The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (dir by Bob Clark)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The title of this 1972 film is definitely a case of truth in advertising.

Children definitely should not play with dead things! I don’t care how mature they are or how lenient of a parent you’re trying to be. When you see your child playing with a dead thing, it is on you to step forward and say, “Child, leave that dead thing alone unless you want to forever burn in Hell.” I know that type of language might be traumatic for some children but you’ll be glad you did it. You know who played with dead things when he was a child? Jeffrey Dahmer! And look how that turned out. He got a miniseries made about him and became an internet meme.

Now, it should be pointed out that they’re aren’t any children to be found in Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. The children of the title are actually a group of wannabe actors who are led by a pretentious douchebag named Alan (played by the film’s writer, Alan Ormsby). With his mustache and his long hair and his hip clothes and his vocabulary of psychobabble and buzzwords, Alan considers himself to be quite the chic 70s gentleman. He refers the other actors as being his “children,” and they let him get away with it. Personally, I would be kind of insulted but whatever.

One night, Alan and his theatrical troupe ride a boat off to an island that is sitting off the coast of Miami. The island is reputed to be haunted and Alan tells the actors several rather gruesome stories about things that have supposedly happened to the inhabitants of the island. According to Alan, the island is used as a cemetery for criminals who were so vile that no one wanted to collect their bodies.

Why are the actors on the island? Along with leading his theatrical troupe, Alan considers himself to be a bit of a warlock. He wants to perform a ceremony at midnight and he expects his actors to help him out. If they don’t help, they’ll lose their jobs. If they do help, they’ll probably lose their lives. Alan and his actors dig up the body of a man named Orville (played by the wonderfully named Seth Sklarey). The ceremony that Alan performs at midnight fails to bring Orville back to life but it does cause the dead who were left in their graves to rise from the Earth as zombies. The zombies are not happy that their island has been invaded and they’re especially not happy about Alan digging up Orville.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things is a mix of comedy and horror, with Alan’s pretentious foolishness dominating the first half of the film while the second features the zombies laying siege to a cottage. It starts out slow but, once the zombies come to life, the film achieves a surreal grandeur. For an obviously low-budget film, the zombie makeup is surprisingly effective and the zombies themselves are so relentless and determined in their pursuit of the living that they help Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things survive the inevitable comparisons to Night of the Living Dead. The film’s final scene, which plays out in near silence, has an undeniable horrific power to it.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was the third film to be directed by Bob Clark. He also directed films like Deathdream, Black Christmas, Murder By Decree, and the infamous (and very financially successful) Porky’s. Of course, his most beloved film is the one that we’ll all be watching in a little less than two months, A Christmas Story.

Lisa Marie’s Oscar Predictions For October

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, it’s that time of the month again! Here are my Oscar predictions for October! To be honest, I’ve been so busy with Horrorthon that I haven’t given the Oscar race as much thought as usual. As of right now, it still appears to be a Killers Of The Flower Moon vs. Oppenheimer vs. Barbie race.

The Bikeriders, which seemed like a strong contender, seems to be in limbo right now. It was scheduled to be released on December 1st but it was taken off the schedule until the SAG-AFTRA strike is resolved. (The studio wants the actors to be able to promote the film, which is understandable given the subject matter.) So, for now, I’m moving The Bikeriders off of my list of predictions.

I’m also pretty confident that The Color Purple will not be the major Oscar contender that many expected, if just because of Alice Walker’s long history of anti-Semitic rhetoric. (Seriously, Alice Walker is a huge supporter of David Icke, the conspiracy theorist who claims that the world is controlled by a group of shape-shifting aliens and Zionists.)

Below are my predictions for October. Be sure to also check out my predictions for March and April and May and June and July and August and September!

Best Picture

Air

American Fiction

Barbie

The Holdovers

Killers of the Flower Moon

Maestro

May/December

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

The Zone of Interest

Best Director

Greta Gerwig for Barbie

Jonathan Glazer for The Zone of Interest

Cord Jefferson for American Fiction

Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer

Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Actor

Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon

Colman Domingo in Rustin

Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

Best Actress

Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon

Natalie Portman in May December

Margot Robbie in Barbie

Emma Stone in Poor Things

Kate Winslet in Lee

Best Supporting Actor

Willem DaFoe in Poor Things

Robert De Niro in Killers of the Flower Moon

Robert Downey, Jr. in Oppenheimer

Ryan Gosling in Barbie

Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers

Best Supporting Actress

Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer

Sandra Huller in Zone of Interest

Julianne Moore in May December

Cara Jade Myers in Killers of the Flower Moon

Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers

Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence (1992, directed by William Lustig)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Jedadiah Leland

Despite finally getting his burial with honors at the end of Maniac Cop 2, Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar) returns for one last outing. Raised from the dead by a voodoo houngan (Julius Harris), Cordell invades a hospital to seek vengeance for a comatose policewoman named Katie Sullivan (Gretchen Baker). In a coma due to the wounds she received while thwarting a convenience store robbery, Katie is being framed by unscrupulous reporters and attorneys who claim that Katie was a bad cop who killed a clerk in cold blood. Cordell sees Katie as being a fellow victim of anti-cop bias and he is not going to let anyone treat her with disrespect, which is something that two doctors (Robert Forster and Doug Savant) are unfortunate enough to discover. Sean McKinney (Robert Davi) and Dr. Susan Lowery (Caitlin Dulany) try to figure out how to bring peace to the souls of both Cordell and Katie.

As opposed to the first two films, Maniac Cop III had a troubled production. Lustig and screenwriter Larry Cohen wanted to set the film in a Harlem hospital and bring in an African-American detective to investigate Cordell’s activities. The film’s Japanese producers insisted that Robert Davi return as the lead, even though the script’s lead character had little in common with the way Sean McKinney was portrayed in Maniac Cop 2. Larry Cohen then refused to do any rewrites on the script unless he was paid more. William Lustig filmed what he could and ended up with a 51-minute movie. Extra scenes were directed by one of the film’s producers and the film was also padded out with outtakes from Maniac Cop 2.

The film is disjointed and there’s too much time devoted to Jackie Earle Haley playing a character who has much in common Leo Rossi’s serial killer from the second film. (Haley’s performance is fine but the character feels superfluous). But the movie’s hospital setting leads to some interesting kill scenes and Z’Dar and Davi both give good performances as two different types of maniac cops. The supporting cast is full of good character actors like Haley, Forster, Savant, Julius Harris, Bobby Di Cicco, and Paul Gleason. Despite the film’s flaws, Maniac Cop III is a solid ending for the trilogy.

Retro Television Reviews: Return To Cabin By The Lake (dir by Po-Chih Leong)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 2001’s Return To Cabin By The Lake! It can be viewed on YouTube.

Stanley Caldwell (Judd Nelson) is back!

At the end of Cabin By The Lake, screenwriter Stanley had managed to escape from the police by faking his own drowning. Return to Cabin By The Lake finds Stanley using a variety of disguises and fake identities in his effort to once again become a part of the film industry. He is particularly interested in the fact that his previous murder spree is being turned into a movie. He’s considerably less happy about the fact that everyone involved in the movie continually disparages his work as a screenwriter. He’s even less happy when he hears them speculating that there was a sexual-motive behind Stanley’s murders or that Stanley was acting out against his mother. For someone who spent the previous movie drowning innocent women and then visiting their bodies in the lake, Stanley sure does seem to be shocked to discover that most people don’t have a high opinion of him. You’re a murderer, Stanley. People don’t like murderers.

Anyway, as a master of disguise, Stanley is able to work his way into the production of the film. Even though everyone on the set is spending 24 hours a day obsessing on and recreating the crimes of Stanley, no one is suspicious of the guy who looks just like Stanley and who keeps saying stuff like, “Stanley would never do that!” Stanley becomes obsessed with script writer Andrea (Dahlia Salem). He also comes to resent the film’s shallow director, Mike Helton (Brian Krause, giving the film’s best performance). Stanley decides that he would be a better director of the film so he buries Mike alive and then takes over direction.

Return To Cabin By The Lake is a bit more deliberately humorous than the first film. If Cabin By The Lake was full of pleasant townspeople and earnest police officers, Return To Cabin By The Lake is populated with caricatures of various Hollywood phonies. Everyone involved in Return To Cabin By The Lake‘s film-within-a-film is blithely unconcerned with the feelings of the the victim’s loved ones nor do they really care about telling the story accurately. Helton’s only concern is that the script have enough sex. That Stanley not only takes over as director but turns out to be a pretty good at it would appear to be Return To Cabin By The Lake’s ultimate statement on the film industry.

Judd Nelson is a bit more energetic in the sequel than he was in the first film. That said, Return To Cabin The By The Lake makes the mistake of asking us to buy the idea of Stanley being a master of disguise. Judd Nelson is always going to look and sound like Judd Nelson, regardless of whether he’s wearing a wig or not.

Though it’s a bit constrained by being a made-for-TV movie, Return To Cabin By The Lake is a marked improvement on the first film, one that has more humor and a better performance from its lead. The film ends with an opening for another sequel but it was apparently never to be.

Horror Scenes That I Love: Sissy Spacek in Carrie

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Sissy Spacek hasn’t appeared in many horror movies but the one in which she did appear is such a classic and Spacek’s performance was so strong that she qualifies as a horror icon regardless. In 1976, Sissy Space played poor and victimized Carrie White, the shy high school student who ended up burning down the prom. Her performance became one of the few horror performances to be Oscar-nominated and Carrie launched a series of Stephen King adaptations.

In one of the best scene from the film, Carrie is forced to deal with both an insensitive principal and a brat on a bicycle.

Horror Novel Review: The Rich Girl by R.L. Stine

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1997 novel, The Rich Girl, tells the story of two teenage friends.

Emma is poor and worried about how her family is going to be able pay for her mother’s medical needs. Sydney is rich and worried that Emma is going to stop being her friend just because she doesn’t like Sydney’s boyfriend, Jason. As you can probably guess, one of these friends has much larger and far more serious concerns than the other but this book is called The Rich Girl and therefore, Sydney is our main character. Sorry, Emma. Only rich people get to star in Fear Street books.

Anyway, Sydney and Emma work at the local movie theater. One night, they come across a duffel bag that someone has been left behind. It’s full of money! In fact, there’s more than enough money to help out Emma’s mother. Sydney wants to turn the money in but Emma points out that her family needs the money and, even more importantly, Emma needs the money. Emma wants to go to college and she wants to finally buy some pretty clothes and she wants her mother to be alive to see her do both. Sydney and Emma decide not to turn in the money but to instead bury it out in Fear Woods. They’ll leave it out there for two weeks and then, it’ll all belong to them! Yay!

Sydney and Emma promise each other that they won’t tell anyone about the money but then Sydney tells Jason. Jason demands a some of the money for himself, though if he could just shut up and be patient, Sydney would eventually have half of the money and everything about their toxic relationship suggests that she would give him however much he wanted. Anyway, all of this all leads to violence and Jason’s apparent death. Sydney and Emma hide Jason’s body but Emma can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching and following her. Could Jason be back from the dead!? Does Zombie Jason want revenge!? Or could it be something else?

This book had a big twist at the end but it was pretty familiar twist and I saw it coming from miles away. I appreciated the kind of dark ending but neither Sydney nor Emma were particularly compelling characters. This one kind of felt like Stine an autopilot.

October True Crime: Jack The Ripper (dir by Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The year is 1888 and London is a city in fear.

A mysterious, cloak-wearing serial killer know as Jack The Ripper is stalking the fog-strewn streets and killing prostitutes after asking them if they know the whereabouts of Mary Clark. The newspapers are full of stories about the murders and editorials condemning the failure of Scotland Yard to capture the killer. The citizens of London’s Whitechapel district are resorting to vigilante justice and any stranger is liable to be accused of being the Ripper.

When an American policeman named Sam Lowry (Lee Patterson) shows up in Whitechapel, he is accosted by a group of suspicious citizens. Fortunately, before one of them can stab Sam, he’s saved by his old friend, Scotland Yard’s Inspector O’Neill (Eddie Byrne). Sam explains that he’s come to London to not only help his old friend O’Neill catch the killer but to also study how the city of London has responded to the horror of the Ripper’s crimes. O’Neill introduces Sam to both the world weary coroner, Sir David Rogers (Ewen Solon), and to Anne Ford (Betty MacDowell), the liberal-minded ward of Dr. Tranter (John Le Musurier). As Anne shows Sam around London and speculates about why the Ripper has managed to avoid being caught by the police, O’Neill tries to discover the Ripper’s identity before he can strike again.

As you may have guessed from the plot description, this 1959 film doesn’t exactly stick to the historical fact when it comes to the murders of Jack the Ripper. For instance, the names and the number of victims have been changed and, needless to say, the NYPD didn’t loan any of its detectives to Scotland Yard. Then again, there’s very few films about Jack the Ripper that actually stick to the facts of the case. (Murder By Decree came perhaps the closest, though it still insisted on pushing the ludicrous Royal Ripper theory.) When one watches a Jack the Ripper film, it’s with the understanding that the story is probably going to be fictionalized. Considering that there’s probably no chance of the Ripper’s identity ever being conclusively established, it’s to be expected.

As for the film itself, it actually has quite a few effective moments. The heavy fog and the black-and-white cinematography creates the properly ominous atmosphere and the murders themselves are surprisingly brutal for a film from 1959, leaving no doubt that this film’s Ripper is a cruel sadist regardless of what other motives he may have. The film itself ends with a properly macabre twist. Patterson, Byrne, and MacDowell aren’t particularly interesting in the lead roles (and Patterson’s pompadour looks a bit ludicrous on a Victorian-era policeman) but the suspects, victims, and witnesses are all well-played by a cast of very British character actors.

There are apparently several versions of Jack the Ripper out there. Though the film was a British production, it was filmed with an eye towards the international market and, as a result, there were several different edits depending on what the film could get away with in each country. Apparently, one version actually switched from black-and-white to color whenever blood was spilled and certain European countries got a version that featured a few fleeting moments of nudity. The version edited for American audiences, not surprisingly, doesn’t feature any of that but it’s still a watchable and entertaining Jack the Ripper film.

One final note: my personal opinion is that Jack the Ripper was some guy that no one has ever heard of. He was probably not a doctor. I doubt he was a Freemason. He certainly was not a part of a Royal conspiracy or any of that other nonsense. He may have been a butcher but it’s just as possible that he could have been a hatmaker or a carriage driver or a petty criminal who paid for his drinks through mugging. He was probably never suspected at the time and I imagine he died without ever telling anyone what he had done. People find comfort in conspiracies and elaborate cover-ups but often, the simplest solution is the correct one.

(That said, every time that Jeff and I go to London, we do the Jack the Ripper walking tour. It’s always interesting to hear the weird theories that people come up with.)

The Films of Dario Argento: Trauma

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1993’s Trauma, Dario Argento tells a story of giallo horror, complete with a killer who wears black gloves, a camera that stalks through the streets of a rainy city, and plenty of eccentric red herrings. The story is set and was filmed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, making this one of the two Argento films to be completely shot in America.

Trauma was also the first of Argento’s films to star his daughter Asia Argento. Asia, who was 16 at the time of filming, plays Aura Petrescu, the daughter of Adriana (Piper Laurie) and Stefan (Dominique Serrand). Aura is a bulimic drug addict, with track marks up and down her arms. Having recently escaped from a mental hospital run by the eccentric Dr. Judd (Frederic Forrest), Aura is preparing to jump off a bridge and end her life when she’s grabbed by David (Christopher Rydell). David works as a headline writer and an artist for a local TV news station. David is also a recovering addict who takes sympathy on Aura and buys her breakfast. Aura thanks David by stealing his wallet and running out of the restaurant.

After being caught by the police, Aura is then returned to her home, a baroque mansion where Adriana works as a fake psychic. When Aura arrives, Adriana is preparing for a séance. She’s been hired to contact the spirit of a victim of The Head Hunter, a serial killer who has been chopping off people’s heads in Minneapolis. As a storm rages outside, Aura again flees from the house. Stefan and Adriana chase after her. Soon, while a terrified Aura screams in the rain (in a scene that will remind some of Asia’s mother, Daria Nicolodi, freaking out at the end of Tenebrae), the Head Hunter is holding up what appeas to be the heads of her parents.

Terrified for her life, Aura goes through David’s wallet, finds his number, and calls him. After setting Aura up at his house, David investigates who is chasing her and how those people are connected to The Head Hunter. David also falls in love with Aura and Aura falls for him. Unfortunately, as so often happens in the films of Dario Argento, the world is full of people who don’t care how in love two people are. The people who are after Aura are determined to get her and if that pushes David back into the world of drug abuse, so be it.

Trauma is middle-of-the-road Argento, featuring some scenes that are touched with genius and other scenes that just feel a bit bland. The cast is an interesting mix of veteran performers like Piper Laurie, Frederic Forrest, and Brad Dourif and younger actors like Christopher Rydell and Asia Argento. Dario Argento is known for being a director who prefers for his actors to come in, hit their marks, and deliver their lines with a minimum amount of fuss and he’s complained about American method actors (like Tenebrae’s Anthony Franciosa, with whom Argento had a notoriously difficult relationship) who want to discuss every little detail of their character and their performance. One can only imagine how he handled working with actors as outspoken and creative as Laurie, Forrest, and Dourif. It must be said that those three actors all give memorable performances but none of them seem to be acting in the same film as Rydell and Asia Argento. Rydell and Asia give rather earnest and straight-forward performances while Laurie, Forrest, and Dourif are all a bit more eccentric in the way they interpret their characters. Piper Laurie, in particular, rejects subtlety and delivers her lines with all of the melodramatic force she can summon. (It should be said that this is absolutely the right approach for the character that she’s playing.) That said, it’s Fredric Forrest who truly seems to be on a different planet from everyone else, giving a performance that can only be described as weird. Again, much as with Laurie’s self-aware melodrama, Forrest’s approach works well enough for his odd character, who I assume was named for the Dr. Judd who appears in Cat People.

The most controversial aspect of the film was the casting of Asia Argento as Aura, with some complaining of nepotism and others accusing Dario of exploiting his own daughter. Personally, I think Asia does a perfectly acceptable job in the lead role, even if it’s obvious that she still had room to develop as an actress. At the time the film was made, Asia was herself bulimic and the film’s most powerful scenes are the ones dealing with Aura’s own fragile sense of self-worth. Along with being hunted by a serial killer and having lost her entire entire family, Aura is also an outsider in America. The film paints a portrait of a society that doesn’t care about those living on the fringes. The only person that Aura has to look out for her is David, himself a former resident of the fringe. Christopher Rydell gives a good performance of David, playing him as someone who is trying to do the right thing and protect the victimized, even at the risk of his own sobriety.

(That said, there is one scene in which David receives a panicked phone call from Aura and Rydell’s underreaction suggests that the actor was not informed of just how desperate Asia Argento would sound when she later dubbed in her part of the conversation.)

Argento’s camera glides down dark hallways and through the streets of the city. He films Minneapolis in the same way that many directors would film New Orleans and, as such, the film becomes a vision of Middle America through European eyes. Because there’s a few issues with pacing and some clunky dialogue that was probably due to the Italian script being translated into English, Trauma is not Argento’s best. It’s middle-of-the-road Argento but it remains intriguing, nonetheless.

The (Reviewed) Films of Dario Argento:

4 Shots From 4 Horror Films: Special James Whale Edition

Posted on October 29, 2023 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 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: James Whale!

4 Shots From 4 James Whale Films

Frankenstein (1931, dir by James Whale, DP: Arthur Edeson)

The Old Dark House (1932, dir by James Whale, DP: Arthur Edeson)

The Invisible Man (1933, dir by James Whale, DP: Arthur Edeson)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir by James Whale, DP: John J. Mescall)

Moments #12: The Halloween That Nearly Wasn’t

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Dazzling Erin

I stood out on the front porch and watched as the sky went from being blue to being dark and gray in a matter of minutes. That was the year that fall came early and almost all the leaves were gone by the end of October. But just as the leaves fell early, so did the storms arrive ahead of schedule. It rained hard during the afternoon and probably panicked everyone looking forward to spending the night collecting candy.

The rain stopped before evening came and that night, costumed searchers and their parents walked up and down the sidewalks, running up to houses and shouting, “Trick or Treat!” I was alone that Halloween so I dressed up like a cat and handed out candy. Everyone was extra grateful because they knew that if the storm had started just an hour later, there would have been no Halloween that year.

Previous Moments: