Category Archives: Horror

Horror on the Lens: The Terror (dir by Roger Corman, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, Dennis Jakob, and Jack Nicholson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Have you ever woken up and thought to yourself, “I’d love to see a movie where a youngish Jack Nicholson played a French soldier who, while searching for a mysterious woman, comes across a castle that’s inhabited by both Dick Miller and Boris Karloff?”

Of course you have!  Who hasn’t?

Well, fortunately, it’s YouTube to the rescue.  In Roger Corman’s 1963 film The Terror, Jack Nicholson is the least believable 19th century French soldier ever.  However, it’s still interesting to watch him before he became a cinematic icon.  (Judging from his performance here and in Cry Baby Killer, Jack was not a natural-born actor.)  Boris Karloff is, as usual, great and familiar Corman actor Dick Miller gets a much larger role than usual.  Pay attention to the actress playing the mysterious woman.  That’s Sandra Knight who, at the time of filming, was married to Jack Nicholson.

Reportedly, The Terror was one of those films that Corman made because he still had the sets from his much more acclaimed film version of The Raven.  The script was never finished, the story was made up as filming moved alone, and no less than five directors shot different parts of this 81 minute movie.  Among the directors: Roger Corman, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, and even Jack Nicholson himself!  Perhaps not surprisingly, the final film is a total mess but it does have some historical value.

(In typical Corman fashion, scenes from The Terror were later used in the 1968 film, Targets.)

Check out The Terror below!

Music Video of the Day: And Fools Shine On by Brother Cane (1995, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Brother Cane’s And Fools Shine On is best-known for appearing on the soundtrack of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.  No matter what else people say about that movie, the general consensus seems to be that at least the music was good.

The video is slightly horror-themed, though Michael Myers doesn’t show up.  Instead, the video feels like an homage to the expressionistic cinema of F.W. Munrau and Fritz Lang, as if someone tried to combine Nosferatu with Metropolis.

Enjoy!

Horror on TV: Tales From The Crypt 3.7 “The Reluctant Vampire” (dir by Stephen Hopkins)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Reluctant Vampire was the 7th episode of the 3rd season of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt!  It stars Malcolm McDowell as a vampire who is a little bit too nice for his own good.  Seriously, you can’t go wrong with Malcolm McDowell as a vampire.

The Reluctant Vampire originally aired on July 10th, 1991.

Enjoy!

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: The Day Time Ended (dir by John “Bud” Cardos)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

At the start of 1980’s The Day Time Ended, the Williams Family has relocated to the desert!  

(Why the desert?  I have no idea.  I’ve been told that the hot air of the desert would be ideal for my asthma but then I’d have to live in the desert and, from what I’ve seen in the movies, bad things always happen in the desert.  If it’s not aliens, it’s zombie cowboys.)

Grandpa (Jim Davis), Grandma (Dorothy Malone), Richard (Christopher Mitchum, looking a lot like his father, Robert), Beth (Marcy Lafferty), and their young daughter, Jenny (Natasha Ryan) have moved into a very nice ranch house that appears to be sitting in the middle of nowhere.  The house comes with a barn, a few horses, and …. ALIENS!

At first, Jenny is the only one to notice the strange blue light that keeps glowing behind the barn.  But soon, the rest of the family is seeing UFOs and weird (but kind of cute) creatures are knocking on the front door and saying hi.  Lizard men appear in the distance and beckon for the family to follow them.  Soon, the house itself is being zapped through time and space….

This is going to be a short review but, then again, The Day Time Ended is a short movie.  With a running time of only 75 minutes (not including the end credits), The Day Time Ended feels less like a movie and more like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone.  That said, if it was an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, it would be considered to be one of the more enjoyable episodes of the series.  While none of the characters are particularly complex or deeply written, the cast is believable as a family and everyone does a good enough job that the viewer won’t want to see anything bad happen to any of them.  (I’m also happy to say that all of those horses are really pretty and — fear not! — for once, no harm befalls any of the animals.)  The motives of the aliens are kept ambiguous throughout the film, leaving the viewers as confused and intrigued as the family and the final shot is somehow both silly and tremendously satisfying at the same time.  The Day Time Ended is a B-movie but it’s an entertaining B-movie.

Directed by B-movie specialist, John “Bud” Cardos, this is one of those movies where the cheapness of the special effects add to the film’s charm.  Initially, the UFOs are represented by lights darting through the sky.  (Residents of Texas will immediately think of our beloved and yet unexplained Marfa Lights.)  When the UFOs are finally seen in close-up, they are obviously plastic models but, in this age of excessive CGI, there’s something undeniably charming about the idea of going to the trouble to build plastic models.  The claymation aliens are adorable!  Seriously, there are some films that you just can’t help but kind of love and, for me, The Day Time Ended is one of those films.

Iceman (1984, directed by Fred Schepisi)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Scientists at an arctic base make an amazing discovery when they find the body of a prehistoric man that has been perfectly preserved in the ice.  Dr. Stanley Shepherd (Timothy Hutton) and his fellow scientists suspect that the Iceman (John Lone) might be in a state of suspended animation.  Instead of performing an autopsy when the body thaws it, the scientists attempt to resuscitate him.

And somehow, it works.

The Iceman, who is eventually named Charlie, is stunned to be in the modern world and does not know how to react to the scientists studying him.  Only Dr. Shepherd treats Charlie as a human being instead of a laboratory specimen.  Despite not speaking the same language, Charlie and Shepherd bond.  Shepherd realizes that Charlie misses his family and eventually, he figures out that, when he was frozen, Charlie was attempting to stop the Ice Age by offering himself up as a sacrifice to a bird god.  When Charlie sees a helicopter, he mistakes it for his god and starts tying to escape from the base.  Realizing that Charlie will eventually be killed and experimented upon, Shepherd tries to help him escape.

If, and it’s a big “if,” you can overlook the implausibility of Charlie being in suspended animation for over 40,000 years, Iceman is actually a really good film with intelligent performances from both Timothy Hutton and John Lone.  Lone is especially good as Charlie, capturing his confusion, fear, and eventually his heart.  Even though he’s in a strange place and time, Charlie never stops thinking of his family and trying to get back to them.  The film works because, like Shepherd, it understands Charlie is too good for the modern world.

Game Review: The Twine Fishing Simulator (2022, maxine sophia wolff)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The Twine Fishing Simulator starts out like an old school fishing simulator.  At first, everything about it, from the font to the simple directions, reminded me of the type of clunky but addictive text games that I used to play back in the early 90s.  Back then, we didn’t need a lot of fancy graphics or even much descriptive text.  We just needed our imagination.

You are fishing.  You start at the Lake.  If you catch enough different types of fish, new locations will be opened.  Each new location gets bigger and there are new fish to catch at each place.  There are also various rewards that you can get after you catch certain fish.  There are NPCs who you can talk to.  You can ask them questions about fishing.  Some of them offer hints.  Some offer side quests.  Some ruminate on the nature of existence.

The further you get into the game, the stranger it gets.  This is not a typical fishing simulator.  It’s not just about catching the fish.  It’s about why you’re catching the fish and why you’re moving from one location to another.  It starts out as nostalgic fun and then gets increasingly surreal as the game progresses.  I can’t reveal too much about it without spoiling the game’s puzzles but it’s ultimately one gigantic mindscrew disguised as a fishing simulator, and an entertaining one at that.  Anyone can write a strange game but it takes talent and imagination to write a strange game that, like this one, is worth playing and even replaying.

It was only after I finished the game that I realized that I could have just stayed at the Lake and kept fishing.

Play The Twin Fishing Simulator.

Horror Scenes I Love: Nina Confronts Lily in Black Swan

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This scene is from Black Swan, which I reviewed during my first year with the Shattered Lens.  For many, many reasons, this is a film that means much to me.

Nina confronts Lily …. or does she?  Those of you have seen the film know.

Book Review: The Confession by R.L. Stine

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

What would you do if your friend confessed to committing a murder?

That’s the dilemma that is at the heart of R.L. Stine’s 1996 YA horror novel, The Confession.

No one at Shadyside High likes Al.  He used to be kind of nice but, as of late, he’s been dressing in all black, drinking beer, and picking fights.  Plus, he’s got a really bad habit of blackmailing his friends.  Al is the type who will sell you the answers to a test and then threaten to tell everyone that you were cheating unless you keep him supplied with cash.  (Fortunately, my sister was a year ahead of me so I could just go through her old tests if I needed the answers in advance.)  Al is a real jerk and no one is that upset when he turns up dead and with a rollerblade stuffed in his mouth!

Who killed Al!?  Well, nerdy Sandy tells his friends that he did it.  At first, everyone’s okay with the idea of covering for Sandy because it’s not like Al was a nice guy and Sandy did promise not to kill anyone else.  But then Julie (who also discovered Al’s body) starts to have nightmares about Sandy and she finds it difficult to keep covering for him every time that she speaks to the police.  Julie also notices that Sandy has been acting a little bit differently since confessing to the murder.  Sandy seems to be a little bit more aggressive now, almost as if he might want to try to kill someone again….

AGCK!

Listen, if I was in Julie’s shoes …. well, I don’t know what I’d do.  On the one hand, I have always been against murder and violence in general.  On the other hand, Al was a real jerk and it was kind of obvious that he would have eventually ended up killing someone if someone hadn’t gotten to him first.  I would not want to be the person who sent a friend to death row.  So, in this case, R.L. Stine came up with a plot that actually made me think.  At the same time, he also added a last-minute twist that let almost all of the characters off the hook.  I guess that’s to be expected.  I mean, we’re talking R.L. Stine here, not Dostoevsky,  Still, I was a bit disappointed with the final few pages of the book.  Things worked out …. BUT AT WHAT COST?

Again, there was no cost.  This is R.L. Stine.  All the trauma in the world is worth it as long as you’re dating a cute guy and speaking in quips by the end of the book.  That, after all, is the appeal of Fear Street.