Due to recent tragic — and still-unfolding — events in Puerto Rico, exacerbated to no end by our shithead of a president’s racism and unconcern, I have to admit that I was rooting for Dominium, a “found footage” indie horror filmed on the island in 2013 for the princely sum of $30,000 that’s now available for streaming on Amazon Prime. DIY flicks hold a special place in my heart even under normal circumstances, obviously, but I went into this one hoping to find a real “hidden gem” that I could enthusiastically recommend to all of you, my dear readers. PR could use some good publicity these days, I think we’d all agree, even from a low-rent movie blog like this one, but — and you knew that “but” was coming — I still gotta call ’em like I see ’em —
Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986, dir. Tom McLoughlin)
I see director Jeffrey Abelson, writer Keith Williams, and Alice Cooper got that Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986) was meant to be funny.
I have a couple of questions right up front.
“And he’s after your soul”??? Umm…since when did Jason want your soul? It may have been 5 years since I watched parts 2-10, Freddy vs. Jason, and the remake, but I’m quite sure Jason was never concerned with souls. The closest he got was hopping into bodies in Jason Goes To Hell. That didn’t have to with souls. That was because he needed a Voorhees womb to get into and then pop-out fully grown seconds later to make his second cameo in his own film.
Also, he “knows your house”??? Jason is Santa Claus now? Cooper took some liberties with this song.
I’m not 100% sure why the kid in this video is named Jason. However, the film does make several jokes about the abandoned idea of having Tommy Jarvis become the new Jason, so I’m going to assume that’s the reason.
Jason is basically a stand-in for people who thumb their noses at these kinds of movies. And just in case you didn’t get that, they include the scene where the caretaker says:
Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment.
at the end of the video.
Seeing as Jason didn’t get good grades, much like his movie counterpart doesn’t have any of the following qualities,…
he has to walk to the theater with his date.
Why does this theater have an entrance that makes me think Pinhead is going to walk through it?
A codpiece? He doesn’t even break anything over it in the video. He does smash a bottle on his forehead though.
I’m glad they included the best scene in the movie. Tommy Jarvis deciding he needs to double-kill Jason, and in the process accidentally resurrecting him as a zombie .
It’s all your fault, Tommy. You could have just set fire to his coffin. You didn’t have to open it and poke at his corpse with a metal rod before trying to burn him.
Thanks to this video, we get to see Tarzan-Jason. I don’t remember that happening in any of the movies.
Yes, it turns out to be Alice Cooper pretending to be Jason. Still, Tarzan-Jason is something I could’ve have gotten behind. I’m guessing Cooper was pretending to be Jason because he just can’t let go of the ending of A New Beginning.
Continuity wasn’t a high priority for these movies. Not for the mask though. That must always have the gash in it no matter how much retconning goes on.
While the Cooper fanboy is scared by the film, Jason and his girlfriend eventually get fed up and wander onto the set of the rest of the music video. A lot of weird stuff is going on here.
Cooper is hanging out with a snake.
Cooper apparently had a cage setup to catch his son. What if they had been standing a little off-center?
Someone with wings rising off a horse. Sure.
They escape…somehow. Also, Jason gets Cooper…somehow.
In the end, the twist is that Jason’s father is Alice Cooper because we weren’t supposed to recognize his speaking voice? I guess that works seeing as I’m sure plenty of people didn’t notice Kane Hodder standing outside the corner’s office in Jason Goes To Hell. I didn’t.
But does that mean that Jason never saw his father before now? I’m going with it being that the films are make-believe like Alice Cooper in makeup. Alice Cooper is a man behind a mask too. Within the video, it’s a side his son never saw before.
Okay, let’s state right off the bat that another “found footage” alien abduction film is probably the last thing the world needs — but that’s hardly the fault of filmmakers Sean Bardin (co-director/screenwriter) and Robert Cooley (co-director), not least because their entry in this crowded field, Unaware, was lensed “way back” in 2010, well before these things became ubiquitous. Admittedly, though, it sat around gathering dust until flicks of this nature were everywhere (2013, to be specific, when it was released on DVD), and like a lot of you, I’m sure, I gave it a pass at that point. Still, now that’s available for streaming on Amazon Prime, I figured, what the hell? It surely can’t be worse than The Phoenix Tapes ’97, can it?
As it turns out, though, it’s not only better than bottom-barrel dwellers than that, it can hold its own with Alien Valley,
Don’t feel bad if you don’t. To be honest, I had totally forgotten about it until, two years ago, my friend Janeen mentioned it to me. (And to be honest, I’m not sure if I ever knew about it before then. Memories can inconsistent, especially when it comes to obscure TV shows that didn’t last for very long.) Freakylinks is a show that aired on Fox back in 2000. It only lasted one season and it was about this guy (played by Ethan Embry) who ran a website called freakylinks.com. To me, that sounds like a porn site but apparently, it was actually a site dedicated to investigating the paranormal.
Freakylinks was produced by the same company that produced The Blair Witch Project. A few months before the show premiered, in order to try to create some Blair Witch-style buzz for the production, the production company set up a website called Freakylinks.com and designed it to look like it was just some ghost hunter’s Geocities-style blog. While the web site got some publicity, it didn’t translate into ratings and Freakylinks was canceled. The freakylinks.com domain is currently for sale if anyone wants to buy it and turn it into a paranormal porn site. (Who says the two have to be separate?)
The entire series has been uploaded to YouTube and below you’ll find a pilot!
Prepare to take a trip into the past, to a time when the internet was still a mysterious and powerful thing and people apparently didn’t realize that anyone with time to kill could make a web site.
In 1986, nerds could build robots that displayed human feelings.
Angry old neighbors hate robots.
If a nerd can build a robot that displays human feelings, then he can also bring his girlfriend back to life by putting a computer chip from the robot in her brain.
Once brought back to life, the girlfriend will start to behave just like the robot.
Basketballs can be used to do anything.
Deadly Friend is best remembered for the scene where the newly revived Samantha (Kristy Swanson) throws a basketball with such force that it causes the head of her neighbor (Anne Ramsey) to explode. It is also remembered for BB, the big yellow robot that was built by Paul (Matthew Laborteaux). Deadly Friend starts out as the ultimate nerd fantasy: a beautiful girlfriend. a big robot, and a killer basketball. By the end of the movie, the fantasy has turned into a nightmare.
Deadly Friend was Wes Craven’s follow-up to A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven intended for the film to be a dark love story between a teenage outcast and his zombie girlfriend, with a strong emphasis on the hypocrisy of the adults around them. Craven said that, in his version of Deadly Friend, people like Samantha’s abusive father were meant to be scarier than Zombie Samantha With A Microchip In Her Brain. Warner Bros. wanted a film that would appeal to teenage horror fans and demanded Elm Street-stlye nightmares and buckets of more blood. As a result, Craven practically disowned the finished movie and Deadly Friend is a tonally inconsistent, with sentimental first love scenes competing for space with heads exploding and necks being snapped. Despite good performances from Laborteaux and Swanson, the final film is too much of a mess to work. However, I know that I will never look at a basketball the same way again.
Director Edgar G. Ulmer made some astounding contributions to the horror/sci-fi genres: THE BLACK CAT, BLUEBEARD, THE MAN FROM PLANET X . Unfortunately, THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN isn’t among them. The below-low budget movie (shot on location in Dallas simultaneously with BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER) tries to throw too many things at the wall, and nothing really sticks, thanks to a weak script and short 57 minutes running time.
Ulmer does show flourishes of his brilliance in the opening scene, where safecracker Joe Faust breaks out of prison, is chased by hounds through the woods, and is met by a woman who drives him to a deserted looking, isolated farmhouse. But by this time, he had been beaten down from years of Poverty Row work with little to no recognition, and you can tell Ulmer just took the money and ran with this one.
The woman is Laura Matson, one of a nest of spies led…
Today’s horror scene that I love is from the 1953 film, House of Wax!
In this scene, a curious visitor to Vincent Price’s wax museum discovers that more than a few of the figures are actually corpses that have been covered in wax. When she is confronted by Vincent Price, she hits his face and, in an homage to the famous unmaking scene from The Phantom of the Opera, discovers what is underneath.
(I’ve recently decided that they should change the name of October to something more appropriate, like Pricetober. Seriously, this month is all about Vincent Price…)
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order! That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!
Today’s director: Guillermo Del Toro!
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Devil’s Backbone (2001, dir. by Guillermo Del Toro)
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, dir. by Guillermo Del Toro)
Crimson Peak (2015, dir by Guillermo Del Toro)
The Shape of Water (2017, dir by Guillermo Del Toro)
No, actually, they don’t. If anything, they cause crimes to happen.
First released in 1971 and directed by Al Adamson, Dracula vs. Frankenstein may not be a good film but it’s definitely an unforgettable film. Yes, it may be thoroughly inept but it’s also perhaps the strangest take on the Dracula/Frankenstein rivalry that you’ll ever see.
Plus, it’s one of the final films of Lon Chaney, Jr. Unfortunately, Lon doesn’t exactly look his best in Dracula vs Frankenstein...
Speaking of slumming celebrities, long before he played Dr. Jacoby and inspired America to shout, “Dig yourself out of the shit!,” Russ Tamblyn played a biker named Rico in this movie.
Also, like every other exploitation film made in 1971, Dracula vs. Frankenstein features hippies, leading to the age old question: who needs the supernatural when you’ve got LSD-crazed hippies running around?
Another age old question: Is Dracula vs. Frankenstein merely inept or is it a classic of bad filmmaking?
Through the Shattered Lens 