Okay, how the hell did Kharis and Ananka get from Mapleton, Massachusetts to the Bayous of Louisiana? That question is never answered in THE MUMMY’S CURSE, though I suppose it doesn’t really matter. The Mummy series needed an injection of something, and despite the unexplained change of scenery, this last entry is better than the previous two.
The Federal government is determined to drain the local swamp (how’s THAT for a switch!) down in Cajun Country, when two representatives of the Scripps Museum, Drs. Jim Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Ilzor Zandaab (Peter Coe ) arrive, sent to retrieve the two mummies lost there in our last episode (even though the swamp was in Mapleton then!). Project leader Pat Walsh (Addison Richards) protests, but there’s nothing he can do about it. One of the workers is found murdered, and the rest of the superstitious lot suspect Kharis has returned (“The devil’s…
In many ways, the 1997 monster film Anaconda is an incredibly dumb movie but let’s give credit where credit is for. Whoever was in charge of casting this movie managed to assemble the most unlikely group of co-stars that you would ever expect to see in a movie about a documentary crew who run into a giant snake while sailing down the Amazon River.
I mean, let’s just consider the most familiar names in the cast. Jennifer Lopez. Ice Cube. Jon Voight. Owen freakin Wilson. I mean, it’s not just that you wouldn’t expect to come across these four people all in the same movie. It’s that they all seem to come from a totally different cinematic universe. They’ve all got their own unique style of acting and seeing them all on the same small boat together is just bizarre. You’ve got Jennifer Lopez, delivering her lines with a lot of conviction but not much sincerity. And then you’ve got Ice Cube coolly looking over the Amazon and basically daring the giant snake to even think about trying to swallow him. Owen Wilson is his usual quirky self, delivering his lines in his trademark Texas stoner drawl. And then you’ve got Jon Voight.
Oh my God, Jon Voight.
Voight plays Paul Serone, a Paraguayan who says that he can help the documentary crew find an isolated Amazon tribe but who, once he gets on the boat, basically takes over and announces that he’s actually a snake hunter and he’s planning on capturing the biggest anaconda in existence. It takes a while for the snake to show up. When it finally does, it’s actually a pretty impressive throw-back to the type of cheesy by entertaining monsters that used to show up in drive-in movies back in the 50s and the 60s. But really, the biggest special effect in the movie is Jon Voight. Wisely, Voight doesn’t waste any time trying to be subtle or in anyway believable in the role of Serone. Instead, Voight gives a performance that seems to be channeling the spirit of the infamous Klaus Kinski. Voight growls, snarls, and glares as if the fate of the world depended upon it and he rips into his Paraguayan accent with all the ferocity of a character actor who understands the importance of being memorable in an otherwise forgettable movie. It’s as if Voight showed up on set and looked at what was going and then said to himself, “Well, Jon, it’s all up to you.” Serone is really a pretty vicious character. I mean, he literally strangles a character to death with his legs! But, thanks to Voight’s crazed energy he’s still the most compelling character in the movie. It’s really scary to think about what the film would have been like without Voight shaking things up. Along amongst the cast, Voight seems to understand just how silly Anaconda truly is. Voight takes a rather middling monster movie and, through sheer force of will, manages to make it at least somewhat entertaining.
Personally, I’d like to see a remake of Anaconda, one that would feature the same cast but would be directed by Werner Herzog. Just imagine if Herzog had told the story of that trip down the Amazon. Gone would be the bland dialogue and rudimentary character motivations. Instead, we’d have Jennifer Lopez slowly going insane while hundreds of monkey lay siege to the boat and Ice Cube musing on the never ending conflict between man and nature. Herzog’s Anaconda would probably be just crazy enough to keep up with Jon Voight’s performance.
Today’s horror on the lens is dedicated to the memory of the great character actor James Karen. Horror fans will remember him from Return of the Living Dead and Poltergeist. He appeared in a countless number of films, usually playing men of authority. 1965’s Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster featured him in a rare starring role.
Despite the movie’s title, it’s not about Frankenstein. Instead, it’s about an astronaut named Frank who is actually an android. When his latest mission into space goes wrong, Frank ends up crashing in Puerto Rico. Now malfunctioning, Frank causes some major chaos. Can his creator, Dr. Adam Steele (James Karen), track Frank down and put an end to his reign of terror?
And what about the Martians? Android Frank isn’t the only threat in Puerto Rico. A group of Martians have landed and are determined to kidnap any girl wearing a bikini so that they can use them to repopulate their race. We’re told that every woman on Mars — with the apparent exception of Princess Marcuzan, played with evil haughtiness by Marilyn Hanold — has been killed as the result of an atomic war. Assisting Princess Marcuzan is Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell), a short, bald Martian with pointy ears.
One of the oddest things about Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster is that, despite being a standard — if wonderfully nonsensical — low-budget B-movie, it features a great soundtrack!
In the 1971 film, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, Zohra Lampert played Jessica, a woman who is struggling to remain sane.
As the film begins, Jessica has just been released from a mental institution. As Jessica explains it, she’s been hearing voices ever since her father died. She struggles with depression and sometimes, she gets paranoid. Her husband, Duncan (Barton Heyman), has just purchased a farm in Connecticut, a place where he believes that Jessica can find some peace. Their friend, Woody (Kevin O’Connor), will be moving out to the farm with them. Woody is a bit of a hippie. Some people would say that Jessica and Duncan are hippies as well but honestly, both of them seem to be more like people who desperately want other people to believe that they’re hippies as opposed to genuine members of the counterculture.
Upon arriving at their new farm, Jessica is shocked to discover a woman named Emily (Mariclare Costello) standing in their farmhouse. When the shocked Jessica calls out for Duncan, he immediately assures her, “I see her, too!” Emily explains that she’s spent the last few months living in the deserted farmhouse. Though Emily offers to leave, Jessica insists that Emily have dinner with them and spend the night. When it becomes obvious that Woody likes Emily, Jessica suggests that Emily should be allowed to live with them.
Duncan agrees to let Emily stay and, much like Jessica, you immediately start to wonder about his motives. Is he merely letting Emily stay to keep Woody happy? Or is he agreeing with Jessica because he’s scared that disagreeing with her will cause her have another breakdown? Or is it possible that he’s attracted to Emily himself?
As the days pass, Jessica struggles to adjust to life in the middle of nowhere. The location is beautiful but, because it’s so remote, it’s menacing as well. The people in the nearby town are strangely hostile and they always seem to be wearing bandages on their necks. Jessica starts to hear voices in the distance, taunting her and telling her that she has no place out in the country. Are they real or is it just her imagination? Is Jessica trying so hard to convince everyone that she’s okay that she’s actually pushing herself to a relapse? And what about the mysterious blonde girl that keeps appearing in the distance, watching Jessica but running away whenever Jessica tries to approach her?
And then there’s the picture that Jessica finds in an antique shop. It appears to be a picture of Emily but the shop’s owner assures her that the picture is over 100 years old….
Apparently, the script for Let’s Scare Jessica To Death was originally called It Drinks Hippy Blood and it’s intent was satirical. You wouldn’t be able to guess that from watching Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, which is one of the creepiest and most dream-like horror films that I’ve ever seen. Unfolding at a leisurely pace and featuring hazy but gorgeous cinematography, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death keeps both Jessica and the audience off-balance. You’re never quite sure if Jessica is right about Emily and the town or if she’s relapsed and is drowning in a sea of her own paranoia. Duncan and Woody both treat Jessica as if she might fall apart at any second. At times, Duncan and his constant concern is so suffocating towards her that you feel that, if Emily hadn’t been there waiting for them, Jessica would have had to create her. As frightening as Emily may be, only Emily can set Jessica free from her domineering husband.
More than being just a character study of a woman struggling to remain above water, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death is also a portrait of the death of counterculture idealism. Jessica, Duncan, and Woody appear to have a chance to live the ideal hippy life on their Connecticut farm but that dream collapses under the weight of all the petty human emotions and foibles that they wrongly thought they could escape. Duncan treats Jessica like a child, gaslighting her whenever she questions anything that’s going on. Woody seems like a good guy but he’s so laid back that he refuses to stand against the tide. Jessica is betrayed by everyone around her. In the end, not even the mysterious blonde girl is willing to actually warn Jessica about what’s happening.
Zohra Lampert gives a wonderfully empathetic performance as Jessica and Mariclare Costello and Gretchen Corbett are well cast as the enigmatic strangers that Jessica can’t seem to escape. Let’s Scare Jessica To Death is a creepy and atmospheric dream of dark and disturbing things and it’s definitely one to see.
Give Charles Band a castle and a D-List celebrity and he’ll give you a movie!
In Spellcaster, which Band produced in 1988 but didn’t release until 1992, the castle is in Italy and there’s not one but three D-list celebrities. British DJ Richard Blade plays Rex, who is a VJ on R-TV, a cable station that only shows music videos. (A music station that actually plays music? Imagine that!) Bunty Bailey, who was the hot girl in Aha’s Take Me On video, is Cassandra, an alcoholic rock star. Finally, Adam Ant is Signor Diablo, who owns the castle.
The plot of the movie is that R-TV is hosting a contest where the winners get to go to Diablo’s castle and not only meet Rex and Cassandra but also search for a million dollar check. The contest winners are a snooty British woman, a sex-obsessed Italian, a sexy French woman, an overweight New Yorker, a blonde vegan, and a brother and a sister who could really use the money. They are a collection of clichés and none of them are very interesting, sympathetic, or smart. Not even the Italian notices that their host is named Mr. Devil.
The search for the money is a bust because the guests keep dying. For instance, the overweight New Yorker eats a stuffed pig, turns into a pig himself, and then gets shot by the snooty British woman, who just happened to bring a rifle with her because all snooty Brits enjoy hunting. Another person ends up getting eaten by a chair that has a lion’s head carved into it. When the lion comes to life and chomps down its jaws, the teeth are obviously foam rubber. It all has to do with Signor Diablo’s crystal ball, where he’s building a collection of souls.
With the casting Adam Ant and Bunty Bailey, Spellcaster tried to be a horror movie for the MTV generation but it came out several years too late. By the time Spellcaster was released, grunge had taken over MTV and both Adam Ant and the Take Me On video seemed like relics from another age. The film itself is a mostly dull affair, one that will be best appreciated by people who are nostalgic for the type of bad movies that used to show up on late night cable.
To be honest, when it comes to bad movies, 2010’s Birdemic is kind of overrated.
I mean, yes — it is such an amazingly inept film that you do have to watch it at least once. And yes, I do occasionally still find myself singing that “hanging out with my family” song to myself.
But compared to something like The Room or April Rain, Birdemic is actually a pretty dull film. I’ve watched it maybe four or five times and it’s always been with a bit of reluctance. The Room, on the other hand, is a film that you can watch over and over again.
(Or, at least you could until The Disaster Artist came out. As brilliant as The Disaster Artist was, I kinda lost interest in The Room after watching it. Incredibly, I haven’t gone to one showing of The Room this year. Actually. now I’m feeling guilty about that. I guess I’ll have to watch The Room sometime tonight. Anyway….)
That said, there are a few scenes from Birdemic that are always good for a laugh. Personally, I enjoy this one. Just watch those birds attack!
THE MUMMY’S GHOST, Kharis the killer mummy’s third time around, finds the plot wearing a bit thin in this rehash, as once again the High Priests of Arkham… wait, what? Arkham? What happened to Karnak? Did the High Priests suddenly change religions? Just another example of continuity shot to hell in this series, though we do get an upgrade in the High Priest department with John Carradine boiling the tanna leaves instead of Turhan Bey .
At least George Zucco as Andoheb is still around to brief Yousef Bey (Carradine) on the plot up til now, dispatching him to Mapleton to fetch back Princess Ananka and Kharis to the temple, though the usual tanna leave spiel is upped from three to nine. There are no more Bannings in Mapleton, but still plenty of victims for Kharis to kill. Frank Reicher is back too, as Professor Norman, giving a lecture on…
I have to admit that I was a little bit hesitant about watching the 2007 film, Diary of the Dead.
It wasn’t that I don’t like zombie movies. In fact, it was the complete opposite. I love zombie films and Night of the Living Dead is one of my favorites. George Romero, of course, went on to make several sequels to Night of the Living Dead. Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead are certifiable horror classics. However, I had heard mixed things about the two zombie films that Romero directed after Land of the Dead. Seeing as how Diary of the Dead was Romero’s second-to-last film before he passed away in 2017, I was worried that I would watch the film and discover that I hated it. I didn’t want experience anything that would tarnish Romero’s cinematic legacy. It didn’t help my expectations that Diary of the Dead is a found footage film and the conventions of the found footage genre tend to get on my last nerve.
(Seriously, nothing makes me throw a shoe at a screen quicker than the sound of someone in a horror movie saying, “Are you filming this?”)
But you know what?
I did watch Diary of the Dead and it’s actually not bad. It may not reach the heights of Romero’s other zombie films but it’s definitely a worthwhile companion piece. It opens with news reports about the start of the zombie apocalypse, meaning that Diary of the Dead is meant to take place at roughly the same time as Night of the Living Dead. (Never mind that Diary of the Dead is full of references to YouTube and blogs and other things that most people probably couldn’t even imagine when Night of the Living Dead first came out.) A group of film students are in the woods, filming a terrible mummy movie when they first hear reports of the dead coming back to life. Some say that there’s no way it could be true. Others say that something must be happening but surely the dead aren’t actually coming back to life. They soon discover that the dead have indeed returned.
We follow the students as they travel across Pennsylvania, trying to find a place that’s safe from the Dead and discovering that there’s literally no such place left in America. Along the way, they also discover that the government has no intention of telling the people the truth about what’s happening. In fact, a group of national guardsmen turn out to be just as dangerous as the zombies. In their efforts to survive, the students are forced to rely on an underground network of bloggers and video makers.
Diary of the Dead has all of the usual zombie mayhem that you would expect from a film like this but, at the same time, it’s got a lot more on its mind than just the dead returning to life. Much as he did with Land Of The Dead, Romero uses Diary of the Dead to comment on the state of America under the Patriot Act. With the government using the zombie apocalypse as an excuse to suspend civil liberties and increase their own power, the film’s characters are forced to depend on new and independent information sources. It’s not hard to see the parallel that Romero is making between the War on the Living Dead and the War on Terror. As well, making all of the characters film students allows for some discussion about whether or not horror films should simply concentrate on being scary or whether they should also attempt to deal with real-world issues. The film leaves little doubt where Romero came down on that issue.
On the negative side, Diary of the Dead struggles a bit to overcome the limitations of its low budget and none of the characters are as compelling as Ben in Night of the Living Dead or Fran in Dawn of the Dead. At times, you find yourself wishing that Diary of the Dead featured just one actor who was as into their role as Duane C. Jones or Ken Foree were in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, respectively. But Diary of the Dead still features enough zombies and enough of Romero’s trademark political subtext to be an acceptable addition to Romero’s vision of the apocalypse.
Artie Logan (Charlie Schlatter) is a wannabe James Dean who keeps getting kicked out of school because he is such a rebel. His father, a judge, gives Artie one more chance. Artie can either enroll at Fairfield College or he can go to jail. Artie chooses Fairfield, where he meets and falls for the beautiful and popular Tally Fuller (Josie Bissett). However, no sooner does Artie show up for their first date than someone sets Tally on fire and crashes through a window. Artie is the number one suspect but Detective P.J. Decker (Christopher Walken) still gives him 24 hours to solve the murder and clear his name. Artie investigates and discovers that Tally was not the innocent, all-American girl that everyone thought she was. This leads to a nudity-filled flashback that explains why All-American Murder was an HBO mainstay in the 90s. It also leads to other people being murdered by snakes and hand grenades.
Despite some bloody murders and the presence of Walken and Joanna Cassidy in potentially interesting supporting roles, All-American Murder fails because it asks us to accept Charlie Schlatter as being a charismatic rebel. When Joanna Cassidy tells him that he’s a “renegade,” not even she sounds like she believes it. The murder mystery is intriguing but Artie is so obnoxious that you want him to go to prison whether he’s guilty or not.
All-American Murder was directed by Anson Williams, who is best known for playing Potsie on Happy Days. The Fonz could have framed Ralph Malph for this murder in half the time that it takes Artie to solve it.
Jon Hall is back as The Invisible Man, but not the same one he played in INVISIBLE AGENT . Like all the Invisible Man movies, THE INVISIBLE MAN’S REVENGE features a new protagonist, as Hall plays Robert Griffin, an escaped mental hospital patient who comes to London seeking his share of a diamond mine after being left for dead in the African jungle by partners Sir Jasper and Irene Herrick. Griffin has returned to get what’s coming to him, and he does… Irene dopes him, and the couple throw the rascal out. Disoriented, Griffin stumbles into a nearby river, where he’s saved from drowning by shady Cockney Herbert Higgins.
Higgins and his disreputable attorney pal try to shake down Jasper, but are confronted by the local chief constable. Griffin’s left to fend for himself, when he stumbles upon the home of Dr. Drury, a scientist experimenting with invisibility on animals…
Through the Shattered Lens