.) Unfortunately, Zada never issues the command to awaken the old man from his trance, so it keeps a part of him awake even in death.

 The idea of keeping someone in a perpetual state of conscious death is genuinely creepy, even if the voice which emanates from the body verges on unintentional comedy. My biggest complaint is that the setup is dragged out until the bitter end. It goes on for so long, in fact, I’ve already told you more than I should have.

The next segment, which begins immediately after Romero’s abruptly ends, was actually my introduction to Argento years ago. The director opens his segment at a dark crime scene, complete with a pendulum murder weapon. The contrast between the directors’ style is immediately apparent: Romero was a technical filmmaker who never let the cinematography distract from the story, while Argento favored visual prose. (We could argue all day about which style is superior, but I’ve liked Romero’s films more consistently, even if they didn’t look as good.)

Whereas Romero’s segment gradually eased you into the macabre, Argento uses the far-fetched crime scene to set the tone for the rest of the movie: this isn’t reality. This is a nightmare.

I feel it’s far easier to suspend disbelief here than it was in the first story, even though it asks you to believe a whole lot more. There’s some very funny stuff in the second segment, but it’s not the goofy fun-funny of Creepshow and HBO’s Tales from the Crypt. It tickles a much deeper and darker funny bone and goes well over the line while doing it. There’s a scene so comically bizarre, I can’t help but wonder… was Argento satirizing Weekend at Bernies?

 So Harvey Keitel plays a photographer who’s fascinated with grizzly deaths. Why John Amos’s detective character is so casual about letting a civilian poke around crime scenes doesn’t matter because, like I said, you’re immediately thrust into this bizarre world without any promise of realism. One day, while he’s developing pictures in his lab, Keitel discovers his wife has taken in a stray black cat. Keitel doesn’t like the cat because the cat doesn’t like him. Perhaps it intuits he’s a bad man?

 And he is a bad man, which is first evidenced when he strangles the cat to death for one of his photography sessions (spoiler: the cat comes back). That’s usually the point with stories like this: bad people have to do bad things to good people so we can cheer when they get what they have coming to ’em. It gets tiring in lesser efforts, but Two Evil Eyes keeps it fresh enough to retain our interest.