Howard Hansen (Ted Prior) is a best-selling horror writer who is suffering from writer’s block. With his agent, Murray (Frank Sivero), pressuring him to get something written, Howard decides to seek inspiration in Chinatown. When he steps into a curio shop and sees a grotesque, one-eyed blob floating in a jar of formaldehyde, Howard buys it. He hopes that the blob will give him an idea for a great book but instead, it just causes him to have nightmares and violent sex with his wife, Peggy (Sandahl Bergman).
Meanwhile, Murray is in debt with loan shark Scott Lindsey (Henry Silva) and Scott’s number one debt collector, Gus (Chad McQueen). Murray needs money and he needs it quickly. Murray sends his “secretary,” Carol (Shannon Tweed), to live with the Hansens and steal an unpublished romance novel that Howard wrote when he was just starting out as a writer. However, the one-eyed blob possesses Carol and she is soon climbing onto both Howard’s workout equipment and Howard! Soon everyone is under the influence of the one-eyed blob, Carol is forcing Howard and Peggy to make love while she holds the gun on them, and both Gus and Murray are sneaking around the house, trying to find the manuscript.
A movie that was once very popular on late night Cinemax, Possessed By The Night is a sometimes awkward but frequently entertaining horror/thriller hybrid from B-auteur Fred Olen Ray. Along with giving Frank Sivero a rare leading role (Sivero is best known for playing Frankie in Goodfellas and providing the inspiration for the Simpsons character of the same name), Possessed By The Night proves that no movie can be that bad when featuring both Sandahl Bergman and Shannon Tweed. When you watch a Fred Olen Ray/Shannon Tweed collaboration from 1994, you know what you’re getting and Possessed By The Night delivers.
Technically, today’s scene that I love isn’t so much a scene as it’s an entire movie!
Below, you’ll find The Haunted Castle, a 3-minute silent from the great French director, Georges Méliès. This film was made in 1896 and is considered, along with The Execution of Mary Stuart, to be one of the very first horror films!
Needless to say, The Haunted Castle is going to look primitive to modern eyes but so what? There’s a lot of charm to be found in these three minutes. Imagine seeing this in 1896, at a time before everyone was knowledgeable (and a bit cynical) about special effects and film trickery.
After you watch this piece of film history, please be sure to watch Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Just be prepared to cry.
As a part of this October’s horrorthon, I am pleased to announce the return of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation film trailers! This used to be a regular (and fairly popular) feature here on the Shattered Lens. Unfortunately, a few years ago, I discovered that I had shared almost every worthwhile trailer on YouTube and, as such, it became more of a “special occasion” type of feature.
However, enough time has passed that there are now new trailers on YouTube! Yay!
So, let’s get things started with 6 Trailers for The First of October!
(Why six? Because Lisa doesn’t do odd numbers!)
I Drink Your Blood (1971)
Let’s start things off with I Drink Your Blood (1971), a film about what happens when hippies get rabies. None other than Ryan C, the Trashfilm Guru himself, has described I Drink Your Blood as being one of the greatest grindhouse films of all time.
2. Psychomania (1973)
What’s the best way to deal with blood-crazed hippies? How about an English motorcycle gang? This was also the final film of George Sanders.
Not all werewolves ride motorcycles! Some of them terrorize remote locations and are hunted by Peter Cushing, as seen in The Beast Must Die.
5. Shock Waves (1977)
Peter Cushing went from filming The Beast Must Die to appearing in Shock Waves, perhaps the greatest Nazi zombie film ever made. Check out my review here!
6. The Loch Ness Horror (1982)
However, zombie nazis aren’t the only thing that live in the water! Just ask the people of Scotland!
“John will never eat shish kebab again!” announces the poster for the 1981 Canadian slasher film, Happy Birthday To Me.
Happy Birthday To Me is famous for three things. One of those things is the poster above, which was apparently so controversial that it actually led to the film being banned in some countries. That said, it’s a brilliant poster, one that probably belongs in the Film Poster Hall of Fame. If I had been alive and old enough to sneak into the movies in 1981, that poster would have drawn me into the theater.
The other interesting thing about the poster is that no one in the movie is named John. There is a shish kebab scene, of course. But it happens to a guy named Steven, not to anyone named John. Of course, the poster also says that Steven likes to ride a motorcycle but, in the movie, the motorcycle rider is a pervy French-Canadian named Etienne. Maybe the film’s producers feared that American audiences would not be willing to watch a movie featuring a character named Etienne. (They were probably right, by the way. Happy Birthday To Me came out decades before Degrassi: The Next Generation taught America that it has nothing to fear from the Canadians.)
As for what else Happy Birthday To Me is famous for — well, first of all, there’s the actual shish kebab scene itself. As cringe-inducing as it may appear to be on the poster, it’s even more disturbing in the actual film. Interestingly enough, there’s not a lot of blood in the scene. In fact, it’s one of the few scenes in Happy Birthday To Me to not be drenched in blood. However, there is a lot of gagging and gurgling and the sounds are all the more disturbing because they’re taking place off-camera. Making it even more unsettling is that Steven (played by Matt Craven, who has since become a distinguished character actor) is one of the few likable characters in the movie. In a movie full of snobs, pervs, and weirdos, Steven is the guy who is always encouraging people to stop fighting, make love, and gamble.
Finally, Happy Birthday To Me is famous for not making a damn bit of sense.
Actually, to be fair, the movie does make sense up until the final ten minutes or so. Up until that point, it’s simply been a well-made slasher film, albeit an above average example of the genre. There’s a killer on the loose, killing students at Crawford Academy. All of the victims are members of the Top Ten, an exclusive clique of rich and spoiled teens. (Interestingly enough, not every member of the Top Ten is killed. In fact, some of the people who you are sure are due to be killed somehow manage to survive.) One member of the Top Ten, Ginny (Melissa Sue Anderson), should be excited about her upcoming birthday party but instead, she is haunted by flashbacks to a car accident and the brain surgery that she was forced to undergo afterward. (Footage of actual brain surgery was used in the film.) Her father (Lawrence Dane) is clueless. Her therapist (Glenn Ford) insists that Ginny needs to move on with her life. But Ginny can’t escape the feeling that something is not right, especially when all of her friends start to disappear.
As I said, it all makes sense up until the final ten minutes or so of the film. That’s when the film produces a twist that is so out-of-nowhere and nonsensical that you cannot help but admire the film’s audacity. I’m not going to spoil the twist, other than to say that it makes no sense and I absolutely loved it. From what I’ve read, it appears that the twist ending was almost literally made up on the spot and it’s just so weird that it elevates the entire movie.
Of the many slasher films that came out in the early 1980s, Happy Birthday To Me is one of the best. It’s a classic that need not ever be remade. (I doubt any remake could match the audacity of the original’s finale.) Nicely acted, intelligently directed, and batshit insane when it needed to be, Happy Birthday To Me is an October essential!
Though the Archive only includes the game (no manual, no instructions of any kind), I was able to find Escape From Hell‘s front and back cover art at the Let’s Play Archive. Almost everything that needs to be known about this game’s tone and sensibility can be deduced simply by looking at these illustrations:
As for the game itself, it is a role-playing game. You are Richard. Largely as a result of your own stupidity, you and your best friend and your girlfriend have all accidentally be sent to Hell.
(Good work on including the Guns and Roses poster in the background.)
Because this is a MS-DOS game from 1990, Hell looks like this:
In the screen shot above, you are standing above a river of flame and there is a skeleton blocking your way. One thing that I quickly learned is that you should not try to talk to the skeletons. If you do, this will probably happen:
That did not work out. One of the problems with trying to play Escape From Hell on the Internet Archive is that, especially early on in the game, it is very easy to die and, without the original disk, it is impossible to save your game. Death means that you literally have to start over again, from the very beginning.
It is worth restarting, though. Once you figure out how to avoid running into skeletons, you do get a chance to talk to some of the other inhabitants of Hell. Like this one:
You also come across clues and other messages:
Eventually, I even found the entrance to Hell’s waiting room.
Unfortunately, once I got in the waiting room, I went down the wrong hallway and this happened:
Escape from Hell is not an easy game but it is worth sticking with. If you can manage to go long enough without dying, you will eventually meet some condemned people who are willing to help you out. Most of them are real-life tyrants, like Joseph Stalin and Genghis Khan. It turns out that Stalin is a really good shot with a nail gun. Who would have guessed?
I am still playing my way through Escape From Hell but, from what I have seen, I recommend it for anyone who wants to take a retro trip through the underworld, MS-DOS style.
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 is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order! That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!
As you might have just guessed, today’s director is Dario Argento. And these are 4 shots from 4 films!
This is our favorite time of the year here at the Shattered Lens because October is horror month. For the past five years, we have celebrated every October by reviewing and sharing some of our favorite horror movies, shows, books, and music!
A part of the tradition of Horrorthon is that we begin every day in October by sharing a free movie. Now, I should warn you that most of these movies will come from YouTube and you know how YouTube is about yanking down videos. So, if you’re reading this in 2024 and wondering where the promised movie disappeared to … well, you should have watched it in 2017!
Let’s start this October off with Baffled!, an entertaining little made-for-TV movie from 1973. Leonard Nimoy plays a race car driver who suddenly starts to have psychic visions of a woman who lives in what appears to be a gothic manor. The woman is in some sort of danger. Nimoy, of course, would rather just race cars but a parapsychologist (Susan Hampshire) convinces him that he has to figure out what his visions mean.
Now, to be honest, Baffled! is not a particularly scary movie. Some of Nimoy’s visions are spooky but there’s nothing in this movie that’s going to give you nightmares. Though it may not be horrifying, Baffled! is a lot of fun. Apparently, it was meant to be a pilot for a TV series. If it had been picked up, I guess Nimoy and Hampshire would have been helping out a new guest star every week. Nimoy seems to be having a lot of fun playing a psychic race car driver and he and Susan Hampshire have a really sweet and enjoyable chemistry.
I watched Baffled! with the TSL’s own Patrick Smith and the other members of the Late Night Movie Gang. We all really enjoyed it and I hope you will too:
Let’s begin “Halloween Havoc!” season a day early by taking a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun for a pair of kaiju eiga films from Japan’s Toho Studios. Both were directed by GODZILLA’s Godfather Ishiro Honda, have special effects from Eiji Tsuurya, and feature the late Haru Nakajima donning the rubber monster suits. But the similarities end there, for while RODAN is a genuinely scary piece of giant monster terror, MOTHRA is a delightfully bizarre change-of-pace fantasy that began Toho’s turn toward more kid-friendly fare.
RODAN was filmed in 1956, and released in America a year later by DCA (the folks who brought you PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE! ) under the aegis of The King Brothers . There’s more A-Bomb testing in the South Pacific, as Americanized stock footage tells us before the movie proper begins. Miners digging deep into the Earth’s crust are trapped by flooding…
Sorry I have been “Clowning” it up a but with my last few reviews, but you know, Coulrophobia and all!
ok, seriously, my last movie review was about clowns; and now this one.
Let’s get the technicals out of the way:
Studio: High Octane Pictures
Director: Aaron Mirtes
Cast : Tom Seidman, Burt Culver and Brittany Belland
Plot:
Emma, a college student with a crippling fear of clowns, must come face to face with her worst fear when an evil spirit in the body of a clown is summoned terrorizing the town she calls home. One by one Emma and her friends receive a balloon with the exact time and date of when it will appear to kill them written on it. After receiving her balloon, Emma realizes that she has two days left to live, and must fight against the clock to find a way to survive.
Review:
As much as this movie captured all the, shall I say tongue-in-cheek, plot lines. It did manage to scare me quiet a bit!
Now, please don’t read to much into the plot holes when you watch this movie. They are several to fall into. At times I am not sure this is meant to be a serious movie. But I was thoroughly entertained!
Would I recommend this movie?
On my horror scale:
3.25 out of 5. But factor the fun of it, I give it a 4!
Poster:
But, since it is time for IT (trailer via Lisa Marie Bowman) to come out, no wonder I am getting so many clown movies to screen! And nightmares to sleep thru!
Should we watch the trailer for ‘Clowntergeist’ together? Yes we should!
Who wants to hold hands now!
Clowntergeist will be available on VOD on all your platforms September 12, 2017 And on DVD in October, just in time for Halloween!
Howard Hansen (Ted Prior) is a best-selling horror writer who is suffering from writer’s block. With his agent, Murray (Frank Sivero), pressuring him to get something written, Howard decides to seek inspiration in Chinatown. When he steps into a curio shop and sees a grotesque, one-eyed blob floating in a jar of formaldehyde, Howard buys it. He hopes that the blob will give him an idea for a great book but instead, it just causes him to have nightmares and violent sex with his wife, Peggy (Sandahl Bergman).
