Category Archives: Film Review

Horror Film Review: My Bloody Valentine (dir by George Mihalka)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor Mabel.

In the 1981 slasher film, My Bloody Valentine, Mabel (played by Patricia Hamilton) is the sweet old woman who has convinced the mayor of Valentine Bluffs to reinstate the annual Valentine’s Day dance.  The dance had been a tradition, up until the great mine explosion of 1960.  Harry Warden was the only miner to survive the explosion, which everyone agreed wouldn’t have happened if the two mine supervisors hadn’t left their post to attend the dance.  (Why two middle-aged men were so eager to attend a teenage dance party is a question that is never really explored.)  Harry went mad in the mine and resorted to eating the other miners to survive.  AGCK!  The next year, Harry killed the two supervisors and was promptly sent off to mental asylum.  Meanwhile, the annual dance was canceled because I guess it was easier to blame the dance than the mining company or the corrupt union bosses.

Mabel, however, has brought the dance back and it’s probably not a minute too soon because the town of Valentine Bluffs is one of the most depressing towns I’ve ever seen.  The sky is permanenlyt overcast.  Everyone spends all day down in the mine, getting covered in soot and trying not to die.  At night, they go to the bar and get drunk and argue with each other.  If the men need to talk about their feelings, they have a drink at the local junkyard.  Among the slashers films that came out in the early 80s, My Bloody Valentine is unique for taking place in an authentically blue collar milieu.  These aren’t upper class teenagers who are about to be targeted by a demented killer.  These are tough men who work hard all day and who are apparently really into Valentine’s Day dances.

Unfortunately, we all know that it’s impossible to move on from a decades-old murder.  No sooner has the Valentine’s Day Dance been announced than some old drunk starts telling everyone that they’re doomed.  People start to get strange and bloody packages in the mail.  A man dressed up like a miner kills Mabel and stuffs her into a washing machine, which seems like an overreaction on the part of The Miner.  It does, however, make one thing very clear.  If even sweet old Mabel can die, then anyone can die.

After Mabel’s death, the mayor and the sheriff announce that the dance is off but those miners are really into Valentine’s Day so they decide to throw a party anyway.  A few of them go down into the mine, which is not necessarily what I would want to do at a party but whatever.  I just don’t like soot.  Unfortunately, our brave heroes go down into the mine at the same time that the Miner shows up at the party and starts killing people.

The assumption, of course, is that the Miner is Harry Warden but most member of the audiences will have seen enough slasher movies to know better.  There’s two obvious suspects.  There’s Axel (Neil Affleck), who has a temper and knows how to use a pickax.  And then there’s TJ (Paul Kelman), who also has a temper and knows how to use a pickax.  Axel and TJ are both in love with Sarah (Lori Hallier) but only one will get to ask her to be his “bloody valentine.”

Among horror fans, My Bloody Valentine is notorious for having been heavily edited to get an R-rating.  Supposedly, cuts were made to every single death scene and, even with the cuts, this is still a notably gruesome film.  The scene involving the showerhead impalement is especially macabre, even if it has obviously been edited.  The Miner is not one of those talkative, quippy, fun-loving murderers that eventually became a staple of the genre.  Instead, he’s notably cruel.  The murders he commits feel personal and calculated.  He’s not one of those movie slashers who just kills anyone unlucky enough to discover Camp Crystal Lake.  Instead, he has a plan.  In the end, the Miner is one of the more frightening of the killers to come out of the early 80s slasher boom.

My Bloody Valentine works far better than it has any right to.  The mine is a notably creepy location and the film does a good job of creating an atmosphere where you really do believe that anyone could die at any minute.  The film plays out like a nightmarish urban legend come to life and it provides an example of the giallo-inspired thrillers that slasher films used to be.  Despite being a Valentine’s Day film, it’s one that your really should watch for Halloween.

When you’re watching either this film or the 2009 remake, be sure to offer up a prayer to Mabel.  With her love of Valentine’s Day, she made it all possible.

Horror On The Lens: Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (dir by Fred F. Sears)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s horror on the lens, we’ve got a sci-fi shocked from 1956.

In Earth vs. The Flying Saucers …. well, the plot is right there in the title.  In a semi-documentary style, this film tells the story of what happens when a bunch of flying saucers come to Earth.  Unfortunately, the inhabitants of those flying saucers aren’t looking to open up a new trading route.  Instead, they want to enslave humanity and, as always, it falls to America to save the world.

This film is probably best known for the scenes of the flying saucers crashing into monuments and buildings in Washington, D.C.  The special effects were done by Ray Harryhausen.

The film was originally black-and-white.  The version below is colorized.  I’m not a huge fan of colorization in general but I do have to say that they did a pretty good job with Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.  While the film may not be as deeply philosophical as Plan 9 From Outer Space, it’s still pretty enjoyable.

Keep watching the skies!

Against The Dark (2009, directed by Richard Crudo)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Legend has it that Steven Seagal’s film career was the result of a bet. The story goes that, in the late 80s, superagent Michael Ovitz, who was then the most powerful man in Hollywood, bet a studio exec that he could make the least appealing man he knew into a movie star. That man was Ovitz’s self-defense instructor, Steven Seagal.

I don’t know if that story is true but it’s as good an explanation as we’re going to get at to why Seagal was ever asked to star in a movie. Despite being a terrible actor who was universally disliked by everyone who worked with him, Steven Seagal was briefly a star in the 90s. Along with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, he was one three top B-action stars around. Lundgren’s appeal was that he could actually act. Van Damme’s appeal was that he was a true athlete and actually could do all of his own stunts. As for Seagal, he was packaged to be a star. He appeared in movie with actors who were talented enough to carry the drama while Seagal whispered his lines. He also worked with talented action director like Andrew Davis. For a while there, Seagal had it all.

It fell apart, of course. Seagal was his own worst enemy, fabricating details of his biography and acting like an ass whenever the cameras weren’t rolling. He was notorious for being difficult and every young actress trying to make it in the 90s had at least one horror story about Seagal harassing them at an audition. His appearance on Saturday Night Live was so bad that it’s still talked about as an example of what can happen when the show gets stuck with a terrible host.  According to the show’s then-cast members, Seagal insisted that the writers come up with a skit in which he would play a therapist who raped his patients. (Check out Tom Shales’s Live From New York for the details on Seagal’s time as host.) He directed two awful movies. Audiences cheered when his character was blown up in Executive Decision.  People stopped showing up for his movies and, for the past few years, Seagal has been better known as a tireless advocated for Vladimer Putin than for his work as a direct-to-video action star.

Against The Dark is one of Seagal’s many direct-to-video movies.  It’s also his first horror movie.  The movie takes place in the future, when vampire/zombie hybrids have taken over the city.  The film misses a major opportunity by not casting Steven Seagal as the head vampire.  When this film was made, Seagal was nearly 60, overweight, and out-of-shape.  He had the right look to play a decadent vampire king but instead, he was just plays his regular Seagal role.  He and his squad patrol the city with samurai swords, hacking up any vampires that they come across.  Seagal’s not actually in much of the film and his stunt double does most of the work.  When Seagal does appear, he looks like he’s trying to catch his breath.  It’s obvious that this film was just a paycheck for him.  There’s no speeches about protecting the environment.  He doesn’t even get out his guitar and sing.

Most of the movie deals with a separate group of survivors, who are stranded in a hospital and who are trying to find a way to escape before the military blows up the city.  Some of the fight scenes, especially the ones that don’t involve Seagal, are not terrible but the film itself is so badly lit that you usually can’t tell who is fighting whom.  There is one memorably weird scene of a female vampire filing down her fans so that she can pass as human but the movie doesn’t really follow up on it.  The movie doesn’t do much with any of it ideas.  Its obvious that vampires and zombies were used because they were hot and someone figured out that even Seagal’s fans were getting bored with him just fighting drug dealers and mercenaries.

Against the Dark is bad, even by the standards of late era Seagal.  Shortly after the movie was released, Seagal tried to reinvent himself as a reality TV star with Steven Seagal: Lawman.  When that and a subsequent threat to run for governor of Arizona didn’t do much for his career, Seagal went to Russia and, after receiving Russian citizenship, declared that he considered Vladimer Putin to be “like a brother” to him.  When asked about Seagal’s claim, Putin’s spokesman replied, “”I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s a huge fan, but he’s definitely seen some of his movies.”  Hopefully, the movie was Under Siege and not Against The Dark.

 

Horror On The Lens: The Phantom of the Opera (dir by Rupert Julian)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s horror movie on the Shattered Lens is both a classic of silent era and one of the most influential horror films ever made.  It’s one that I previously shared in 2013, 2015, 2016, 2108, 2019, and 2020 but it’s such a classic that I feel that it is worth sharing a second (or fifth or even a sixth or perhaps a seventh) time.

First released in 1925, The Phantom of the Opera is today best known for both Lon Chaney’s theatrical but empathetic performance as the Phantom and the iconic scene where Mary Philbin unmasks him. However, the film is also a perfect example of early screen spectacle. The Phantom of the Opera was released during that period of time, between Birth of the Nation and the introduction of sound, when audiences expected films to provide a visual feast and Phantom of the Opera certainly accomplishes that. Indeed, after watching this film and reading Gaston Leroux’s original novel, it’s obvious that the musical was inspired more by the opulence of this film than by the book.

This film is also historically significant in that it was one of the first films to be massively reworked as the result of a poor test screening. The film’s ending was originally faithful to the end of the novel. However, audiences demanded something a little more dramatic and that’s what they got.

 

The TSL’s Grindhouse: The Last Laugh (dir by Jeremy Berg)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Myles (Steve Vanderzee) is a once-hot comedian whose career has been going downhill ever since 1) his wife died in a car accident and 2) he started taking medication to control his moods. Myles has now gone from playing packed comedy clubs to appearing in sleazy dives where he’s regularly cheated out of getting paid.

However, it appears that Myles finally has a chance to get back up on top! He’s been booked as the opening act for an egotistical comedy superstar! All Myles has to do is deliver one good set and his life will no longer be a joke. The only problem is that there’s a dead body in Myles’s dressing room and the staff of the theater is disappearing one-by-one. There’s a murderer stalking the theater and, at times, it seems like only Myles can see him. Is Myles — who hasn’t taken his pills — losing it or is there really a killer in the wings?

That’s the question asked by 2020’s The Last Laugh. It’s an intriguing question and the premise has a lot of promise but, unfortunately, the execution leaves even more to be desired. Not only are the victims rather generic but you also never really feel as if you know Myles. The film doesn’t show us much of his act so you really don’t know if the guy’s even all that funny. Since a lot of the movie hinges on whether or not Myles is willing to blow his shot at stardom in order to expose the murderer, it would be helpful to actually care about whether or not Myles becomes a star or not. Unfortunately, Myles isn’t really that likable or interesting of a character so who cares?

I did like the fact that the people behind The Last Laugh paid homage to some classic Italian horror films. Several of the shots of the killer creeping through the theater appeared to pay homage to Michele Soavi’s StageFright and there’s also a clever shout out to the Short Night Of The Glass Dolls at the end of the film. Unfortunately, there’s not really enough to the plot of The Last Laugh to make it memorable and the ambiguous ending will probably leave most viewers angry rather than intrigued. (Personally, I usually like ambiguous endings but, in this case, it just felt a little lazy.)

The Last Laugh has promise but it doesn’t really live up to it.

International Horror Film Review: The Phantom Carriage (dir by Victor Sjöström)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In this 1921 silent film from Sweden, Sister Edit (Astrid Holm) is dying on New Year’s Eve. She has tuberculosis, an illness that was once as common and as feared as COVID is today. Knowing that she doesn’t have long to live and that she probably won’t even make it through the night, she makes one last request. She wants to talk to David Holm (played by the film’s director Victor Sjostrom).

This request shocks everyone because David Holm is known for being a petty criminal and a notorious drunkard. As if to the prove their point, David is spending New Year’s Eve in a cemetery, getting drunk with two friends of his. He tells his friends about a legend that the last person to die on New Year’s Eve is cursed to spend the next year driving death’s carriage and collecting souls. David is obsessed with this legend because, last year, his best friend Georges died right before the clock turned twelve.

Believe it or not, David is actually right. Georges (Tore Svennberg) is currently steering his phantom carriage through the streets of the city, stopping to collect the souls of the recently departed. It’s not a job that Georges wants but it’s one that he’s destined to do until the end of the night. Once a new year begins, someone will take Georges’s place.

When a fight breaks out at the cemetery, David is struck over the head with a bottle, just as the clock strikes midnight. Georges promptly appears. It looks like David has a new job but, before he can get started, he has to deal with both Sister Edit’s request and his guilt over the collapse of his marriage to the tragic Anna (Hilda Borgström). Anna is now near death herself, struck down by the same disease that is killing Sister Edit, a disease that was quite possibly given to both of them by David himself. (It’s easy to imagine someone making a modern version of this film, with COVID replacing the consumption.)

When one hears that The Phantom Carriage is a Swedish film about death, one can probably be excused from thinking, “Aren’t all of them?” And it is true that Ingmar Bergman regularly cited The Phantom Carriage as being a huge influence on his own films, especially The Seventh Seal. And yet, to say that either The Phantom Carriage or The Seventh Seal are solely about death is to do a disservice to both films. The Phantom Carriage is about many things; love, guilt, regret, addiction, destiny, and the promise of redemption. In the end, it’s a film about life. After he’s struck on the head, David reflects on the life that led him to that moment and, finally, he sees how his life not only effected the lives of so many others but how their lives effected his own. It’s only after he’s hit on the head with that bottle and he rides the phantom carriage that he understands what the life he had was truly about.

Of course, for most people, the main appeal of the film will be viewing the ghostly carriage as it moves, unseen by the living, through the streets of the city. The film’s supernatural effects were captured through the use of double exposures, which may sound simple today but which was a very new technique way back in 1921. The images of the transparent ghosts and the carriage making is way through the living remain haunting. There’s a real sense of melancholy that runs through this film, an atmosphere of loss and regret that, a hundred years later, is still effective. It’s a film that plays out like a dream of life and death, light and darkness.

For a film that was released in the early (some would say primitive) years of narrative cinema, The Phantom Carriage holds up remarkably well. Though the film has its overly sentimental and melodramatic moments (it is, after all, a silent movie), the sight of that carriage continues to be hauntingly sad and beautiful.

Horror Film Review: The Dark Half (dir by George Romero)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It will always fascinate me that Stephen King, one of the most popular writers in the world and one of the legitimate masters of horror, also has one of the least inspiring accounts on twitter.

Seriously, he may be the most popular author in the world but he tweets like a retiree who has just discovered the internet.  Go over to his twitter account and you won’t find memorable descriptions of small town hypocrisy.  You won’t find scenes of shocking psychological insight.  You won’t find moments of unexpected but laugh-out-loud dark humor.  Instead, you’ll find a combination of dad jokes, boomer nostalgia, and an unseemly obsession with wishing death on any public figure who is to the right of Bernie Sanders.  It’s odd because no one can deny that King’s a good storyteller.  At his best, Stephen King is responsible for some of the best horror novels ever written.  Everyone who is a horror fan owes him a debt of gratitude for the work that he’s done promoting the genre.  At his worst, he’s your uncle who retweets the article without reading it first.

Of course, someone can be great at one thing an terrible at something else.  I can dance but I certainly can’t sing.  Stephen King can write a best seller but a good tweet is beyond him.  That’s the dual nature of existence, I suppose.  That’s certainly one of the themes at the heart of both Stephen King’s The Dark Half and the subsequent film adaptation from George Romero.

Filmed in 1990 but not released for three years due to the bankruptcy of the studio that produced it, The Dark Half tells the story of Thad Beaumont and George Stark (both played by Timothy Hutton).  Thad is a professor who writes “serious” literature under his real name and violent, pulpy fiction under the name of George Stark.  No one reads Thad’s books but they love George Stark and his stories about the master criminal and assassin, Alexis Machine.  (Alexis Machine?  George Stark may be a good writer but he sucks at coming up with names.)  After a demented fan (played, with creepy intensity, by Robert Joy) attempts to blackmail him by threatening to reveal that he’s George Stark, Thad decides to go public on his own.  His agent even arranges for a fake funeral so that Thad can bury George once and for all.

Soon, however, Thad’s associates are turning up dead.  It seems as if everyone associated with the funeral is now being targeted.  Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Michael Rooker) suspects that Thad is the murderer.  However, the murderer is actually George Stark, who has come to life and is seeking revenge.  Of course, George has more problems than just being buried.  His body is decaying and he’s got a bunch of angry sparrows after him.  The Sparrows Are Flying Again, we’re told over and over.  Seeking to cure his affliction and to get those birds to leave him alone, Stark targets Thad’s wife (Amy Madigan) and their children.

The Dark Half has its moments, as I think we would expect of any film based on a Stephen King novel and directed by George Stark.  Some of the deaths are memorably nasty.  Hutton is believably neurotic as Thad and cartoonishly evil as Stark and, in both cases, it works well.  Rooker may be an unconventional pick for the role but he does a good job as Pangborn and Amy Madigan brings some unexpected energy to the thankless role of being the threatened wife.

But, in the end, The Dark Half never really seems to live up to its potential.  In the book, Thad was a recovering alcoholic and it was obvious that George Stark was a metaphor for Thad’s addiction.  That element is largely abandoned in the movie and, as a result, George goes from being the literal representation of Thad’s demons to just being another overly loquacious movie serial killer.  Despite having a few creepy scenes, the film itself is never as disturbing as it should be.  For all the blood, the horror still feels a bit watered down.  Take away the sparrows and this could just as easily be a straight-forward action film where the hero has to rescue his family from a smug kidnapper.  Comparing this film to Romero’s Martin is all the proof you need that Romero was best-served by working outside the mainstream than by trying to be a part of it.

Add to that, I got sick of the sparrows.  Yes, both the film and the book explain why the sparrows are important but “The Sparrows Are Flying Again” almost sounds like something you’d find in something written in a deliberate attempt to parody King’s style.  It’s a phrase that’s intriguingly enigmatic the first time that you hear it, annoying the third time, and boring the fifth time.

The Dark Half was a bit of a disappointment but that’s okay.  For King fans, there will always be Carrie.  (I would probably watch The Shining but apparently, King still hasn’t forgiven Stanley Kubrick for improving on the novel.)  And, for us Romero fans, we’ll always have Night of the Living Dead, Martin, Dawn of the Dead, and the original Crazies.  And, for fans of George Stark, I’m sure someone else will pick up the story of Alexis Machine.  It’s hard to keep a good character down.

Horror on the Lens: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir by Robert Wiene)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a film that I’ve shared four times previously on the Shattered Lens.  The first time was in 2011 and then I shared it again in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020!  Well, you know what?  I’m sharing it again because it’s a classic, it’s Halloween, and everyone should see it!  (And let’s face it — it’s entirely possible that some of the people reading this post right now didn’t even know this site existed in any of those previous years.  Why should they be deprived of Caligari just because they only now arrived?)

Released in 1920, the German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of those films that we’ve all heard about but far too few of us have actually seen.  Like most silent films, it requires some patience and a willingess to adapt to the narrative convictions of an earlier time.  However, for those of us who love horror cinema, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari remains required viewing.  Not only did it introduce the concept of the twist ending (M. Night Shyamalan owes his career to this film) but it also helped to introduce German expressionism to the cinematic world.

My initial reaction to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was that it simply wasn’t that scary.  It was certainly interesting to watch and I was happy that I was finally experiencing this film that I had previously only read about.  However, the film itself was obviously primitive and it was difficult for my mind (which takes CGI for granted) to adjust to watching a silent film.  I didn’t regret watching the film but I’d be lying (much like a first-year film student) if I said that I truly appreciated it after my first viewing.

But you know what?  Despite my dismissive initial reaction, the film stayed with me.  Whereas most modern films fade from the memory about 30 minutes after the end credits,The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has stuck with me and the night after I watched it, I even had a nightmare in which Dr. Caligari was trying to break into my apartment.  Yes, Dr. Caligari looked a little bit silly staring through my bedroom window but it still caused me to wake up with my heart about to explode out of my chest.

In short, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari passes the most important test that a horror film can pass.  It sticks with you even after it’s over.

For the curious with an open mind to watch with, here is Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari!

Enjoy!

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Amityville: The Awakening (dir by Franck Khalfoun)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

You have to feel bad for the DeFeo family.

Not only where they murdered in their sleep by a junkie loser who also happened to be a member of the family but, for the past five decades, their names have been slandered in a countless number of Amityville books and films.  The house’s subsequent owner, George Lutz, realized that he could make a fortune by claiming that the murder house was haunted by a demon and, working with an author named Jay Anson, he did just that.  Anson’s book, The Amityville Horror, was published in 1977.  The first film version was released in 1979.  Since then, there have been over 20 Amityville films, the majority of which feature reenactments of the DeFeo murders and all of which let Ronald DeFeo, Jr. off the hook by suggesting that it was the supernatural that led to the murders as opposed to a raging heroin habit.

With so many different films having been made by so many different directors and companies, it’s next to impossible to maintain any sort of consistent continuity from film to film.  2017’s Amityville: The Awakening acknowledges this in the most meta way possible by having the film’s lead character, Belle (played by Bella Thorne), watch the original film with two of her friends while discussing all of the sequels.  In the world of Amityville: The Awakening, the films exist and the house is both famous and infamous.  And yet, people still voluntarily live there.

The latest inhabitants are Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her three children, Belle, Juliet (McKenna Grace), and James (Cameron Monaghan).  James is on life support after having been paralyzed in an accident and Joan is fanatically devoted to him.  Though Dr. Milton (Kurtwood Smith) says that there’s no chance of James ever recovering and that he’s probably brain dead, Joan remains convinced that James will someday come back again.  As she explains at one point, she’s abandoned her faith in God but she still has faith that there will be a way for James to recover.

No sooner has the family moved in then all of the typical Amityville stuff starts happening.  Flies start buzzing around.  The dog doesn’t want to be in the house. Juliet starts talking to people who aren’t there.  One night, James flatlines but, after being dead for several minutes, his heart suddenly starts to beat again.  Suddenly, James is showing indications that, though paralyzed and unable to speak, he is aware of his surroundings.  Joan is convinced that James is recovering but is it possible that something else is happening?

If I may take the risk of damning with faint praise, Amityville: The Awakening is not bad for an Amityville film.  Yes, you do have to wonder why the house has never been torn down and yes, I’m as bored with the big Amityville flies as anyone else.  And the scenes where the characters discuss the DeFeo murders are icky and unethical as Hell.  But, with all that in mind, this is actually one of the better-made Amityville films.  Director Franck Khalfoun was also responsible for the better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be remake of Maniac and he brings a lot of energy to his direction here.  He’s smart enough to realize that the audience is going to automatically roll their eyes at yet another Amityville film and he often rolls his eyes with them.  As a result, we get some deserved digs at the shoddiness of the other films.  Khalfoun is also smart enough to understand that Bella Thorne is more effective as a personality than an actress and, as such, the character of Belle is carefully developed to fit with Thorne’s public image.  Jennifer Jason Leigh, on the other hand, is such a good actress that she actually brings some unexpected depth to the role of Joan and the film as a whole.

Amityville: The Awakening is one of the better Amityville films.  You still have to wonder why that house is still standing, though.  Seriously, tear it down already.

Terror on Tour (1980, directed by Don Edmunds)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s not easy being a Clown.

The Clowns, of course, is the name of the band that’s at the center of this sleazy slasher film.  The Clowns (who were played by a real-life band called The Names) wear clown make-up and sing songs about how they want to chop up the members of their audience and “send you home in a box.”  When Clown groupies start to turn up dead during a 24-hour Clown orgy, the police suspect that the Clowns are the murderers and they send an undercover cop to one of their performances.  It turns out that the Clowns are innocent because the murders continue even while they’re performing on stage.  But if the Clowns aren’t the killers, who is?

Terror on Tour is one of the many zero budget extravaganzas to come out in the early 1980s, trying to capitalize on the slasher boom and the popularity of bands like Alice Cooper and KISS.  It’s not every good, mostly because the members of The Names couldn’t act worth a damn and the film is so badly lit and the sound is so poorly recorded that watching the movie will make you want to sleep long before it makes you want to rock.  You won’t remember the name of a single member of the band but you will remember the groupie who says, “This cocaine is making me horny,” with all the passion of Kramer saying, “These pretzels are making me thirsty” in that Woody Allen movie.  Speaking of Seinfeld, Larry Thomas plays the band’s manager.  Years later, Thomas would receive an Emmy nomination for playing the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld.  He would also go on the imdb and post an apology for having appeared in Terror on Tour.  Larry, everyone has to start somewhere!  And you were by far the best actor in the movie.  You didn’t look straight at the camera once.

The best scene is one member of the band shouting, “I need a joint!” until someone brings him one.  That’s the advantage of being a star, I guess.