Category Archives: Horror

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Friday the 13th 1.17 “The Electrocutioner”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

There’s nothing scarier than going to the dentist!  Especially when he has a cursed electric chair!

(As a sidenote, I was planning on reviewing this last week but I was not feeling well so I held off until this week.  I apologize for the delay in the writing and posting this review!  These things do happen and I’ve recently been told that I need to start getting more rest and looking after my health so it may happen more than once.)

Episode 1.17 “The Electrocutioner”

(Dir by Rob Hedden, originally aired on April 18th, 1988)

In 1978, Eli Pittman (Angelo Rizacos) was sitting on death row, an innocent man who had been wrongly convicted of murder.  Sentenced to die in the electric chair, Eli’s cries of innocence fell on deaf ears.  The warden of the prison didn’t care.  The judge didn’t care.  The prosecuting attorney didn’t care.  Miraculously, Eli survived the first attempt to electrocute him.  And, fortunately, his death sentence was overturned before he could be shocked a second time.

Ten years later, Eli is working as a dentist at a school for runaways.  Though he presents himself as being a charitable doctor who just wants to help the less fortunate, Eli is actually a deeply bitter man.  He wants revenge on everyone who sent him to prison.  Eli has purchased the electric chair in which he was meant to die.  He’s disguised it as a dentist chair.  When his teenage patients sit in the chair, they are reduced to ash.  Eli is then able to generate electricity through his body.  He uses this power to get his revenge.

Can Ryan, Micki, and Jack stop him?

After a really good opening scene (which is filmed in black-and-white and makes use of a handheld camera to generate a genuinely nightmarish atmosphere), this becomes one of the sillier episodes that I’ve watched so far.  Angelo Rizacos is good in the flashback scenes and he makes you feel a good deal of sympathy for Eli.  But, in the modern day scenes, he overacts to an extent that Eli goes from being a victimized man driven by revenge to a rather broadly-drawn supervillain.  He’s like a character from a B-comic book movie, the sort of villain that would expect Venom or Morbius to battle in a pre-credits sequence.

Add to that …. an antique electric chair?  This show is at its best when the antiques are stuff that you could imagine actually stumbling across in an antique store.  The idea of that big, bulky chair being in the store (and subsequently being disguised as a dentist chair) was just silly.

But you know what?  Friday the 13th is a fun show, even when it’s silly.  Chris Wiggins, John D. LeMay, and Robey made for a good team of investigators and, if nothing else, it was fun watching them interact in this episode.  This was a silly episode but at least it was silly in an entertaining way.

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Monsters 1.19 “Rain Dance”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire show is streaming on Tubi.

This week, a rather predictable story is saved and elevated by one truly impressive monster!

Episode 1.19 “Rain Dance”

(Dir by Richard Friedman, originally aired on April 22nd, 1989)

Tonight’s episode of Monsters deals with a couple living in a shack in the middle of the desert.  Tom Solo (Kent McCord) is a self-styled treasure hunter who thinks that he can get rich by swindling the indigenous people out of their valuable artifacts.  His wife, Vanessa (Teri Copley), is sick of living in the desert and just wants to return to civilization.  Vanessa is extremely vain.  Tom is extremely smug.  It’s easy to imagine how they got together but it’s bit more difficult to understand why they’re still together.  

When an angry old woman (Betty Carvalho) shows up at the shack, she spends a few minutes yelling at Tom for trying to take advantage of her people and then complains about the drought that is destroying their land.  She says that her people found and tamed the land and that some day, the land will again belong to them.  She also gives Tom an artifact, a statue of what Tom assumes he’ll be able to get a few bucks for.  Myself, I would probably turn down the statue because it is seriously creepy.

Yikes!

Of course, it turns out that Tom is wrong about having any chance of making money of the statue.  The statue is a rain idol, one that comes to life in the middle of the night to stalk both Tom and his wife.  When confronted by the statue, both Vanessa and Tom are transformed into statues that crumble into dust.  The next morning, the old woman comes by to retrieve her idol and happily says that the rains will now come to wash away the dusty particles that were once the Solos.

Again, yikes!

Seriously, this was not a particularly complicated episode of Monsters.  From the start, it was obvious that Tom and Vanessa were going to pay for their exploitation of the natives and it was also obvious that, since neither one of them had any redeeming qualities, neither would survive the night.  And, as soon as the old woman showed up with that statue, it was pretty obvious what the instrument of their doom would be.  Vanessa was established early on as being obsessed with keeping her skin from drying out in the desert heat so I wasn’t surprised when she eventually started turning into sand.

It wasn’t surprising but it still worked because the monster was scary!

Seriously!

The end result was an effective morality take about the perils of greed and assuming you’re more clever than you actually are.  In many ways, this could have been a particularly macabre episode of The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery.  Monsters is at its best when it offers a scary monster and a dark ending and this episode certainly did that.

Live Tweet Alert: Join #ScarySocial for X!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, at 9 pm et, Tim Buntley will be hosting #ScarySocial!  The movie?  2022’s X!

If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag!  I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well.  It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

X is available on Prime!

See you there!

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Monsters 1.18 “The Match Game”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire show is streaming on Tubi.

Agck!  The monsters are going to get me for being so late in posting this review!

Episode 1.18 “The Match Game”

(Dir by Michael Brandon, originally aired on April 15th, 1989)

So, if you’ve ever wanted to see Tori Spelling’s head literally get squeezed into nothingness, this is the episode for you.

Spelling plays Beverly, a teenage girl who enjoys breaking into old houses and playing the match game.  That’s the game where you and your friends sit in a circle and a match is passed from person to person.  The person holding the match tells a story until their flame dies.  Then the next person continues the story until their match dies.  The whole idea is to see just how grotesque things can get by the time the story finally ends.  I played a variation of the game when I was in high school.  Admittedly, my friends and I did it in our creative writing teacher’s classroom and we used an hourglass instead of a match and our stories usually turned pretty perverse by the time the third person got their chance to contribute.

Tori Spelling is not the only familiar face to be found here.  Her boyfriend is played by Sasha Jenson, who will forever be known as Dazed and Confused‘s Don Dawson.  Spelling’s best friend is played by Ashley Laurence, who was the lead in the first Hellraiser.  Spelling is not the only well-known actor here but she is the only one to give an amazingly bad performance.  That’s not a surprise, of course.  Spelling has never been a particularly good actress and she did this episode around the same time that she was playing Screech’s girlfriend on Saved By The Bell.  Credit where credit is due, she is better here than she was on Saved By The Bell.

When Paul (Byron Thames), the newcomer to the group, gets his chance to hold the match, it doesn’t go out until he’s gone into great detail about Hubert Waverly, the horribly deformed man who once lived in the house where the group is playing their game.  This brings Hubert to life.  Jenson and Spelling are taken out quickly.  Finally, it occurs to the two survivors that Paul can vanquish Hubert by finishing the story.  That’s good and all but the episode never really explains why Paul’s match didn’t go out the first time.  How did he know about Hubert?  Did Hubert spring from Paul’s mind?  These are important questions that the show just kind of pushes to the side.

Oh well!  This is still an atmospheric episode and probably as close as this show has gotten to being scary since that episode about the makeup box.  Even Tori Spelling’s bad performance felt oddly appropriate for what was essentially a 30-minute 80s slasher film.  I enjoyed this episode so much that I might even go find that old box of matches that we keep out in the garage….

Live Tweet Alert: Watch Renfield With #ScarySocial!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting later year’s Renfield, starring Nicolas Cage!

If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag!  The film is available on Prime!  I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well.  It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.16 “Tattoo”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, a pair of tattoo needles cause trouble!

Episode 1.16 “Tattoo”

(Dir by Lyndon Chubbuck, originally aired on March 7th, 1988)

Tommy Chen (Leonard Chow) is a first generation Chinese-American who has a gambling problem.  He owes several thousand dollars to the local gangsters and his grandfather, Lum Chen (Keye Luke), is no longer willing to help cover his costs.

However, Tommy thinks that he’s found the perfect solution for his problems.  He has two cursed tattoo needles.  All he has to do is tattoo something on someone’s body.  That tattoo will come to life and, as long as the tattooed person dies, Tommy will win whatever game that he’s playing.  With a gangster demanding that he pay his debts by the end of the night, Tommy is going from gambling den to gambling den, drawing tattoos and making money.  Unfortunately, he owes so much that almost every dollar that he makes is taken away from him as soon as he receives it.

And, of course, he also has Ryan, Micki, and Jack trying to track him down as well.

I had mixed feelings about this episode.  On the one hand, the tattoo needles are a totally impractical weapon because Tommy, who is a little bit on the small side, has to find a way to get his victims to lie still and not resist while he tattoos him.  His first victim is a half-conscious woman at an Opium den and that’s at least believable.  But, by the time Tommy is tattooing a gangster, you have to wonder if there isn’t a more practical way for him to make money.

On the other hand, the sight of the tattoos coming to life and crawling (or slithering) up their victims is definitely a frightening one.  One tattoo turns into a giant spider.  Another turns into a coral snake.  One tattoo turns into a fist that bursts out of someone’s chest.  (That made me jump.)  The needles may be impractical but if you have a thing about spiders and snakes (as I do), it really won’t matter.  They’re too frightening for the viewer to spend too much time worrying about the logic of how they actually work.

Fortunately, Ryan and Jack are able to recover the needles and use them to kill the latest tattoo before it can claim a victim.  Unfortunately for Tommy, he’s playing Russian roulette at the time.  Even more unfortunately for Micki, she’s standing close enough to get splattered by blood when Tommy’s gun turns out to have a bullet in the chamber.  I have to admit that I’ve never gotten the appeal of Russian roulette.  I’ve always assumed it must be a guy thing.  Myself, I see the gun being traded back and forth and I say, “Yikes!”

Next week, a cursed electric chair falls into the hands of a dentist …. AGCK!

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Tobe Hooper Edition

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

Today, on what would have been his 81st birthday, the Shattered Lens pays tribute to Texas’s own, Tobe Hooper!

The Austin hippie who redefined horror and left thousands of yankees terrified of driving through South Texas, Tobe Hooper often struggled to duplicate both the critical and the box office success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  It’s only been in the years since his death that many critics and viewers have come to truly appreciate his unique and subversive vision.

Down here, in Texas, we always believed in him.

It’s time for….

4 Shots From 4 Tobe Hooper Films

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, dir by Tobe Hooper, DP: Daniel Pearl)

The Funhouse (1981, dir by Tobe Hooper. DP: Andrew Laszlo)

Poltergeist (1982, dir by Tobe Hooper, DP: Matthew F. Leonetti)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, dir by Tobe Hooper. DP: Richard Kooris)

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Monsters 1.17 “Taps”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire show is streaming on Tubi.

I was pretty hard on Monsters last week.  In retrospect, I think some of that was due to the fact that I was feeling anxious about getting my new laptop.  I stand by what I said about the episode because it wasn’t a good one but I do regret the slight tone of outrage that I took in my review.  Seriously, this is not a show to take seriously.

Take tonight’s episode for example….

Episode 1.17 “Taps”

(Dir by David Misch, originally aired on March 4th, 1989)

Suzy St. Claire (Mary Jo Keenan) is a professional dancer who is appearing, on Broadway, in a show that stars and is directed by an egomaniacal tap dancer, Gary Gregory (Neal Jones).  Suzy wants freedom from both the show and her romantic relationship with Gary so that she can go to Hollywood and try to become a star.  Gary tells her that there’s no way he’ll ever let her go.  So, Suzy contacts a lawyer and he helps her got out of the contract, along with suing Gary for sexual harassment.  Nah, just kidding.  That’s what I would do but Suzy just decides to poison him.  When Gary doesn’t die quickly enough and proves to be too big to fit in a suitcase, Suzy dismembers him.

A few years later, Suzy is in Hollywood with her agent, Sam (Dan Frazer).  She demands to know why Meryl Streep is getting Oscar nominations but she’s not.  Sam points out that starring in Graveyard Slasher III is not the path to getting Academy recognition.  After Sam leaves, Suzy realizes that she’s not alone in her apartment.  She looks over at the window and, behind the curtains, she sees a familiar red shoe.  She opens the curtains and is confronted by….

…. A DISEMBODIED LEG!

Apparently, she forgot to destroy Gary’s leg and now, it has tracked her down.  In a scene that has to be seen to be believed, she is chased around the apartment by the leg.  When she tries to leave the apartment, the leg trips her.  The leg hops up and down until she says, “You want to dance with me?”  It’s a scene that is so ludicrous that it nearly works.  The only problem is that a hopping leg, on its own, doesn’t really have the type of forward momentum necessary to be a real threat.  If you can’t outrun one hopping leg, maybe you deserve whatever you get.

In Suzy’s case, that means using a meat carver to chop off her own leg and then somehow — it’s never shown how — attaching Gary’s leg to the stump.  When we next see Suzy, she is back in New York and Sam is wondering why she’s abandoned her film career to return to dancing.

Good Lord, this was silly.  To its credit, it was meant to be silly.  None of the dialogue was meant to be taken seriously and the actors were all clearly in on the joke.  But, ultimately, that disembodied leg was just too utterly ridiculous for the story to work.  I applaud this episode for laughing at itself but I just wish it had been a little better executed.  Add to that, for an episode about dancers, we didn’t get to see nearly enough dancing.  Sorry, the hopping leg doesn’t count.

Next week …. Tori Spelling guest stars!  We’ll see how that goes.

Film Review: A Stranger In The Woods (dir by József Gallai)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“My humor is a bit abstract.”

— Victor Browning (Bill Oberst, Jr.)

“He’s a very strange guy.”

— Edith (Laura Ellen Wilson)

A Stranger In The Woods opens with a car driving into the woods.  The skies are cloudy.  The road is isolated.  It’s unsettling because, other than the driver of the car, there aren’t any other people around.  Other than the road, there are no signs of civilization.  It’s the type of image that causes the viewer to consider just how much we take for granted the idea of interacting with other people and living in a world where our needs are taken care of.  Today, we view anyone who would separate themselves from civilization as being an eccentric.  In the past, though, that was how most people lived.  They lived alone in home that they built for themselves and visitors and strangers were viewed with suspicion.  It’s a way of life that many people had forced upon them from 2020 to 2021 and it led to the anger and societal anxiety that is still shaking the world today.  Living in isolation is not easy for most people in the modern world, which is perhaps why we are so fascinated with people who can actually handle it.

Driving the car is Edith (Laura Ellen Wilson), a 20-something film student who has been given a tip by one of her professors.  There is a man named Victor Browning (Bill Oberst, Jr.) who lives by himself in the woods.  He’s known for being a bit off-key but he is considered to be generally harmless.  He lives in a cabin, spending his time in what appears to be self-imposed exile from the world.  He only occasionally leaves his cabin so he can get supplies.  Victor has agreed to be interviewed by Edith for a student documentary.

The first meeting with Victor is a bit awkward but he soon starts to open up to Edith.  Victor seems to be friendly and polite, even if he does appear to be a bit haunted by things that happened in the past.  Then again, Edith has things in her past that haunt her as well.  However, as Edith’s stay with Victor continues, she starts to notice some odd and eventually disturbing things about Victor and his isolated existence….

A Stranger In The Woods is a found footage film, playing out as a combination of the footage that Edith shot for her documentary and audio recordings of phone calls that she placed to various people.  As a result, we learn about Victor’s secrets along with Edith.  Like Edith, we start the film liking Victor for his shy manners and his seemingly gentle sense of humor and, just like Edith, we are shocked to witness his sudden changes in mood and his seeming reluctance to discuss certain aspects of his life.  Bill Oberst, Jr. gives a performance that keeps you guessing about just who Victor is and what he’s doing out in the woods.  Oberst is sometimes likable and sometimes frightening and he always keeps the audience from getting too complacent while watching the story unfold.  Victor Browning’s name brings to mind such Universal horror icons as Victor Frankenstein and director Tod Browning and, like the characters who appeared in those classic horror films, he is compelling even when we’re not sure what’s going on inside his head.

A Stranger In The Woods is an atmospheric film, one that understands that there’s nothing scarier than being alone in the middle of nowhere in the dark.  Victor is a fascinating character and fans of 70s horror will want to watch for Lynn Lowry’s cameo during the second half of the film.  A Stranger In The Woods is an effectively creepy portrait of a very strange guy.

Scenes That I Love: Terence Stamp Goes For A Drive in Fellini’s Toby Dammit

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The great Italian director, Federico Fellini, was born 104 years ago today.

Today’s scene that I love comes from Toby Dammit, Fellini’s contribution to the 1968 anthology film, Spirits of the Dead.  In this scene, a narcissistic actor (Terence Stamp) goes for a very fast drive through a very haunted Rome.