The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Dead Night (dir by Brad Baruh)

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hey, I’ve got an idea! It’s Spring Break so why don’t we spend it in a cabin in the middle of a snow storm!?

Great idea!

Let’s go!

Oh, look — we’re at the cabin now and there’s some strange woman passed out front. What should we do!?

Hey, let’s bring her inside!

Good idea!

Uh-oh, the woman’s inside and she’s alive but she’s acting kind of weird!

Hey, let’s eat dinner!

Now, in all fairness to the characters in 2018’s Dead Night, things are a bit more complex than that. It’s not just that they decided to go up to a snowy cabin for Spring Break. The cabin is actually supposed to be a therapeutic location. James Pollack (AJ Bowen) is dying of cancer and it’s felt that the cabin will not only ease his pain but perhaps increase his life. If nothing else, the wilderness will bring some sort of inner peace. Accompanying James are his wife, Casey (Brea Grant) and their two teenage children, Jessica (Sophie Dalah) and Jason (Joshua Hoffman), and Jessica’s best friend, Becky (Elsie Luthman).

As for the mysterious woman who shows up out front of the cabin, they’re just trying to be nice when they invite Leslie Bison (Barbara Crampton) to stay in the cabin with them. Even though Leslie can’t tell them how she ended up at their cabin, the Pollacks are not the type to just allow someone to die in the snow. Really, we should all be more like the Pollacks, I guess.

Still, Leslie does turn out to be really obnoxious. She makes inappropriate jokes. She rudely asks which member of the family is dying. She blows kisses at Jason and smirks when Jessica announces that they can’t eat until they’ve said grace. In fact, the family is on the verge of kicking Leslie out when …. well, things happen.

What things? We get some hints from a terrifically over the top true crime show, segments of which appear throughout the movie. Hosted by Jack Sterling (Daniel Roebuck), the show deals with the question of how a perfect wife and mother like Casey Pollack could eventually go insane and chop up her family and friends with an ax. Sterling tells us that, even though Casey called several people and told them that she had found a strange woman outside the cabin, the police were convinced that this was all just a part of an elaborate lie.

Hmmm….so, I guess we know what’s going to happen, right?

Well, no, Not quite. It turns out that the true story is a little bit different from what we might have seen on television. For instance, Jack Steling’s show says nothing about the weird incident that happened in the early 60s, when a young woman got lost in the wood and was apparently impregnated with a piece of a tree….

If you go over to this movie’s imdb page, you’ll find a lot of angry reviews from people who felt that this movie didn’t have a real plot and that it was too gory but I don’t know. I kind of liked it. I mean, it’s a horror movie about people stuck in the middle of the woods. What exactly are you expecting to get other than some nonsensical ax murders? I mean, yes, the film doesn’t make complete sense but the cabin and the woods are both wonderfully creepy locations and the film also featured the great Barbara Crampton playing a …. well, I won’t spoil it. Plus, I watch a lot of true crime television and I can tell you that this film’s satire of the particular genre is spot-on!

So, what can I say? Suck it, imdb. I kinda liked Dead Night.

Great Moments In Comic Book History: Spider-Man Meets The Monster Maker

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

With the Marvel Cinematic Universe about to enter it’s fourth phase and having said goodbye the majority of the Avengers, it’s time to really go through the Marvel vaults and give some consideration to some characters who may not be as well-known as Iron Man or Captain America but who still deserve their own shot at cinematic immortality.

Consider, for instance, Baron Ludwig von Shtupf, the Monster Maker!

Baron Ludwig von Shutpf made his first (and, to date, only) appearances in two issues of Marvel Team-Up. In Marvel Team-Up #36, he kidnapped Spider-Man from New York and Frankenstein’s Monster from the antarctic. In Marvel Team-Up #37, he summoned Man-Wolf to join them all in his castle. Baron von Shtupf was the latest in a long line of mad scientists and he had come up with the perfect plan for world domination. Why not take three great monsters and combine them into one big monster? It seemed like a good plan but Spider-Man, Man-Wolf, Frankenstein’s Monster, and an Agent of SHIELD named Judith Klemmer stopped him and left him tied up in his study.

The Baron would never appear again in the pages of Marvel Comics, which is amazing when you consider that even a character like the Living Eraser made a handful of appearances over the years before being permanently erased. Was it because Baron von Shtupf’s name sounded suspiciously like a certain Yiddish vulgarity? Perhaps. Not bringing back Baron von Shtupf is a waste of a perfect good character so how about, Disney? How about a little love for the Monster Maker? Just imagine what Christoph Waltz could do with the role.

The main reason that I remember the Monster Maker is because, when I was seven years old, I found a copy of Marvel Team-Up #36 at a garage sale and I got excited because The Frankenstein Monster was on the cover. My mom bought it for me. When I got home, I read the comic and I was stunned to discover that it ended with a “to be continued” right after Spider-Man and the Monster discovered the Man-Wolf waiting for them in the Baron’s laboratory. (This was when I was still too young to understand that all comic books ended with a “to be continued” because that was the easiest way to get kids like me to spend my allowance on them.)

I spent years searching for a copy of Marvel Team-Up #37 so I could find out how the story ended. It was not until twelve years later, when I came across it on Ebay, that I was finally able to get a copy of the second part of the Monster Maker saga! For that reason, I have never forgotten Baron von Shtupf and I guess I never will.

Marvels Team-Up #36 (August, 1975) and Marvel Team-Up #37 (September 1975)

“Once Upon A Time In A Castle” and “Snow Death”

Writer — Gerry Conway
Penciler — Sal Buscema
Inker — Vince Colletta
Colourist — Al Wenzel (#36) and Phil Rache (#37)
Letterist — Charlotte Jetter (#36) and Karen Mantio (#37)
Editor — Len Wein (#36) and Marv Wolfman (#37)

Previous Great Moments In Comic Book History:

Mortal Sins: Absolution (1978, directed by Anthony Page)

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

Father Goddard (Richard Burton) is a stern and repressed teacher at a Catholic boys school. Goddard is strangely obsessed with two of his students. The intelligent and athletic Arthur Dyson (Dai Bradley) is a favorite of Goddard’s. However, Goddard cannot stand Arthur’s best friend, Benji (Dominic Guard). Benji wears a leg brace and takes a sarcastic attitude towards Goddard and the Catholic Church in general. When Goddard finds out that Benji has been hanging out with a drifter named Blakely (Billy Connolly) and that Blakely is camping near the church, Goddard calls the police. After the Blakely’s camp is destroyed and the drifter mysteriously vanishes, one of the boys goes to confession and tells the priest that he has murdered Blakely and hidden the body. Is the boy telling the truth or is Goddard the victim of an increasingly complicated prank?

Written by Anthony Shaffer (who also wrote the classic The Wicker Man), Absolution is an extremely complicated mystery that sometimes seems like it’s trying to do too much at one time. It starts out as a character study of an out-of-touch priest and then it becomes a coming of age story about Benji and his friendship with the free-thinking Blakely. Then it turns into a murder mystery and a horror movie before finally settling on being an anti-Catholic tract. The story does hold your interest because of the actors but that does not mean that it always makes sense. The film’s central conspiracy is clever and complicated but also thoroughly implausible.

The man reason to watch the film is that Richard Burton gives one of his best performances as the self-loathing Father Goddard. Burton had a famously mixed-record as a screen actor but Absolution makes good use of his tendency to ham it up. Much of what motivates Goddard is left unclear in the movie, though it is subject of much speculation among his students. Burton fills in the screenplay’s blanks with an intense performance as a man who has convinced himself that he has complete control when he actually has none at all.

Retro Game Review: Beyond: Two Souls (2013, Quantic Dream)

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

In between replaying Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, I decided to go ahead and also replay Qunatic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls.

In Beyond: Two Souls you play two characters who are linked together. Jodie (Ellen Page) is a troubled young woman who, after being rejected by her family while still a child, is raised by paranormal researcher, Nathan Dawkins (Willem DaFoe). You are also Aiden, a mysterious psychic force that Jodie can use to read minds and move objects. Because of Jodie’s powers, the CIA wants them to work for her. Because Jodie does not want to assassinate progressive world leaders just because the CIA wants them dead (remember, this is a French game), Jodie goes on the run. The game itself is told out of chronological order, with the player going back and forth from Jodie’s childhood and Jodie’s present as a fugitive. Like Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, Beyond: Two Souls has multiple endings depending on what you do during the game.

Beyond: Two Souls is a weaker game than both Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human but, when I replayed it, I discovered that it was not as bad as I remembered. Willem DaFoe and especially Ellen Page are amazing in the roles of Jodie and Nathan and the parts of the game that took place during Jodie’s childhood actually improved on a second playing. (There’s nothing more fun than burning down the bully’s house.) The nonlinear storytelling was still needlessly confusing. Fortunately, there is an option to play the game’s chapters in chronological order.

The game’s flaws were still there, though. The CIA stuff was heavy-handed but that is to be expected from Quantic Dream. The main problem I had with the game is that the constant switching back and forth between Jodie and Aiden felt awkward. You can switch between the two throughout the game and I kept pushing the wrong button and I would suddenly find myself stuck in Aiden form, even when there wasn’t anything for Aiden to do. The game’s heavy reliance on quick time events also made me feel as if I didn’t have as much control over the narrative as I did in Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human.

Quantic Dream is one of my favorite video game developers because they are willing to experiment and take risks. Sometimes, those risks pay off and sometimes they lead to an interesting failure, like Beyond: Two Souls. Tomorrow, I’ll look at one of their experiment’s that worked.

Scenes That I Love: The Silver Shamrock Broadcast From Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

From 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

It’s almost time.

Silver Shamrock!

Book Reviews: Nightmare Store and Horror Hotel by Hilary Milton

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

You are trapped in a department store overnight! Can you survive even while being pursued by ghosts, monsters, and killer mannequins?

You are trapped in a hotel! No one else seems to be around! Can you survive even while being pursued by ghosts, monsters, and a crazy doctor with a scalpel?

It all depends on which one of these two books you read!

These are two books that I ordered off of Amazon two years ago and they’re both enjoyable reads. They’re choose your own adventure-style books, where you get trapped in a location overnight and you have to try to survive while various monsters and ghosts try to kill you. Every few pages, you’re given an option for what you want to happen next in the story. What’s interesting is that, instead of it being the usual “If you run got page 75” sort of thing, it’s instead more like, “If you hear a noise, go to page 33. If you see something out of the corner of your eye, go to page 28.” So, to an extent, you get to decide how your scary story plays out. These books were written for children, of course but both of them still get surprisingly grisly and intense at time.

Of the two, I preferred Horror Hotel. The hotel was just a more interesting locations than the store and there was a lot more variety to the options and storylines in Horror Hotel. I mean, yes, it’s obvious that Horror Hotel is basically just The Shining for kids but so what? It had some scary moments! It also had some scary pictures to go along with the text. I wonder how many children in the 80s were traumatized by that picture of a scaly hand reaching out from underneath the bed and grabbing your ankle? Or how about the picture of the crazy-haired scientist running at you with a scalpel in his hand? AGCK!

Anyway, these are fun books. They can orered off of Amazon and and they’re an enjoyable way to kill a little time in between hauntings.

And now, a word from Doc Bowman concerning Halloween….

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Doc Bowman

Hi, everyone!

Doc Bowman here with a very special holiday message!

Tomorrow is Halloween, which my owners — the flame-haired one and the nice one — says is the greatest time of the year! It’s the time when kids get candy, horror movies are on TV, and my owners get to play dress up or, if it’s anything like last year, barely get dressed at all.

But it’s also a time when stupid people do bad things. I’m a black cat so both the flame-haired and the nice-one say that I’m not going to be allowed go outside at all tomorrow. They say it doesn’t matter how much I beg, I’m staying inside. I know they’re doing the right thing but I’m still going to beg and knock things off of tables and counters because I’m a cat and that’s what I do. And they’re going to hopefully give me a lot of treats and pet me to keep me happy, even though they’ll probably have to lock me in the flame-haired one’s room to keep me from running for the front door every time they open it for a trick or treater. That’s just the way thing go at the cat’s house.

Tomorrow night, please make sure that all your pets are safely inside. It may sound like a silly concern but not everyone out there is as nice and wonderful as my owners and the people who read this site!

Have a safe and happy Halloween everyone!

International Horror Film Review: Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (dir by Hajime Soto)

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The world’s ending and does it really matter?

The 1968 Japanese film, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (love that title!), opens with an airplane flying across a blood red sky. Why has the sky changed colors? The pilots aren’t sure and the passengers barely notice. Indeed, the passengers are more concerned with their own problems. There’s the arms manufacturer who is desperate to land his next big contract. There’s the professor who views the world with professional detachment. There’s the corrupt politician who only cares about increasing his own power. There’s the terrorist who is traveling with a rifle hidden in the plane. There’s the other terrorist who has a bomb and who may or may not be working with the first terrorist. (It’s a dangerous world out there.) And then there’s the American war widow, Mrs. Neal (Cathy Horan), whose husband has just been killed in Vietnam.

When a report comes over the radio that one of the passengers has bomb, the crew searches everyone’s bags. “Why are you searching our bags!?” the arm manufacturer demands. “There was a mix-up at the airport and we may have the wrong bag on this flight,” the co-pilot lies. Finally, when the co-pilot and a stewardess come across a metal box in the back of the plane, they think that they’ve found their bomb.

Instead,they’ve found the first terrorist’s rifle. He uses that rifle to hijack the plane and then he shoots out the plane’s radio. Unfortunately, this couldn’t have happened at a worse time because it turns out that the Earth has just been invaded by aliens!

A UFO causes the airplane to crash on a uncharted island. The rifle-toting terrorist is possessed, Thing-style, by one of the aliens. The passengers start to bicker among themselves. Who is to blame for the plane crash? The terrorist or the pilots? Who is to blame for the aliens invading, the aliens or the humans? The professor theorizes that the aliens saw that Earthlings are constantly at war and they decided that this would be a great time to invade the planet. In fact, as the professor goes on to speculate, perhaps we have brought this on ourselves. Maybe we deserve to be invaded. The humans on the island proceed to go out of their way to prove the professor correct.

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell plays out like a pop art alien invasion film. The colors are bright and vibrant. The imagery is often surreal, with the alien literally oozing out of the forehead of the people that it has possessed. By the end of the film, entire cities are full of shriveled up dead bodies while spaceships glow in the distance, their pulsating lights making them resemble the atomic mushroom clouds that have haunted Japanese horror and science fiction cinemas ever since World War II. While the surviving passengers debate whether or not the Earth deserves to be saved, we get red-tinted inserts of assassination and war. The passengers may not be sure whether or not Earth deserves to survive but it’s obvious the filmmakers have made up their minds and they, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.

How about you?

6 Horror Performances That Deserved An Oscar Nomination

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Despite making some inroads as of late, horror films still never quite get the respect that they deserve when it comes Oscar time. That’s especially true of the performers who regularly appear in horror films. If it’s rare for a horror movie to receive a best picture nomination, it’s even rarer for someone to get nominated for appearing in one of them.

And yet, it takes as much skill to make a monster compelling as it does a historical figure or a literary character. In fact, it may take even more skill. After all, everyone knows that Queen Elizabeth I actually ruled over England and that Atticus Finch was an attorney in the South. However, everyone also knows that there’s no such things as vampires and that the dead cannot be reanimated or raised as a zombie. It takes a lot of skill to make a monster seem human.

With that in mind, here are 6 horror performances that deserved, at the very least, an Oscar nomination:

1. Boris Karloff as The Monster in Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein(1935)

The great Boris Karloff is perhaps the most egregious example of a deserving actor who was consistently ignored by the Academy because of the type of films in which he appeared. In the role of Monster, Karloff was never less than brilliant and he set the standard by which all future monsters are judged.

Dracula (1931, directed by Tod Browning)

2. Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931)

When viewed today, it’s perhaps a little bit too easy to be dismissive of Lugosi’s grandly theatrical interpretation of Dracula. But, if you can ignore all of the bad imitations that you’ve seen and heard over the years, you’ll discover that Lugosi’s performance is perfect for the film in which he’s appearing. Indeed, Lugosi’s best moments are the silent ones, when he goes from being a courtly (if vaguely sinister) nobleman to a hungry animal. In those moments, you see why Lugosi’s performance endures.

3. Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho (1960)

Ah, poor Anthony Perkins. Before he played Norman Bates, he was considered to be something an up-and-coming star and even something of a neurotic romantic lead. As with Lugosi’s Dracula, we’ve seen so many bad imitations of Perkins’s performance that it’s easy to overlook just how good he is in the role. He was so perfect as Norman that spent the rest of his career typecast. And, sadly enough, he didn’t even get a much-deserved Oscar nomination out of it.

4. Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973)

Christopher Lee was one of the great actors and, though he may be best remembered for his horror work, he actually appeared in almost every genre of film imaginable. Lee was often dismissive of the Dracula films that he made for Hammer so, as much as I’d love to argue that he deserved a nomination for The Horror of Dracula, I’m instead going to suggest that Lee deserved one for the role that he often cited as his favorite, the pagan Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. Lee brings the perfect mix of wit and menace to the role and, in the process, shows that not all monsters have to be undead.

5. Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis in Halloween (1978) and Halloween II (1981)

Much as with Lugosi and Anthony Perkins, it’s important (and perhaps a little bit difficult) to separate Pleasence’s performances in these two slasher films with all of the imitations that have followed. In both films, Pleasence does a great job of playing a man who has been driven to the verge of madness as a result of having spent too much time in the presence of evil. As potentially dangerous as Sam Loomis sometimes appears to be, there’s no way not to sympathize with him as he continually tries to get people to understand that he wasn’t the one who left Michael escape. If nothing else, Pleasence deserved a nomination just for his delivery of the line, “As a matter of fact, it was.”

6. Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th (1980)

“I’m an old friend of the Christys.” AGCK! RUN!

4 Shots From 4 Films: Halloween, Hereditary, Mandy, Mom and Dad

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 lets the visuals do the talking!

This October, we’re using 4 Shots From 4 Films to look at some of the best years that horror has to offer!

4 Shots From 4 2018 Horror Films