Category Archives: Film Review

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Abby (dir by William Girdler)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Some films are a hundred times more entertaining than they have any right to be and that’s certainly the case with 1974’s Abby.

A blaxploitation take on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, Abby opens with Bishop Garrett Williams (William Marshall, star of Blacula) taking a peaceful stroll with his students at seminary.  Garrett talks about how he will miss them all when he is off on archeological dig in Nigeria.  One of his students asks him some questions about Eshu, one of the spirits of the Yoruba religion.  Bishop Williams explains that Eshu is a trickster and a force of chaos and carnal excess.  Yes, the Bishop explains, he does believe that demons are real.

And indeed, no sooner has the Bishop gone to Nigeria and opened up a small puzzle box adorned with the symbols of Eshu than a demon claiming to be Eshu travels from Africa to Louisville, Kentucky.  Louisville is the new home of the Bishop’s son, Reverend Emmett Williams (Terry Carter).  Reverend Williams is a good and god-fearing man and his new wife, Abby (Carol Speed), is a devout Christian who sings in the choir, speaks out against drugs, and never curses.  That changes, however, once the demon claiming to be Eshu gets inside of her.  Soon, Abby is speaking in a very deep voice, laughing at inappropriate moments, demanding constant sex, and plunging a knife into her arm.  When the now possessed Abby disappears into the sordid nightlife of Louisville, Reverend Williams and his brother-in-law, Det. Cass Potter (Austin Stoker), try to find her.  Eventually, Bishop Williams joins them in their search, knowing that even if they find Abby, it will fall to him to perform the exorcism to save her life and soul.

Abby has so much in common with The Exorcist that Warner Bros. actually ended up suing the film’s producers and distributor for plagiarism.  That lawsuit is one reason why it’s not particularly easy to see Abby today.  Indeed, I had to resort to watching a washed-out upload on YouTube.  Of course, Abby was hardly the first or the last film to rip off The Exorcist.  Almost every horror released in the wake of William Friedkin’s classic shocker owes something to The Exorcist.  Abby, however, was one of the more finanically successful rip-offs of the film, or at least it was until the lawsuit led to it being removed from theaters.  It’s unfortunate that Abby is so difficult to see because it’s actually one of the more entertaining Exorcist rip-offs out there.

A lot of that is due to the confrontation between the dignified and stately William Marshall and the far more hyperactive Carol Speed.  Carol Speed gives a performance of amazing energy, whether she’s happily cackling after a woman drops dead of a heart attack or if she’s kicking her husband in the groin.  Carol Speed holds nothing back and basically tears through every scene like a force of uncontrollable nature.  She provides the perfect counterbalance to Marshall’s more measured performance as the Bishop.  Marshall delivers his lines with such authority and conviction that the viewer has no doubt he could probably scare the devil out of everyone.  Carol Speed, meanwhile, is so good at playing wild that the viewer wonders how, even if they can get Eshu out of here, Abby will ever be able to go back to being a demure preacher’s wife.  Setting Marshall and Speed loose in the seedy nightclubs of Loiusville leads to an occasionally horrific, occasionally silly, but always entertaining between good and evil.

Abby is an entertaining horror film.  It’s just unfortunate that we will probably never get to see a good print of it.  But then again, maybe that’s for the best.  The graininess of the version that I saw actually added to the experience of watching the film.  It made me feel like I was in some small theater in the middle of nowhere, watching a print of the film that had taken a long and difficult journey just so it could be seen and appreciated.

Fan Base (2021, directed by Curtis Everitt)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Cray (Blair Kelly) has spent his entire life convinced that his father is a famous horror actor.  When he sees the actor sitting on a bench and reading a newspaper, Cray introduces himself as the actor’s son.  The actor politely explains that he was rendered sterile in a motorcycle accident and cannot be Cray’s father.  Cray beats the actor to death and then heads over to another movie site so he can stalk the actor’s former co-star, Janey Romero (Carol Lynn Fortin).

This low-budget, straight-to-video horror film tries to make fun of the whole process of making other low-budget, straight-to-video horror films but the dialouge is never as funny as the movie seems to think and none of the actors appear to have a semblance of comedic timing.  There have been many instances of horror stars, especially women, getting stalked by obsessive fans so the story does have some root in reality.  It is something that particularly seems to happen to the final girls from the Friday the 13th films, with Adrienne King literally putting her career on hold because of an obsessed stalker.  Some people really do take their fandom too far.  But Fan Base doesn’t do much with the idea and never finds a way to balance both the bad comedy and the bad horror.

Horror Film Review: The Beast of Yucca Flats (dir by Coleman Francis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tick …. tick …. tick …. tick

The clock is ticking throughout the 1961 film, The Beast of Yucca Flats.  There’s only so much time left for someone who is trying to escape from a repressive, communist regime.  There’s only so much time that one can spend wandering through the desert before he starts to succumb to the heat and has to remove almost all of his clothes.  There’s only so long that the police can search before they get trigger happy and go after the wrong guy.

Tick …. tick …. tick …. tick

The Beast of Yucca Flats opens with a woman stepping out of the shower and getting attacked and strangled by someone hiding in her house.  Who attacked her and why?  How does it relate to the rest of what we see in this film?  Was this a flashback or a flashforward?  I’ve watched The Beast of Yucca Flats a few times and I don’t know.  Perhaps it’s just a sign of the randomness of fate.  Who knows how to control the whims of the universe?  Or maybe director Coleman Francis was just looking for an excuse to bring some nudity into the film.  As enigmatic a figure as Coleman Francis may have been, he undoubtedly understood that importance of selling tickets.

Tick …. tick …. tick …. tick

Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson is perhaps best known for his work with Edward D. Wood, Jr.  He was Lobo in Bride of the Monster.  He was the police detective who was raised from the dead in Plan 9 From Outer Space.  By most accounts, Tor was a nice guy with a good sense of humor but he was also a hulking and intimidating physical presence and he had a difficult time delivering dialogue.  However, Ed Wood was not the only director for which Tor Johnson worked.  He also worked with Coleman Francis, playing Joseph Javorsky in The Beast of Yucca Flats.

Tick …. tick …. tick …. tick

Joseph Javorsky is a Russian scientist who has defected to America and who is carrying a briefcase full of not just nuclear secrets but also evidence that the Russians have already landed on the Moon.  Russian agents follow Javorsky out to Nevada and assassinate his American contacts and his bodyguard.  Javorsky wanders into the desert and, due to the heat, he has to remove his clothing to survive.  This film allows you to see more of Tor Johnson that you’ve probably ever wanted to see.  Unfortunately, Javorsky wanders into an American nuclear test and is mutated into a monster who is motivated by rage.

Tick …. tick …. tick …. tick

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Javorsky, who seemed to have the best motivations when it came to defecting to America.  He’s turned into a monster and finds himself being pursued through the desert by the police and a father who worries that Javorsky has kidnapped his children.  Tor Johnson is thoroughly miscast as a nuclear scientist but if you can overlook the fact that he’s Tor Johnson wandering around the desert, he actually is a sympathetic figure.  His niceness comes through, even after he starts to turn into the beast.

Tick …. tick …. tick …. tick

The Beast of Yucca Flats is not a film that makes any sort of sense, not in the usual way.  It works if one views it as being a filmed dream but let’s not give director Coleman Francis too much credit.  While the dubbed dialogue and the narration and the odd performances all create a surreal atmosphere, there’s nothing to indicate that any of that was deliberate on Francis’s part.  If anything, one gets the feeling that Coleman Francis mostly made this movie so he could fly his airplane over the desert.  The Beast of Yucca Flats may not be good but that final scene of poor old Tor reaching out to the rabbit still brings tears to my mismatched eyes.

October True Crime: Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (dir by Michael Feifer)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ed Gein was a farmer who lived in Plainfield, Wisconsin in the 1950s.  Everyone in town agreed that Ed was a bit of an eccentric.  He had been something of a recluse ever since the death of his mother in 1945.  Having never married, he spent most of his time on his farmhouse, where he had a collection of pulp magazines and literature about Nazi war crimes.  Ed supported himself by doing odd jobs around town.  He was quiet and a little weird but he was considered to be harmless enough.

Or, at least, he was until November of 1957.

That was when Bernice Worden, the owner of the local hardware store disappeared.  Her son told the police that Ed Gein has been the last person to talk to her the night before she disappeared and that Gein had specifically said that he would return to the store the next morning.  When the police searched Gein’s property, they discovered that Gein’s house was full of body parts.  Among other things, they found several skulls, a trash can made out of human skin, bowls made out of skulls, leggings made out of skin taken from human legs, nine vulvae in a shoe box, four noses, masks made from the skin taken from human heads, a corset made out of human skin, a pair of lips on a window shade drawstring, and the bodies of Bernie Worden and tavern owner Mary Hogan.  The police who discovered Gein’s home were reported to have been haunted by nightmares for years afterwards.  The officer who interrogated Gein later died of heart failure when he was informed that he was going to have to testify at Gein’s trial and relive the experience of hearing Gein’s story.

Gein confessed that he had started digging up graves after the death of his mother, collecting recently deceased women who he thought resembled her.  Gein also confessed to murdering both Bernie Worden and Mary Hogan, though most observers felt that Gein had killed many more.  Judged to be legally insane, Gein spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital, where he was said to be a polite and friendly patient.  He died of cancer in 1984.

The story of Ed Gein has inspired many writers and filmmakers.  Psycho was inspired by Gein’s crime, with the book’s version of Norman having far more in common with the real Gein.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s house of horrors was also inspired by Gein and so was The Silence of the Lambs‘s Buffalo Bill.  The 1974 film, Deranged, featured Roberts Blossom in the role of Ed Gein, whose name was changed to Ezra Cobb.

In 2007’s Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield, Kane Hodder plays Ed Gein.  Best-known for playing Jason Voorhees in several Friday the 13th films (and for providing a great DVD commentary for Friday the 13th Part VII: New Blood), Hodder plays Gein as being a hulking and awkward farmer who, after losing his mother, comes to believe that death is the only thing that’s real in life.  With his friend Jack (Michael Berryman), Gein digs up bodies from the local graveyard.  When Jack finally says that he’s tired of digging up bodies and that he thinks Gein needs to get professional help, Gein responds by murdering Jack and dragging the body behind his pickup truck.  Interestingly enough, Gein drives by Deputy Bobby Mason (Shawn Hoffman) who doesn’t even notice the body being dragged because he’s too busy fooling around with his girlfriend, Erica (Adrienne Frantz).

Bobby, in short, is a bit of a dumbass and that’s unfortunate for the people of Plainfield because Ed Gein is about to go on a rampage.  First, he abducts the owner of the local tavern.  Then, he abducts Bobby’s own mother, Vera (Priscilla Barnes)!  And, to top it all off, he abducts Erica just a few hours later.  This leads to a lot of scenes of Bobby running around, searching for his mother and then his girlfriend and managing to screw up just about everything that he attempts to do.  Bobby being a total idiot wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that Bobby is also supposed to be the hero of our story.

Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield features a lot of gore and discarded body parts, to the such an extent that I had to actually look away from the screen more than a few times.  That said, the story itself is only loosely based on the facts of the case.  (For instance, Ed Gein never kidnapped the girlfriend of a deputy and instead, he reportedly never even tried to flee once it became obvious that the police were on to him.)  The film is so haphazardly edited that it’s often difficult to keep track of how many days or night have passed from one scene to another and there’s quite a few scenes that feel as if they’ve been included to pad out the running time.  That said, Kane Hodder gives a good performance as this film’s version of Ed Gein, proving that he can be just as intimidating when wearing a mask of human skin as when wearing a hockey mask.

Horror on the Lens: Plan 9 From Outer Space (dir by Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Viewing Plan 9 From Outer Space during October is a bit of a tradition around these parts and here at the Shattered Lens, we’re all about tradition.  And since today is the 97th anniversary of the birth of Ed Wood, Jr., it just seems appropriate to watch his best-known film.

Speaking of tradition, this 1959 sci-fi/horror flick is traditionally cited as the worst film ever made but I don’t quite agree.  For one thing, the film is way too low-budget to be fairly judged against other big budget fiascoes.  If I have to watch a bad movie, I’ll always go for the low budget, independent feature as opposed to the big studio production.  To attack Ed Wood for making a bad film is to let every other bad filmmaker off the hook.  Ed Wood had his problems but he also had a lot of ambition and a lot of determination and, eventually, a lot of addictions.  One thing that is often forgotten by those who mock Ed Wood is that he drank himself to death and died living in squalor.  The least we can do is cut the tragic figure some slack.

Plan 9 From Outer Space is a ludicrous film but it’s also a surprisingly ambitious one and it’s got an anti-war, anti-military message so all of you folks who have hopped down the progressive rabbit hole over the past few years should have a new appreciation for this film.  I mean, do you want the government to blow up a Solarnite bomb?  DO YOU!?

Also, Gregory Walcott actually did a pretty good job in the lead role.  He was one of the few members of the cast to have a mainstream film career after Plan 9.

Finally, Plan 9 is a tribute to one man’s determination to bring his vision to life.  Ed Wood tried and refused to surrender and made a film with a message that he believed in and, for that, he deserves to be remembered.

Now, sit back, and enjoy a little Halloween tradition.  Take it away, Criswell!

Can you prove it didn’t happen?

WELL, CAN YOU!?

October Positivity: Catching Faith 2: The Homecoming (dir by John K.D. Graham)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Taylor family returns in 2019’s Catching Faith 2!

It’s been four years since Alexa (Lorena Segura York) and John Taylor (Dariush Moslemi) forced their son to confess to drinking two beers at a high school party.  As a result of his confession, Beau Taylor (Garrett Westton) was suspended from playing during the regular season and was briefly the most unpopular guy at his high school.  However, it appears that did not keep Beau from getting into a good college and eventually make it to the NFL.

Meanwhile, Ravyn Taylor (Bethany Peterson) has also moved out of the house, presumably to attend MIT.  As we saw in the previous movie, she was so moved by Beau’s decision to confess that she decided not to cheat on her Latin midterm.  Apparently, that decision paid off because Ravyn still became the class valedictorian.

Alexa and John now live in their huge house with only Alexa’s mother, Loretta (Sandra Flagstad).  Loretta is suffering from Alzheimer’s and she is often confused and angry.  Alexa has been offered a job with an up-and-coming design firm but she’s not sure how she can balance working and taking care of her mom.

When he’s injured in a game, Beau is informed that his football career is over.  Using crutches and struggling to find the strength to even bend his knee, Beau returns home and takes a job as an assistant to his old football coach (played by Bill Engvall).  While Beau is learning how to coach and coming to terms with the loss of his dreams, Ravyn is preparing for her wedding!

Alexa is excited that Ravyn has gotten married because Alexa has spent the last 20 years planning Ravyn’s wedding.  However, she’s a bit less excited when she learns that Ravyn’s husband is in the army and is scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan and that he’s Nathan Adams (Shane McCamant).  Nathan is a good and responsible guy but he’s also the son of Jezi Adams (Alexandra Boylan), who was once Alexa’s best friend until they had a falling out over Alexa forcing her son to confess to drinking beer.  Jezi felt that, by forcing Beau to confess, Alexa put the future of the entire team (including her son, who was the quarterback) at risk.  Jezi and Alexa immediately start to argue, in their own passive aggressive way, over their conflicting visions of what the wedding should be like.  Of course, neither one ever bother to ask Ravyn what she wants.

Changing Faith 2 is better than the first one, largely because the characters are all now adults and there’s nothing in the film as ridiculous as Alexa and John forcing their son to put his entire future at risk just because he had a beer at a high school party.  As opposed to the first film, there are only a few scenes — mostly featuring Alexa talking to her bible study group about how difficult it is to balance all of her responsibilites — that indicate that this is meant to be a religious movie.  I also liked the fact that the sequel spent more time focusing on Alexa’s heritage, which was something the first film barely acknowledged.

That said, with the possible exception of Ravyn, none of the Taylors were particularly sympathetic characters and the film features a “shocking” death that, because you’ll see coming from a mile away, ultimately feels a bit manipulative.  The scenes at Alexa’s new job (where everyone is a flakey millennial) feels like some sort of boomer fever dream of what young people are like and Jezi is portrayed in such a cartoonish fashion that the ultimate reconciliation between her and Alexa never quite carries the emotional punch that it should.  Catching Faith 2 is an improvement on the first film but it’s still weighted down by its own heavy-handedness.

Icarus File No. 13: Birdemic 2: The Resurrection (dir by James Nguyen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

2013’s Birdemic 2 picks up four years after the end of the first film.  Society has recovered from the vicious bird attacks.  Humans and bird are once again living as friends.  Actually, no one seems to have learned a thing from the last movie because global warming is still out of control, blood rain is falling in California, and a woman is attacked by what she calls a “giant jumbo jellyfish.”  This can only mean that nature is getting ready to fight back once again.

Rod (Alan Bagh) was one of the few people to survive the previous Birdemic.  He is still rich and he is still dating Nathalie (Whitney Moore).  They adopted Tony (Colton Osborne), the little boy who they rescued during the first film.  At one point, Tony mentions that his sister Susan is now dead, having died as a result of eating the fish that Rod caught in the first film.  (Apparently, this was an ad lib from actor Colton Osborne and, since director James Nguyen doesn’t believe in multiple takes, it made it into the film.)  Rod invests in a movie being directed by Bill (Thomas Favaloro) and starring Bill’s new girlfriend, Gloria (Chelsea Turnbo).  In fact, Bill and Gloria pretty much act exactly the same way that Rod and Nathalie acted in the first film, which feels a bit redundant since Birdemic 2 already features Rod and Nathalie.

Anyway, there’s a lot of scenes in the film that are meant to act as a commentary on Hollywood, with craven studio people showing that they are not capable of understanding Bill’s artistic vision.  At one point, Bill talks about how he directed a movie called Replica.  He and Gloria also pay a visit to Tippi Hedren’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame because it wouldn’t be a James Nguyen film without a Tippi Hedren reference.

Unfortunately, a blood rain causes the resurrection of several birds and two cavemen from the La Brea tar pit and soon, filming on Bill’s movie is delayed by the cast and crew running for their lives.  It’s pretty much the same as the first movie, except that the birds are now bad CGI as opposed to clip art and, for some reason, there are also zombies involved.  Why are the zombies there?  Who knows?

Birdemic 2 was made to capitalize on the camp success of Birdemic and several scenes from the original film are recreated for the sequel, right down to several pointless walking scenes, another boardroom celebration scene and another scene in which the female lead strips down to her underwear and asking her boyfriend if he likes what he sees.  Damien Carter also makes another appearance, singing a different song and leading a new dance party.  (Nathalie is still the best dancer in the Birdemic films.)

Birdemic 2 is a bit more self-aware than the first film, which means that some of the attempted humor is presumably intentional.  Unfortunately, the charm of the first Birdemic was to be found in just how cluelessly earnest it was.  James Nguyen sincerely believed he was making a good film with the first one.  With the second one, he seems to be trying to re-capture something that he didn’t really realize that he had captured in the first place.  That said, even with all of the deliberate camp, there’s enough lectures about climate change to leave little doubt that, at heart, Nguyen was still taking this film far more seriously than anyone else on the planet.

He certainly takes his films more seriously than the people who appear in them.  Much as in the first film, Whitney Moore struggles to keep a straight face and it’s obvious that many of her co-stars were specifically hamming it up to see what they could get away with.  Alan Bagh, for his part, remains as unexpressive but strangely likable as ever.

Birdemic 2 tries but, in the end, there’s no beating the original!

Previous Icarus Files:

  1. Cloud Atlas
  2. Maximum Overdrive
  3. Glass
  4. Captive State
  5. Mother!
  6. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
  7. Last Days
  8. Plan 9 From Outer Space
  9. The Last Movie
  10. 88
  11. The Bonfire of the Vanities
  12. Birdemic

The Eric Roberts Horror Collection: Clinton Road (dir by Richard Grieco and Steve Stanulis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

2019’s Clinton Road features what might be my favorite Eric Roberts cameo appearance.

Roberts appears standing outside a club in New Jersey.  He’s speaking to the woman who is working the door and trying to convince her that he should be allowed into the club, even though she doesn’t think that he’s on the list.  He explains that he’s Eric Roberts.  The woman replies that he’s not the Eric Roberts that she knows but then, suddenly, she realizes that he is Eric Roberts the movie star!  She apologizes profusely.  Eric says its okay and gives her a fist bump.  Everyone waiting to get into the club applauds.

Seriously, that is the extent of Eric Roberts’s role in Clinton Road.  It comes out of nowhere and it has nothing to do with the actual plot of the film.  Why is Eric Roberts waiting outside of some club in New Jersey?  Who knows?  He’s just there and he’s a cool dude and everyone loves him.  As with so many of his cameos, one gets the feeling that Roberts just happened to see some people shooting a movie and he decided to be a part of it.

Eric Roberts is not the only well-known actor to make a brief appearance in Clinton Road.  The film itself was directed by actor Richard Grieco and it’s obvious that he asked some of his well-known friends to help out.  The manager of the club is played Ice-T and he shows up long enough to tell the urban legend of the vanishing hitchhiker.  The owner of the club is Vincent Pastore, who played Pussy on The Sopranos.  Private investigator-turned-character actor Bo Dietl shows up, playing the mayor of the town and barking orders at people.  Everyone gets a chance to be, at least briefly, the center of attention but none of them play characters who actually have anything to do with the film’s main story.

That story is about Michael (played by former American Idol contestant, Ace Young), a fireman whose wife disappeared while walking down Clinton Road, a haunted rural road in New Jersey.  (For the record, Clinton Road is real and, as this film states, it’s the center of many urban legends.)  Michael is ready to move on and marry his new girlfriend, Kayla (Lauren LaVera).  However, Michael’s former sister-in-law, Isabella (Katie Morrison), convinces Michael to go out to Clinton Road with her and make one last effort to contact his wife’s spirit.  Accompanying them is a medium named Begory (James DeBello), Begory’s girlfriend, Gianna (Erin O’Brien), and Michael’s brother, Tyler (former Big Brother houseguest Cody Calafiore).  Tyler is loudly skeptical of Begory’s claims to be able to speak to the dead but it soon becomes clear that the group is not alone on Clinton Road.

To my surprise, I ended up liking Clinton Road.  It’s a very low-budget film and the plot doesn’t always make sense but it was obviously made by people who both loved New Jersey and who loved the legends that have sprung up around Clinton Road.  The atmosphere was ominous, the imagery was often surreal, and, when they did appear, the spirits were effectively creepy.  The fact that the characters all had an attitude that was more appropriate to The Sopranos than to a standard lost-in-the-woods horror film only served to make the film all the more entertaining.  If you’re going to set your horror film in New Jersey, you might as well go all out and make the most New Jersey horror film imaginable.

I enjoyed this film.  I just hope Eric Roberts didn’t make the mistake of turning down Clinton Road on his way home.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

  1. Star 80 (1983)
  2. Blood Red (1989)
  3. The Ambulance (1990)
  4. The Lost Capone (1990)
  5. Love, Cheat, & Steal (1993)
  6. Love Is A Gun (1994)
  7. Sensation (1994)
  8. Dark Angel (1996)
  9. Doctor Who (1996)
  10. Most Wanted (1997)
  11. Mr. Brightside (2004)
  12. Six: The Mark Unleased (2004)
  13. Hey You (2006)
  14. In The Blink of an Eye (2009)
  15. Enemies Among Us (2010)
  16. The Expendables (2010) 
  17. Sharktopus (2010)
  18. Deadline (2012)
  19. Miss Atomic Bomb (2012)
  20. Lovelace (2013)
  21. Self-Storage (2013)
  22. This Is Our Time (2013)
  23. Inherent Vice (2014)
  24. Road to the Open (2014)
  25. Rumors of War (2014)
  26. Amityville Death House (2015)
  27. A Fatal Obsession (2015)
  28. Stalked By My Doctor (2015)
  29. Joker’s Poltergeist (2016)
  30. Prayer Never Fails (2016)
  31. Stalked By My Doctor: The Return (2016)
  32. The Wrong Roommate (2016)
  33. Dark Image (2017)
  34. Stalked By My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge (2018)
  35. Monster Island (2019)
  36. Seven Deadly Sins (2019)
  37. Stalked By My Doctor: A Sleepwalker’s Nightmare (2019)
  38. The Wrong Mommy (2019)
  39. Exodus of a Prodigal Son (2020)
  40. Free Lunch Express (2020)
  41. Her Deadly Groom (2020)
  42. Top Gunner (2020)
  43. Deadly Nightshade (2021)
  44. Just What The Doctor Ordered (2021)
  45. Killer Advice (2021)
  46. The Poltergeist Diaries (2021)
  47. A Town Called Parable (2021)
  48. My Dinner With Eric (2022)

October Hacks: The Last Slumber Party (dir by Stephen Tyler)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Woo hoo!  School’s out for summer and that means that it’s time to have a slumber party!  It’s time to gather at the home of whoever has the biggest house and dance around in your sleepwear before falling on the couch, watching a really bad TV show, and talking about how all the boys in town suck.  What fun!  Seriously, I used to love slumber parties!  Of course, the parties I went to were a lot more fun than the one featured in the film that I am about to review.

The 1988 film, The Last Slumber Party, is called The Last Slumber Party because it features an escaped homicidal lunatic who wears surgical scrubs and mask and who carries around scalpel.  The lunatic shows up at the party and makes sure that, for the majority of the cast, it is their last slumber party.  But, to be honest, I think this would have been the last slumber party even if the killer didn’t show up just because the party sucks so much that I don’t think anyone would ever want to run the risk of throwing another one.

Seriously, this is the most boring slumber party that I’ve ever seen.  First off, there’s only three guests and only one of them, Chris (Jan Jensen), has a personality.  Of course, that personality is not a particularly likeable one, in that it leads to Chris constantly cursing and making fun of every boy at the school for being, in her opinion, gay.  Speaking of the boys at the school, four of them attempt to crash the slumber party but again, none of the really have a personality beyond not being able to open up a can of beer without spilling it on their shirt.  As well, most of the guys are quickly dispatched by the scalpel-wielding killer.  The girls are a bit perturbed when the guys start to mysteriously disappear but none of them are upset enough to actually look for them or to pay attention to the reports on the television about an escaped murderer.  Instead, Chris just suggests that the boys got scared off because they were gay.  Seriously, Chris is a bit obsessed.

Also obsessed with Dr. Sickler (David Whitley), who is the father of one of the girls and who was scheduled to give the escaped lunatic a lobotomy.  Of course, Dr. Sickler isn’t obsessed with his missing patient as much as he’s obsessed with remembering to pick up some orange juice.  His wife really likes orange juice and there’s way too much talk of orange juice in this film.  Oddly enough, Dr. Sickler never actually picks any up.

I’m grasping at things to say about this film because there’s not really a whole lot to be said about The Last Slumber Party.  Judging by the accents of the majority of the cast, The Last Slumber Party was a regional production and it was made down in my part of the world.  I actually enjoyed hearing the familiar accents but I just wish the characters had been a bit less unlikable and the dialogue had more of a natural rhythm.  As it is, this is just one of those slasher films that’s full of padding and feels considerably longer than just 77 minutes.  For the majority of the film’s characters, this would indeed be their last slumber party.  It’s a shame they couldn’t have ended things with a better get-together.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The Chill Factor (dir by Christopher Webster)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1993 film, The Chill Factor, is a bit of an oddity.

The film opens with a shot of young, attractive people racing their snowmobiles across a snowy landscape.  One of them, Jeannie (Dawn Laurrie), narrates.  She tells us that she can still remember everything that happened as if it was yesterday.  She and her friends were visiting the ski slopes of Wisconsin.  She was engaged to be married to Tom (Aaron Kjenaas), who she secretly knew didn’t really love her that way that she loved him.  She mentions that they were traveling with their friends and none of them had any worries because they were young and the year 2000 was right around the corner.  She mentions that one of her friends was “dating a black girl.”  It’s an odd line, especially when heard in 2023, when interracial couples in movies and television are so common that it’s almost become a bit of a cliché.  One thing that makes the line feel all the stranger is the rather flat tone of the narrator’s voice.  The narration almost sounds as if it’s being delivered by someone who is under hypnosis.

Jeannie, Tom, and their friends stop off at a rustic lodge.  Karen (Connie Snyder) is Tom’s little sister and Chris (David Fields) is her boyfriend, as well as being a medical student.  Ron (Jim Cagle) is a friendly football player who has just been drafted by a pro team.  Ron’s girlfriend, Lissa (Eve Montgomery), is the black girl mentioned in Jeannie’s opening narration.  When two local racists confront Ron and Lissa and spit out a racial slur, friendly waitress Bessie (Bekki Vallin) makes it up to the group by telling them about a great place to race their snowmobiles.  It’s called Black Friar Lake and Bessie promises to tell them why it’s named that if they come back.  Even though Tom has been drinking all day long, he insists on going out to Black Friar Lake.

At Black Friar Lake, Tom pulls a Kennedy and crashes his snowmobile into a tree.  His friends drag the unconscious and blood-covered Tom to an abandoned Dominican summer camp.  They bandage his wounds and try to keep him warm.  Chris says that Tom probably has internal injuries.  However, Tom suddenly opens his eyes and, other than having a headache, he acts as if nothing serious has happened.  While Ron heads back to town to try to get help, Karen searches the camp and comes across a makeshift Ouija board.  Even though Jeannie believes that Ouija boards can actually summon evil spirits, she still joins the others in fooling around with it.  (As Jeannie explains in her narration, “It was my nature.”)  Soon, Tom is waking up more often and speaking much more aggressively than usual.  (When Karen — HIS SISTER — tells him that he’s a pain in the ass, Tom tells her, “I’ll give you a pain in the ass,” and then suggests that she and Chris should go have sex.)  Soon, people are dying, blood is being spilled, and the Ouija board keeps trying to send out messages.

The Chill Factor is an odd film.  On the surface, it seems like a typical mash-up of slasher mayhem and Evil Dead-style supernatural activity.  But there’s an intriguingly off-center quality to the film.  The film moves at its own dream-like pace, with certain scenes going on longer than one might expect while other scenes end rather abruptly.  When the group first arrives at the summer camp, their conversations are a bizarre mix of the mundane and the philosophical.  Random shadows can be spied moving along the walls and the main characters never seem to notice that fresh blood is flowing from the eyes of a statue of Jesus.  Towards the end of the film, there’s a Rosemary’s Baby-style sex scene between Tom and Jeannie, except occasionally it’s not Jeannie that Tom is making lover to but instead Karen.  The falling snow gives the entire film a chilly and rather bleak atmosphere.  (This may be the only film to feature a demon chasing his prey on a snowmobile.)  The cast was obviously made up of amateurs and the majority of the performances are extremely stiff.  However, even that contributes to the film’s otherworldly atmosphere.  Indeed, watching the performers, I was reminded of Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass, in which Herzog had his actors perform under the influence of hypnosis.

Finally, there’s an interesting subtext to this film.  Jeannie, who fears that Tom will never love her the way that she loves him, has a night of passionate sex with him, just to wake up the next morning and discover that he had suddenly changed.  He’s not the man who she thought he was.  Now, in Tom’s case, this is because he’s been possessed by a demon.  However, this scene captures a fear that every woman has felt.  Will your lover still be the same man when you wake up in the morning?  Or, having gotten what he wanted, will he then reveal his true self?  As much as Jeannie feared the Ouija board, she still used it because, deep down, she wanted to know who Tom really was.  And the board revealed the truth.  In her final piece of narration, Jeannie speaks of still dreaming about that night with Tom and her flat tone leaves it up to the audience to decide if she dreams of who Tom become or who she thought Tom was before.

I suspect that The Chill Factor may have been a happy accident, a case of a low budget and an amateur cast actually coming together something that turned out to be far better than anyone was expecting.  Accidentally or not, The Chill Factor is an intriguing work of existential horror.