Category Archives: Film Review

Anime You Should Be Watching (Horror Edition): Perfect Blue (dir. by Satoshi Kon)

Posted on by Arleigh

Satoshi Kon’s 1998 psychological thriller Perfect Blue remains a striking and influential work nearly three decades after its release. Despite being an animated film, it evokes the unsettling style and tension found in the classic Italian giallo thrillers of the 1970s and ’80s—films by directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava—and melds them admirably with elements of 1970s Eurotrash exploitation and arthouse psychological thriller reminiscent of Brian De Palma. Kon’s debut feature is a haunting exploration of fractured identity, blending show-business satire, Hitchcockian suspense, and surreal nightmare imagery into a profoundly relevant story in today’s age of parasocial fandom and digital voyeurism.

The film centers on Mima Kirigoe, a member of the bubblegum J-Pop group “CHAM!” who decides to leave the idol world to pursue a career in serious acting. This choice, rooted in her desire for personal growth and artistic expression, sets off devastating consequences. For her managers and many fans, Mima’s break from the manufactured idol persona is viewed as betrayal—a dissolution of a carefully crafted image designed for maximum market appeal. The pristine, innocent figure worshipped by fans begins to crumble, replaced by the complicated reality of adulthood and the harsh glare of fame.

To fully grasp the horror underpinning Perfect Blue, it’s important to understand the nature of Japanese idol culture. These idols are not merely singers or performers—they are highly managed brands. Every lyric, outfit, choreographed move, and public appearance is tightly controlled to project purity and accessibility. This system bears close resemblance to the meticulously produced Western pop acts of the late 1990s and early 2000s like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. Both rely on constructing polished, artificial personas that maximize commercial appeal, often at the expense of genuine selfhood. When an idol deviates from this script, it frequently provokes obsession, confusion, and even violent reactions from a subset of fans unable to reconcile the constructed image with evolving reality.

Mima’s transition from ingénue pop star to serious actress thrusts her into an intense psychological crucible. Her first major acting role requires her to perform a deeply disturbing rape scene, one that blurs lines between professional obligation and personal violation. Kon lingers on Mima’s shocked expression—a powerful mask of confusion and repressed trauma. This sequence sets the tone for the film: a world where performance, identity, and exploitation intertwine irrevocably, creating a landscape where self and roles imposed by society become indistinguishable.

As Mima’s public persona shifts, darker forces emerge. An eerie fan website titled “Mima’s Room” chronicles her life with disturbing accuracy but is clearly authored by an unknown party. Even more threatening is an obsessed fan fixated on the idol version of Mima, stalking her and insisting that the “real” Mima no longer exists. This duality—between reality and imitation, self and construct—becomes the film’s thematic centerpiece. The narrative loops and fractures, cutting between dreams, televised drama, and supposed reality until neither Mima nor the viewer can be sure what is authentic. This masterful ambiguity immerses us in the protagonist’s psychological collapse.

The horror in Perfect Blue operates on two deeply intertwined levels. First, it is a psychological portrait of a young woman’s unraveling, echoing themes explored in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan—films focused on fragile female psyches under immense pressure. While Aronofsky has publicly denied that Black Swan was directly inspired by Perfect Blue, the similarities in theme and specific visual motifs suggest otherwise. Both films explore the disintegration of identity in a young woman caught between innocence and adult roles, with dreamlike, unsettling sequences blurring reality and hallucination. The parallels in their portrayal of psychological breakdown, stalking, and the pressure of performance are striking, though Aronofsky’s work is set in the world of ballet rather than pop music and acting.

Second, Perfect Blue channels the lush, stylized dread characteristic of giallo cinema. Kon borrows Argento’s fascination with voyeuristic camera angles, saturated color palettes, and the interplay of beauty and violence. Like Argento’s heroines trapped in a hall of mirrors, Mima finds herself caught in a labyrinth where surreal horror becomes tangible and murder might be just another staged act in a disturbing performance.

Yet unlike Suspiria’s occult grotesques, Kon’s horror resides not in supernatural forces but within the mind and media itself. Animation becomes a revelatory choice—rather than softening violence, it frees Kon from physical constraints, allowing reality to fracture visually with startling fluidity. Identities shift from frame to frame, reflections move independently of their sources, and timelines collapse and fragment like psychic glitches. The medium’s flexibility intensifies the film’s psychological disorientation, blurring fact and fantasy in ways live-action cinema would struggle to capture so viscerally.

Kon’s prescient understanding of media obsession resonates more strongly than ever today. Long before social media reshaped how identity is constructed and perceived, Perfect Blue envisioned the internet as a distorting mirror that erases the line between self and performance. The “Mima’s Room” website serves both as diary and prison—a disturbing precursor to the carefully curated digital personas that dominate social media platforms now. As Mima reads falsified diary entries that resemble her life more “truthfully” than her own memory, she grows alienated from reality. The omnipresent gaze of fans, stalkers, and producers merges into an oppressive force she cannot escape.

This taps into a modern phenomenon: parasocial relationships. These one-sided emotional bonds fans develop with celebrities or fictional characters foster a dangerous illusion of intimacy and knowledge, often masking boundaries between admiration and entitlement. In Perfect Blue, the deranged fan believes he “knows” Mima in a way that justifies controlling her, even committing violence to preserve the image he idolizes. This mirrors the darker side of parasocial dynamics today, where fans demand absolute authenticity or control over public figures’ identities, sometimes leading to harassment or stalking. Kon’s film foreshadows how internet culture can exacerbate these fragile boundaries, blurring realities and fueling destructive obsession.

The film’s editing amplifies this psychological suffocation. Kon intercuts scenes from Mima’s TV drama—ironically titled Double Bind—with moments from her “real” life until one blurs imperceptibly into the other. Viewers are drawn deeper into uncertainty: are we witnessing actual events, staged fiction, or yet another deceptive layer? This deliberate manipulation creates unease without relying on cheap jump scares or graphic violence. The horror is existential—losing trust not only in others but in one’s own mind.

This theme has become exponentially more relevant with the rise of social media influencers and online streaming personalities. Today, countless individuals cultivate personal brands that blend their private lives with public personas online, often with blurred or deliberately ambiguous boundaries. The intense fan interaction, constant scrutiny, and expectation of accessibility echo the pressures Mima faces. As social media blurs the line between “real” self and online performance, the risks of losing grip on one’s identity—as Mima does—feel more immediate and widespread than ever.

It is extraordinary that Perfect Blue was Kon’s first feature film. His command of cinematic language is masterful—harnessing animation as a means to probe psychological depths rather than as mere escapism. His subsequent works—Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika—build on themes of identity, memory, and the fluid borders of reality, but Perfect Blue remains his rawest and most unsettling contribution. His untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2010 at just 46 left the film community mourning a visionary whose full promise was tragically unfulfilled.

One of Perfect Blue’s greatest achievements is rejecting outsider stereotypes about anime. It is neither childish fantasy nor gratuitous erotica, though it fearlessly explores sexual anxiety, trauma, and performance under intense scrutiny. Kon’s film proves that animation can tackle mature themes—mental illness, societal pressure, gender identity—with subtlety and emotional gravitas usually reserved for live-action cinema. It challenges the misinformed Western association of adult anime with “hentai,” affirming animation’s capacity as a serious art form.

Kon’s film also critiques fandom’s darker impulses, asking difficult questions about ownership and identity. How much of a celebrity’s life belongs to the public? How much of one’s self must be sacrificed under the weight of expectation? In today’s hyperconnected online world, Kon’s portrayal of obsessive fans demanding idealized idols is uncannily relevant and urgent.

Ultimately, Perfect Blue transcends genre and era. It is not merely a psychological thriller or celebrity critique but a mirror held to an increasingly performative world. Long before social media dissolved the lines between private and public selves, Kon foresaw how image can consume reality. The result is a masterful fusion of paranoia, empathy, and stunning visual style—a giallo-inspired fever dream painted in blood-red and neon blue. For animation, it remains a landmark in artistic maturity; for cinema as a whole, it stands as one of the most chilling and insightful portraits of fame’s corrosive gaze and the dark side of parasocial obsession.

Horror Film Review: Evils of the Night (dir by Mardi Rustam)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

How dumb can one movie be without becoming unwatchable?

1985’s Evils of the Night is here to answer that question!

Three space alien vampires (John Carradine, Julie Newmar, and Tina Louise) have led an expedition to Earth.  They’ve taken over a hospital and they’re stealing the blood of their patients so that it can be sent back to their dying planet.  They especially want young blood, which is why they specifically came to a college town.  Unfortunately, their intelligence was faulty and they arrived during the summer, when the campus was closed.  (I guess this is one of those rare colleges that don’t offer a summer term.)  There’s actually a very lengthy scene in which Carradine explains the faulty intelligence to Newmar and Louise and then Newmar complains about how the alien intelligence service just isn’t that good.  What makes this scene so special is that Carradine delivers his lines with a straight face and Newmar actually seems to be sincerely annoyed.  Aliens — they’re just like us!

Just because college is out of session, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any young people hanging out down at the lake.  There’s actually quite a few, though all of them look to be a little bit too old for high school or college or whatever they’re supposed to be attending.  Several of them are played by veterans of the adult film industry, including Amber Lynn and Jerry Butler.  Everyone wants to get laid down at the lake, which is probably the most realistic thing about Evils of the Night.  However, John Carradine needs their blood so he has Julie Newmar hire two slovenly mechanics, Kurt (Neville Brand) and Fred (Aldo Ray), and sends them out to kidnap any young people that they find.  Kurt and Fred are very good at their job.  Newman pays them and mocks them for caring so much about coins.  Little do the mechanics realize that the aliens are planning on shooting them with their space laser as soon as they leave the planet.

Evils of the Night is a good example of a bad movie that is oddly watchable just because the viewer finds themselves curious as to just how stupid things can get.  The answer here is very stupid and very nonsensical  It never seems to occur to anyone just go to a different lake or maybe just do their skinny dipping in a pool somewhere.  The plot has a “make it up as you along” feel to it and that, at the very least, keeps things vaguely interesting.  The actors playing the “teen” victims are enthusiastic without being particularly good while most of the veterans in the cast are all obviously just there for the paycheck.

That said, John Carradine.  Wow.  What a career.  A trained Shakespearean actor who made his stage debut in 1925 and went on to appear in a countless number of movie, Carradine was a favorite of both John Ford and Fred Olen Ray.  Carradine appeared in hundreds of a theatrical films.  In fact, his final film was released seven years after Carradine’s death.  Carradine was one of the great actors, with that deep voice and that commanding stare.  But he was also one of those actors who was apparently willing to appear in just about anything and that’s one reason why he’s still such a beloved icon.  Playing an outer space vampire-turned-doctor was definitely not the strangest role that Carradine ever played.  Carradine handles his scenes like a pro!

Evils of the Night is dumb but I dare you to look away.

October True Crime: The Onion Field (dir by Harold Becker)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This 1979 true crime drama opens in Los Angeles in 1963.

Rookie Detective Karl Hettinger (John Savage) has just joined the Felony Squad and met his new partner, Ian Campbell (Ted Danson, making his film debut).  Ian is a tall, somewhat eccentric detective, the type who practices playing the bagpipes in the basement and who takes Hettinger under his wing.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Smith (Franklyn Seales) has just been released from prison.  The nervous and easily-led Jimmy almost immediately runs into Gregory Powell (James Woods), a small-time hood with delusions of grandeur.  Powell is the type who talks a big game but who really isn’t even that good of a thief.  Smith and Powell form an uneasy criminal partnership.  They are easily annoyed with each other but they also share an instant bond.  Though the film doesn’t actually come out and say what most viewers will be thinking, there’s a lot of subtext to a brief scene where Powell appears to caress Smith’s shoulder.

One night, Hettinger and Campbell are kidnapped by Smith and Powell.  Smith and Powell drive them out to an onion field.  Because he’s misinterpreted the Federal Kidnapping Act and incorrectly believes that he and Smith are already eligible for the death penalty because they kidnapped two police officers, Powell shoots and kills Campbell.  (The close-up image of Campbell falling dead is a disturbing one, not the least because he’s played by the instantly likable Ted Danson.)  Hettinger runs and manages to escape.  He saves his life but he’s now haunted by the feeling that he abandoned his partner.

The rest of the film deals with the years that follow that one terrible moment in the onion field.  Treated as a pariah by his fellow cops, Hettinger sinks into alcoholism and eventually becomes a compulsive shoplifter.  Smith and Powell, meanwhile, use a variety of tricks to continually escape the death penalty and to keep their case moving through the California justice system.  Powell, for instance, defends himself and then later complains that he had incompetent counsel.  Smith, meanwhile, is defended by the infamous Irving Karanek, a legendary California attorney who specialized in filing nuisances motions.  (Later Karanek found a measure of fame as Charles Manson’s attorney.  Eventually, he had a nervous breakdown in 1989, lived in his car, and was briefly suspended by practicing law.)  While Smith and especially Powell quickly adjust to being imprisoned, Hettinger spends the next decade trapped in a mental prison of guilty and bitterness.

Based on a non-fiction book by Joseph Wambaugh, The Onion Field is a compelling look at a true crime case that continue to resonate today.  The film can be a bit heavy-handed in its comparisons between the two partnerships that define the story.  Both Hettinger and Smith are young and neurotic men who find themselves working with a more confident mentor.  The difference is that Hettinger’s mentor is the cool, composed, and compassionate Ian Campbell while Smith’s sad fate is to be forever linked to the erratic Gregory Powell.  While the film may have the flat look of something that was made for television, it’s elevated by the performances of its lead actors.  James Woods give an especially strong performance as the cocky Powell, a loser in the streets who becomes a winner behind bars.  Over the course of the film, he goes from being a joke to being the prisoner that others come to for legal advice.  John Savage, meanwhile, poignantly captures Hettinger’s descent as the trauma from that night leaves him as shell of the man that he once was.

The film’s supporting cast is full of familiar faces.  Christopher Lloyd and William Sanderson show up as prisoners.  Ronny Cox plays the detective in charge of the onion field investigation.  David Huffman plays a district attorney who is pushed to his breaking point by the obstructive tactics of Smith’s attorney.  Priscilla Pointer play Ian Campbell’s haunted mother.  All of them do their part to bring this sad story to life.

The Onion Field is a chillingly effective true crime drama and a look at a murder that was inspired by one man’s inability to understand federal law.

Horror Film Review: Voodoo Man (dir by William Beaudine)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1944’s Voodoo Man, Michael Ames stars as Ralph, a screenwriter who has been asked to write a treatment based on the real case of several “girl motorists” who have disappeared in the surrounding area.  Ralph turns down the assignment because he’s busy planning his wedding to Betty (Wanda McKay).  However, when Betty’s maid of honor, Stella (Louise Currie), vanishes, Ralph and Betty set out to investigate.  As Ralph puts it, he’s become a part of the story that he earlier rejected.

What has happened to Stella and all of the other women?  They’ve been abducted by Toby (John Carradine) and Grego (Pat McKee), two lunkheads who work for Dr. Marlowe (Bela Lugosi).  Dr. Marlowe lives in an isolated mansion where he is cared for by his loyal housekeeper (Mici Goty).  Twenty-two years ago, Dr. Marlowe’s wife, Evelyn (Ellen Hall), died but Marlowe has been able to keep her body in a sort of suspended animation ever since.  Marlowe is kidnapping women because, through the use of voodoo and mad science, he hopes to take their “will to live” and transfers it into Evelyn.  Helping Marlowe out is a voodoo priest named Nicholas (George Zucco).

Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco!  Obviously, the main appeal of Voodoo Man is that it brings together three great names in horror. Even if the story doesn’t really make much sense (and it doesn’t), the film gets a lot of mileage out of the combination of Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco.  While Lugosi does seem to be a bit bored with his role, Carradine and Zucco really throw themselves into their characters.  John Carradine, in particular, seems to be having the time of his life as he shuffles around the mansion and replies, “Yes, master,” to every command from Dr. Marlowe.  It’s the type of entertaining performance that could only be delivered by a trained Shakespearean slumming in a low-budget, B-grade horror film.  As for Zucco, he plays Nicholas with a certain amount of ruthless erudition.  Zucco is playing the Boris Karloff role here and he definitely seems to understand what that means.

As for the film itself, it has its moments.  Legend has it that director William Beaudine’s nickname was “One Shot” because he was usually only willing to do one take of each scene.  As a result, he filmed quickly and he didn’t spend a lot of money and that was probably a good thing for a production like Voodoo Man.  It also meant that if someone flubbed a line or bumped into a piece of furniture, that take would still be the one that showed up in the film.  My favorite moment of Voodoo Man was when the local sheriff (Henry Hall) referred to Dr. Marlowe as being “Dr. Martin,” and Bela Lugosi, who appeared to be struggling not to laugh, quickly said, “It’s Marlowe.”  The sheriff corrected himself.  That’s the type of fun you don’t get in movies made by people who do more than one take.

Voodoo Man has a quick 61-minute running time.  To enjoy it, it probably helps to already be a fan of low-budget, B-horror films from the 40s.  Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco are combination that deserves to be seen.

Horror On The Lens: Baffled! (dir by Philip Leacock)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This is a film that I share every year for Horrorthon and can you blame me?  Check out this pitch: Leonard Nimoy is a race car driver who can see into the future and who uses his powers to solve crimes!

Seriously, if that’s not enough to get you to watch the 1973 made-for-TV movie Baffled!, then I don’t know what is.  In the film, Nimoy takes a break from racing so that he and a parapsychologist (played by Susan Hampshire) can solve the mystery of the visions that Nimoy is having of a woman in a mansion.  This movie was meant to serve as a pilot and I guess if the series had been picked up, Nimoy would have had weekly visions.  Of course, the movie didn’t lead to a series but Baffled! is still fun in a 70s television sort of way.  Thanks to use of what I like to call “slo mo of doom,” a few of Nimoy’s visions are creepy and the whole thing ends with the promise of future adventures that were sadly never to be.  And it’s a shame because I’ve always wondered what was going on with that couple at the airport!

Enjoy Baffled!  Can you solve the mystery before Leonard?

 

Horror Review: Horror Express (dir. Eugenio Martin)

Posted on by Arleigh

There was one film I saw when I was very young that absolutely terrified me, and even now, decades later, it still has the power to unsettle me and rob me of sleep. That film is Horror Express, a 1972 Spanish-British horror/science fiction hybrid directed by Eugenio Martín. It brought together two titans of gothic horror cinema, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—icons of the Hammer Films era—while also featuring Telly Savalas in a sadistic, scene-stealing turn as a volatile Cossack captain.

When Horror Express was released, the horror genre was at a fascinating crossroads. The gothic traditions popularized by Hammer Studios throughout the 1960s were beginning to fade, overtaken by the grittier, bloodier styles of filmmakers like Herschell Gordon Lewis and George A. Romero. By 1968, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead had already shifted the genre toward a darker, more nihilistic tone, paving the way for the grislier excesses that would dominate the 1970s. Martín’s film stood out precisely because it clung to the elegance and atmosphere of Hammer’s gothic aesthetic while incorporating moments of shocking violence and morbid detail. It occupied an unusual in-between space: refined in look and tone yet unnerving in its thematic brutality. Its blend of period atmosphere, science fiction paranoia, and restrained gore made it a fascinating transitional work in horror history.

The premise is simple but chilling. Aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, a British anthropologist (Christopher Lee’s Professor Saxton) transports a recently unearthed specimen—an ape-like, fossilized creature. His colleague, Peter Cushing’s Dr. Wells, becomes reluctantly entangled in the unfolding mystery. Predictably, the specimen is not what it seems; it revives and begins unleashing a series of violent attacks on the passengers. Soon it is revealed to harbor a far more terrifying, alien intelligence capable of killing and inhabiting its victims. This leads to one of the film’s most haunting sequences: the white-eyed, zombie-like corpses, drained of memories and humanity, shambling through the train corridors under the entity’s control. At eight years old, these images struck me as some of the most horrifying I had ever seen, and even today their uncanny blend of gothic atmosphere and science fiction body horror still lingers.

Viewed in retrospect, Horror Express bears a striking resemblance to John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There?—the basis for Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing in 1982. Like those stories, it is steeped in paranoia, playing with the idea of an alien intelligence that can absorb knowledge and animate the dead. While it never attains the precision of Carpenter’s later masterpiece, it foreshadows that same blend of claustrophobia, distrust, and escalating dread.

What makes Horror Express unforgettable is its restraint. Rather than leaning on gore, it generates fear through suggestion, atmosphere, and disturbing imagery. The snowy isolation of the Trans-Siberian route reinforces the cold sterility of its alien invader, while the confined train cars become a claustrophobic prison of escalating terror. Over time, the film has slipped into the public domain, making it widely available on streaming platforms and budget DVDs. Though often overlooked in surveys of 1970s horror, it deserves recognition as one of the last great gothic horror films before the torch passed to Craven, Carpenter, and Hooper.

For me, Horror Express remains not just a childhood scare but a cinematic touchstone: a rare piece of science fiction horror bridging two eras, one that manages to terrify without relying on excess gore. It disturbed me at age eight, and even now, watching the blank-eyed corpses lurch through the dim train cars still triggers that same visceral shiver.

Working with Jigsaw, Short Film Review by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

This is an example of a perfect short film! Sometimes life is just awful and you find that Hell has sub-basements. I am currently in the next to last sub-basement; yes, it really is that bad. At times like that, Richard Morgan, the author of Altered Carbon wrote “You take what’s offered….sometimes you just need to get to the next screen.” Working with Jigsaw was one of those moments for me. It was funny enough to make my brain take a brief break and allow me to laugh. Trust me, if a film is funny enough to make me laugh at this time in my life, you might literally pee your pants or poo or pee/poo them. What I am trying say is that you should wear your peeing yourself pants while watching this and then shower- Don’t be gross!

Thanks Al

The plot is right in the title and you get what you were promised. You know you have something special when the writer and director know that 3 minutes and 43 seconds is actually longer that you think. Why is that important? It is critical to have the time awareness because it frees the short film director to use silence to set up a reaction. In this film, the silences set up the punchlines, but it a straight horror short it allows for suspense, payoff, and even to have a moment to care about the characters. Most of the shorts I watch are either pitches in disguise or worse they don’t use their time wisely to make you care that the characters are in peril.

Working with Jigsaw pulls together the concept of a malevolent force being awful at work. Jigsaw is constantly interfering with people’s work to make them play his non-lethal but horribly annoying games. The HR scene at the end is film gold!

I really can’t say enough nice things about this short. Both writers got jobs working for Jimmy Kimmel after this short, which fills with rare joy! I hope they continue to make short films and feature length comedies- they are truly gifted artists!

October Positivity: Nothing Is Impossible (dir by Matt Shapira)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

With apologies to Brad Crain, I’ve never been a basketball fan.

I’m not really a team sports fan in general but basketball truly gets on my nerves.  My main issue, of course, is that all the squeaky shoes make it difficult for me to watch a game.  The constant squeaking is headache-inducing.  My other problem with basketball is that people who like basketball tend to really, really, really like it, to the extent that they can’t handle the fact that some of us don’t really care.  Finally, I get tired of being expected to pay attention to whatever it is the coaches say after the game.  How many times have I come online to see breathless stories about a basketball coach giving his thoughts on current events?  Like seriously, who cares?  Why would I care what a coach thinks about tariffs?  Why are we even asking basketball coaches for their opinions?  Aren’t basketball coaches just supposed to yell at people until they get kicked out of the game?  I’ve seen Hoosiers, which I will acknowledge is a very good movie despite my feelings about the game.  Gene Hackman was constantly getting kicked off the court and everyone loved him for it.  Temper tantrums, that’s what we need from basketball coaches.  We don’t need to know your thoughts on the cost of bread.

What’s the point of all this?  Before I talk about 2022’s Nothing Is Impossible, I thought you deserved to know my own bias against the game.  Nothing is Impossible is a movie that loves basketball.

Nothing is impossible?  Try telling that to former basketball-star-turned-high-school-janitor Scott Beck (David A.R. White).  Scott, we’re told, could have been a star in the NBA but it didn’t pan out.  Instead, Scott works as a janitor and volunteers as an assistant high school coach.  While NBA players and their coaches are answering questions about who they voted for in the last election, Scott is looking after his alcoholic father and regretting the fact that he left Ryan Aikins (Nadja Bjorlin) at the altar.

Ryan is now the owner of a basketball team and, when the team announces that it will be holding live tryouts for anyone who wants to try to make the team, Scott finds himself tempted to try to achieve his dream of playing in the NBA.  Can Scott do it?  Can he still compete at a competitive level?  Actually, could he ever compete at a competitive level?  Listen, I know this is a PureFlix film and David A.R. White can probably appear in any one of their films that he wants to because he’s one of the founders of the company but White is never particularly convincing as someone who could make a professional basketball team.  He’s not particularly tall.  He doesn’t come across as being particularly athletic.  He’s middle-aged.  Nothing is impossible the title tells us but the idea of an unathletic, middle-aged, 5’10 white guy dunking on a bunch of NBA superstars truly tests that claim.

The important thing, of course, is that Scott and Ryan discover that they’re still in love and White and Bjorlin manage to generate enough romantic chemistry to make a believable couple.  The other important thing is that Steven Bauer shows up as a heartless executive.  It’s always nice to see Bauer destroying dreams.  Otherwise, the film did not change my opinion about basketball.

Seriously, those shoes are just too damn squeaky….

October Hacks: Popeye The Slayer Man (dir by Robert Michael Ryan)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“You’re a monster!” a terrified woman shouts at the hulking, murderous figure who haunts the local abandoned cannery.

“I yam what I yam,” the Sailor Man (Jason Robert Stephens) replies before presumably killing her in some grotesque way.

The Sailor Man haunts the cannery.  Some believe him to be a ghost be actually, he’s just a former sailor who has been mutated after eating too much contaminated spinach.  Now, he is freakishly strong and can literally rip people into pieces with his hands.  Running into the Sailor Man means that you will soon be seeing disconnected limbs, compound fractures, and split open heads.  The Sailor Man’s motives aren’t always easy to figure out but, if you smell the burning of his pipe, you should probably run.  With those gigantic arms and his permanent sour expression, the Sailor Man can pretty much do whatever he feels like doing.  Shooting him or stabbing him won’t stop him.  He’s hooked on the spinach.

Popeye The Slayer Man is one of three Popeye-themed slasher movies to be released in the wake of Popeye moving into the public domain.  In this one, Dexter (Sean Michael Conway), a film student, decides that he wants to make a documentary about the Sailor Man legend so he and his friends break into the cannery.  Almost everyone is killed in a bloody way and it’s hard not to notice that no one seems to be that upset about it.  Dexter comes across the dead body of someone who was previously described as being his best friend since the Second Grade and he barely seems to care.  Instead, he just lifts up his camera and films.  I’m tempted to think that this was meant to be a satire on the callousness of aspiring documentarians but I might be giving the film too much credit.  Who knows?

Obviously, you can’t take a film like this too seriously.  In almost every room in the cannery, there’s at least a handful of empty spinach tins.  To be honest, I actually think the film didn’t go far enough.  Sure, Popeye’s killing people and there’s a character named Olivia (Elena Juliano) but where’s Bluto?  Popeye is presented as a largely silent killer which, again, seems like a missed opportunity.  Popeye is also presented as being rather random in his kills.  He allows one person to survive for reasons that are incredibly unclear, beyond the fact that I guess the filmmakers felt that the character in question was too sympathetic to suffer the same bloody death as nearly everyone else in the film.

Other than the killer being Popeye, this is pretty much a standard low-budget slasher.  I will admit that I kind of appreciated that is was pretty straight-forward about its intentions.  Unlike a lot of recent slasher films, it never came across as if it was apologizing for being what it was and there’s definitely something to be said for that.  The film embraces the philosophy of “I yam what I yam.”  The Sailor Man would be proud.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The Undertaker (dir by Franco Steffanino)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1988’s The Undertaker, a small college town is rocked by a serious of viscous, sexually-charged murders.  While the professors and the students deal with their own dramas on campus, the bodies are piling up at the local funeral home.  Who could the murderer be?

Well, Joe Spinell’s in the film.  That really should be the only clue you need.

Spinell plays Roscoe, the town undertaker who has issues with his mother, cries at random, talks to dead bodies, watches movies featuring sacrifices, and occasionally performs what appears to be some sort of a ritual with his victims.  This film was Spinell’s final film and he gives a performance that alternates between being perfunctory and being fully committed.  On the one hand, there are plenty of scenes where Spinell appears to be making up his lines as he goes along,  In the scenes in which he appears in his office, it’s appears that Spinell is literally reading his lines off of the papers on top of his desk.  Then there are other scenes where Spinell suddenly seems to wake up and he flashes the unhinged intensity that made him such a fascinating character actor.  In the 70s and 80s, there were many actors who frequently played dangerous people.  Spinell was the only one who really came across like he might have actually killed someone on the way to the set.  Spinell was in poor health for most of his life and he also struggled with drug addiction.  In The Undertaker, he doesn’t always look particularly healthy.  Even by Joe Spinell standards, he sweats a lot.  And yet, in those scenes were actually commits himself to the character, we see the genius that made him so unforgettable.

As for the film itself, it’s basically Maniac but without the New York grit that made that film memorable.  Instead, it takes place in a small town and Spinell, with his rough accent and his button man mustache, seems so out-of-place that the film at times starts to feel like an accidental satire.  Roscoe is obviously guilty from the first moment that we see him and yet no one else can seem to figure that out.  Only his nephew suspect Roscoe but that problem is quickly taken care of.  Whenever anyone dies, their body is brought to Rosco’s funeral home.  Roscoe puts on his black suit, plasters down his hair, and tries to look somber.  Roscoe spends a good deal of the film talking to himself.  When a victim runs away from Roscoe, Spinell looks at a nearby dead body and shrugs as if saying, “What can you do, huh?”

If you’re into gore, this film has a lot of it and, for the most part, it’s pretty effective.  In the 80s, even the cheapest of productions still found money to splurge on blood and flayed skin effects.  If you’re looking for suspense or a coherent story, this film doesn’t really have that to offer.  It does, however, offer up Joe Spinell in his final performance, sometimes bored and yet sometimes brilliant.