The natives are getting restless… and you will too, while watching THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET, which feels a lot longer than its 61 minute running time. The film does have a few saving graces, mainly the great Lionel Atwill as a mad scientist experimenting with bringing people back from the dead, and is an early endeavor for future film noir auteur Joseph H. Lewis . But the extremely lame script by Al Martin, whose inexplicably long career included the Lewis-directed Bela Lugosi vehicle INVISIBLE GHOST, manages to sink this shocker despite Atwill’s and Lewis’s best efforts.
Dr. Ralph Benson offers a man $1000 to let him put the man in a “catatonic state”, and revive him later. Benson has mad dreams about conquering death and disease with his untried (and definitely not FDA approved) methods. When the man doesn’t return home the next day, his wife calls the…
How else do you explain the prank that begins the 1980 slasher film, Terror Train? At a party, awkward pledge Kenny (Derek MacKinnon) is told that Alana Maxwell (Jamie Lee Curtis) is waiting for him in an upstairs bedroom and she totally wants to have sex with him! Poor Kenny. Really, he should have been able to figure that this was a prank but I guess he’s just naive. Anyway, he goes upstairs, strips down to his underwear, and listens as Alana says, “Don’t be shy …. kiss me!”
Kenny thinks that Alana is waiting for him in the bed but actually, she’s hiding behind a curtain. So, what’s in the bed? Well, as Kenny soon discovers, it’s a limbless corpse! Oh, those wacky pre-med students! Under the direction of Doc (Hart Bochner), they’ve stolen a cadaver from the medical school and they’ve used it to play the joke of the century! Everyone bursts into the room, laughing.
Ha ha! Funny joke, right?
Well, not to Kenny. Kenny totally freaks out and starts spinning around and gets all wrapped up in the sheets. Needless to say, Kenny does not get laid that night.
In fact, Kenny ends up losing his mind. And that’s unfortunate but, as they say, life goes on. Three years later, the pranksters are all due to graduate so they’re going to throw a costume party on a train! The conductor (Ben Johnson) watches as these rich, costumed college kids get on his train and you can just tell that he’s thinking, “There better not be no funny business.” He need not worry! Alana is on the train and she still feels so bad over what happened to Kenny that you can be sure that there won’t be any pranks during this graduation party!
Unfortunately for everyone else, Kenny’s decided to get on the train as well. While his former classmates are smoking weed, getting drunk, dancing to the best disco music of 1980, and taunting a magician (David Copperfield), Kenny is killing people and stealing their costumes.
Kenny’s first victim actually dies before the train leaves. When he comes staggering up to everyone with a sword sticking out of him, everyone assumes that it’s just another joke. Nope! Turns out the sword is real but everyone’s too busy boarding to notice as the guy collapses to the ground and is promptly dragged underneath the train. In a scene that always makes me cringe, the train slowly crushes him as it starts to move forward. I mean, seriously …. Agck!
So, now Kenny is wandering around the train, dressed like Grouch Marx and killing people. It takes people a while to notice because we’re not exactly dealing with the smartest group of college graduates. And, once they do realize …. well, what are they going to do? They’re stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere! Even if they do get off the train, it’s snowing and below freezing outside! I mean, it’s almost as bad as Minnesota in January out there….
Of the many slasher films that Jamie Lee Curtis appeared in after Halloween, Terror Train is definitely the best. After making his directorial debut here, Roger Spottiswoode went on to become one of the busiest directors in Hollywood and you can tell why when you watch this movie. Spottiswoode’s makes great and atmospheric use of the train and Kenny’s habit of constantly changing his costume keeps you guessing just where he might be at any given time. Even more importantly, Spottiswoode takes the time to develop the characters so that they become more than just cardboard victims. Jamie Lee Curtis, Hart Bochner, Sandee Curris, and Timothy Webber all give excellent performance as the objects of Kenny’s wrath while old veteran Ben Johnson brings some gravitas to the film as the wise conductor.
(My only objection is that the worst of the pranksters is named Doc, which happens to be the name of our cat. And let me just say that Doc the cat would never pull as cruel a prank as Doc the medical student.)
As we all know, Jamie Lee Curtis will be returning to the horror genre later this month. She’ll be playing Laurie Strode in David Gordon Green’s Halloween remake or reboot or sequel or whatever it is. Famously, Curtis refused to appear in horror films for several years, saying that she didn’t want to be typecast. That was understandable on her part and, as much as I love horror movies, it was probably a smart career move. That said, the slasher films that Curtis appeared are some of the best of the genre. Halloween, Terror Train, and even Prom Night are all classics of their kind. Terror Train is a suspense masterpiece, perfect for any cold and snowy night when you want to scream a little.
For today’s horror on the lens, we have 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles!
Based, of course, on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, The House of the Baskervilles is well-remembered for being the first of many Sherlock Holmes films to star Basil Rathbone as the detective and Nigel Bruce as his loyal sidekick, Dr. Watson. Interestingly enough, Holmes is absent for a good deal of the film, leaving it up to Watson to do the majority of the investigating. That said, you can still see why Rathbone’s interpretation of the character proved to be so popular that he would go on to play Holmes in a total of 14 movies and one radio series.
Happy Horrothon……wait a minute…this isn’t a horror movie!!! Nope, but it is going to win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director.
First Man is a biopic of Neil Armstrong from his test pilot days, Gemini missions, Apollo Mission and return home. I was moved. Ryan Gosling inhabited that man’s very soul. I have not seen acting that good in years and years. At every point in the film, you are more on the edge of your seat than you have been in decades. I knew he would land the LEM on the moon, but it was so close to disaster that you felt for him.
The picture opens with Neil doing test piloting. He’s already getting tapped to be in the Gemini missions, but he almost passes. He has a daughter that stricken with cancer and we share in his grief throughout the film’s entirety. I won’t spoil it, but there’s a moment when Neil is on the moon with his late daughter’s bracelet and …. oh man. Once his daughter passes, his wife pushes him to take the Gemini mission and we rapidly see that she is his ROCK! We see it when his daughter passes and when the stress of the burden of achievement weighs upon this Great Man.
The weight of greatness and death is looked dead in the eye in this picture. Brave men are facing and dealing with mortality in nearly every scene. We see that the cost of putting the first man on the moon is paid in blood. So many great men die in this heroic quest that it begins to feel like a Homeric adventure or great tale of an ancient Samurai told through a modern lens. All the while they are struggling to make this great achievement, we hear the familiar whining of lesser men moaning in the background like white noise.
Once it is clear that Neil will be Commander to go to the Man, his wife demands that he explain the risks to his two remaining children. He tells them and we feel his paternal pain twisting in him like a blade because his destiny is set. We get closer to the other two members of his team – one I can’t remember and the other is Buzz Aldrin who is portrayed as complete asshole. I mean…wow…what a dick!
When Neil approaches the moon, the LEM is heading for disaster and fate tempts Neil to abort, but it’s obvious that Neil will succeed or he will die trying. There was no going back empty handed for him. There’s a lesson here: the greatest achievements require sacrifice up to and including your life.
The film allows us to see this amazing quest through the eyes of our greatest American Representative. It is also clear that the Space Race, Humankind’s greatest achievement, was a road that led to victory and was paved with blood.
You know who I’m talking about, of course. She’s usually the only person in her circle of friends who isn’t sexually active, who doesn’t drink, and who doesn’t do drugs. She’s usually studious and responsible and it’s usually said that she’s so mature and smart that guys are scared to ask her out. While that may sound like kind of a boring life for a teenager to lead, it also means that there’s nothing around to distract her once the killer shows up. While all of her friends are too drunk, stoned, or naked to escape, the final girl is the one who not only outruns the killer but who occasionally beats his head in as well.
Every slasher film has a final girl but few of them ever really seem to concern themselves with what’s going to happen to her after the end credits roll. (Usually, if there is a sequel, we find out that the final girl died mysteriously a few months after surviving the previous massacre.) It’s only logical that having all of your friends killed over the course of one night would not necessarily leave you in a good place emotionally.
The 2015 horror film Last Girl Standing answers the question, “What happens after the horror movie ends?” In the opening scenes, we find Camryn (Akasha Villalobos) in a very familiar situation. She’s running around the woods. She’s stumbling across the bodies of all of her dead friends. She’s being pursued by a man wearing a deer mask. The man is known as The Hunter and when Camryn finally manages to turn the tables on him, we have reached the point where most slasher films would end.
However, this is right where Last Girl Standing begins.
Two years later and Camryn is still struggling to recover from the night. She’s haunted by nightmares and sometimes, she even has visions of the Hunter stalking her. She’s gotten a job working in a laundromat and her co-workers seem nice but are they? It seems like everyone Camryn meets either asks her about that terrible night or they’re scared to get too close to her, as if she carries bad luck or they’re afraid that the Hunter’s insanity has somehow been transferred to her.
For her part, Camryn worries that someone might be stalking her and it doesn’t help her paranoia when Nick (Brian Villalobos) starts working at the laundromat. Again, Nick seems friendly but is he? Can Camryn ever trust anyone again? Even more importantly, should she ever trust anyone again? As most things do, it all ends in blood and tragedy.
Last Girl Standing is an interesting hybrid of a film. On the one hand, based on the film’s opening and its final scenes, Last Girl Standing is definitely a horror film. And yet, the middle part of the film is far more concerned with examining the life of someone struggling with PTSD than with providing the usual jump scares. While the film’s premise might sound like the setup for a typical slasher film, Last Girl Standing is ultimately more about how we deal with trauma. Akasha Villalobos gives a sensitive and empathetic performance as Camryn and the entire cast of this low-budget film does a good job of grounding this story in reality.
All in all, Last Girl Standing is a worthwhile film for those of us who have wondered what happens after the final credits roll.
In 1957, the citizens of the town of Moorheigh discovered that their local doctor was doing experiments on his patients, removing their hearts and using them to try to bring his dead wife back to life. The townspeople responded by executing Dr. Rendell and chanting a poem that goes, “This town has a doctor named Rendell/Stay away from his house because he’s the doctor from Hell.” They would have killed Dr. Rendell’s son too, except that Evan, Jr. escaped by sewing himself up in his mother’s corpse and then later using a scalpel to cut his way out.
Thirty-five years later, Evan, Jr. (Larry Drake) returns to Moorheigh, looking to get revenge on the town. Because of his evil laugh, he is now known as Dr. Giggles and he has a medical-related one liner for every occasion. When Dr. Giggles learns that Jennifer (Holly Marie Combs) needs a heart monitor, Dr. Giggles decides to stalk her while killing all of her interchangeable friends. Dr. Giggles says that he wants to give her a new heart, preferably one that he’s ripped out of someone else’s body. Jennifer is not very appreciative.
Dr. Giggles was meant to be a franchise started, in the fashion of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th films. It was a franchise that would never be because there wasn’t much that could be done with Dr. Giggles that wasn’t done during the first film. Larry Drake was a good actor but, other than the scene where he used a scalpel to cut himself out of a dead body, there was nothing about Dr. Giggles that distinguished from all the other horror movie slasher. He wasn’t a dream weaver like Freddy or indestructible like Jason. He was just a dude dressed like a doctor who giggled too much.
For a better film featuring Larry Drake as a villain, do yourself a favor and watch Sam Raimi’s Darkman.
Universal Pictures kept cranking out the horrors, but HORROR ISLAND isn’t one of them. It’s as misleading a title as Hollywood ever produced, more of a comedy/mystery with some “old dark house” elements thrown in for good measure. This little ‘B’ was released as a double feature with MAN MADE MONSTER, and while its good for what it is, it ain’t horror!
Atmospherically directed by George Waggner and shot by Universal workhorse Woody Bredell , HORROR ISLAND begins spookily enough with a peg-legged sailor trodding the docks attacked by the mysterious Phantom. Rescued from the briny water by hard-pressed for cash entrepreneur Bill Martin and his pal Stuff Oliver, we learn the sailor is Tobias Clump, a Spaniard who claims he has half a map of Sir Henry Morgan’s buried treasure – and The Phantom just stole the other half! Bill happens to have inherited Morgan’s Island, where twenty…
Like many Italian horror films, Mario Bava’s 1971 film, Bay of Blood, is known by many different names.
The original Italian title, or at least one of them, was Ecologia del delitto, which roughly translates to Ecology of Crime. That may sound a little dry to our English-speaking ears but it’s actually a totally appropriate title. The film is about a series of crimes, all inspired by greed and the desire to take control of a bayside mansion.
The film was also called Reazione a catena, which translates to Chain Reaction. Again, that may sound a bit bland but it’s a totally appropriate title. This film takes the concept of a chain reaction to its logical extreme. Everyone in the film wants control of the bay and everyone is willing to kill to do it. One person murders someone just to get murdered themselves. As dark as that may sound, this film actually finds Bava in a rather playful mood. Bava’s direction is wonderfully self-aware and totally cognizant of how absurd the film’s plot occasionally is. It all ends with a perfectly sardonic little twist, one that not only feels earned but which perfectly epitomizes the film’s darkly humorous worldview.
When the film was released in the UK and the United States it was given several different titles. (At one point, in the United States, it was actually sold as being a sequel to Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left, which it definitely was not.) One title was Carnage. Another was Blood Bath. Again, bland titles but totally appropriate to the film. Over the course of the film’s 84-minute running time, 14 people are murdered. With the exception of two innocent bystanders and four teenagers who made the mistake of trying to party in the murder mansion, they were all bad. Still, fourteen is a lot of carnage.
In fact, Bava’s film would later be cited as one of the first slasher films. That’s true, though this film has considerably going on beneath the surface than the average slasher film. If the average slasher often can be defined by sex=death, Bava’s film can be defined as greed=death. That said, several of this film’s murders were “borrowed’ by the early installments of the Friday the 13th franchise. Remember that double impalement from Friday the 13th Part 2? It was taken, almost shot-for-shot, from Bava’s film.
My favorite title for Bava’s film was Twitch of the Death Nerve, which is just so wonderfully over-the-top and melodramatic. It’s the title that most captures the film’s combination of blood and satire. If I was solely in charge of picking the film’s official title, I would have selected Twitch of the Death Nerve.
However, the official title of Bava’s film appears to be Bay of Blood and I guess that’s an okay title. I mean, it’s appropriate. A lot of blood is spilled in that bay, starting with Countess Federica (Isa Miranda) and then going on to include the majority of her family members and business associates. The film opens with Federica’s murder and then doesn’t waste any time in revealing that Federica was murdered by her husband, Filippo (Giovanni Nuvoletti). Filippo murdered his wife on behalf of her estate agent, Frank (Chris Avram) and now, Frank just needs Filippo to sign the property over to him. Of course, what Frank doesn’t realize is that Filippo was murdered just minutes after he murdered Federica….
And that’s just the start.
Bay of Blood is one of Mario Bava’s best films, featuring a cast of wonderfully sordid characters and grisly murders. The film itself becomes a bit of a black comedy, as one murder leads to another. Bava directs with his usual bravura sense of style, making the bay both beautiful and menacing at the same time. If you want to know why almost every horror film made since 1970 owes a debt of gratitude to Bava, Bay of Blood is a good place to start.
That may seem like an obvious point to make when talking about the original A Nightmare On Elm Street but it’s still one that needs to be made. I always seem to forget just how scary the original is. I mean, there’s been so many sequels. And there was that kind of silly movie where Freddy Krueger fought Jason Vooerhees. And then there was the fairly forgettable reboot. Freddy Krueger is something of a cultural icon. Even people who have never watched any of the movies knows who Freddy Krueger is. Freddy has become so well-known for his quips and his puns and his bad jokes that it’s easy to forget that the reason he put razors on his gloves was so he could kill children.
Despite the fact that Jackie Earle Haley took over the role in the reboot, Freddy Krueger will always be associated with the actor who first played him, Robert Englund. What’s interesting is that, whenever you watch or read an interview with Englund, he comes across as being literally the nicest guy in the world. (His autobiography is one of the most cheerful Hollywood memoirs that I’ve ever read.) Before he was cast as Freddy, Englund was a fairly busy character actor. It’s always a little odd when he pops up in some old movie on TCM because, inevitably, he’s always seems to be playing a nice and often kinda shy guy. Supposedly, when Englund auditioned for the role of Freddy, he darkened his lower eyelids with cigarette ash and he purposefully said very little while meeting with director Wes Craven. Craven, who based Freddy Krueger on a childhood bully, was impressed enough to cast this very likable actor as one of the most evil killers in the history of horror cinema.
And make no mistake about it. In the first film, Freddy Krueger is terrifying. He’s not the joker that he would become in later installments of the franchise. When he does laugh, it’s because he’s taunting his latest victim. This Freddy isn’t quite as quick-witted as the Freddy who showed up in Dream Warriors and other films. This Freddy keeps things simple, popping up in your nightmares, chasing you, and, once he catches you, killing you. It’s not just his glove and his burned faced that makes Freddy terrifying in this film. It’s how determined and relentless he is. He’s not going to stop until he catches you and, seeing as how he’s already dead, there’s really not much you can do to slow him down. Englund plays Freddy as being the ultimate bully. The only joy he gets is from tormenting the rest of us. It’s a testament to the strength of Englund’s performance that memories of Freddy dominate our thoughts when it comes to A Nightmare of Elm Street, despite the fact that Freddy is only onscreen for seven minutes.
It’s an effective film, not just because of the nightmare scenes but also because of the scenes that take place in the waking world. The majority of the film follows Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), Glen (Johnny Depp), Tina (Amanda Wyss), and Rod (Jsu Garcia, who is credited as Nick Corri in this film) as they try not to die. And let’s be honest. None of these characters are particularly deep. Rod’s the bad boy. Tina’s the rebellious Catholic. Glen’s the nice guy. Nancy’s the good girl. They’re archetypes that should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a slasher film. And yet, you really do care about them, especially Nancy and Glen. (Admittedly, everyone that I’ve ever talked to about this film seems to care about Rod the least.) Langenkamp, Depp, and Wyss all give such likable performances that you really do find yourself worrying about what will happen to them when and if they fall asleep.
I rewatched A Nightmare on Elm Street last night and I was shocked to discover that, even though I knew what was coming, the movie still scared me. The sight of Freddy straining against the wall over Nancy’s head was still unbelievably creepy. The gory scene where Freddy attacks Tina still frightened me, as did the famous geyser of blood scene. Even the much-parodied scene where Freddy’s glove rises up between Nancy’s legs while she sleeps in the bathtub still made me shudder.
It’s easy to take for granted just how good and scary the original Nightmare on Elm Street actually is. For horror fans, it’s a film that deserves to be watched this October season. Just don’t fall asleep afterwards.
Today’s horror on the lens is the surprisingly brutal 1956 B-movie, Indestructible Man!
I reviewed this movie back in 2013. It was definitely made on a low-budget and it features one of the most sexist endings in cinematic history and yet it’s also occasionally effective. The film’s biggest strength is that the Indestructible Man is played by Lon Chaney, Jr. Though Chaney was clearly dealing with his personal demons at the time this film was made, his surly manner and ravaged face make him very effective in the role of Charles “Butcher” Benson.
Through the Shattered Lens