Category Archives: Horrorthon

Snakes On A Vacation: Curse II: The Bite (1989, directed by Frederico Prosperi)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Clark (J. Eddie Peck) and his girlfriend, Lisa (Jill Schoelen), are vacationing in New Mexico.  It’s a romantic getaway, except for all of the snakes.  Clark manages to save Lisa from one snake through the use of his trusty rifle but then he himself gets bitten once they go to a motel.  Luckily, traveling salesman Harry Morton (Jamie Farr!) has a suitcase that’s full of anti-snake venom antidotes.  Unfortunately, the one that Harry gave to Clark doesn’t do much good because not only does the bite on Clark’s arm get worse but it starts to turn into a snake!  In fact, his entire body is full of snakes, just trying to slither out!  It’s a vacation from Hell as Lisa tries to find a cure for Clark, Clark tries to control his serpent-like instincts, and Harry tries to find the young couple so that they don’t sue him.

This is an unrelated sequel to a film called The Curse.  In fact, it’s probable that this film was just called The Bite until the first Curse did slightly better at the box office than anyone expected.  The two films share not a single character or plot point in common.  There’s not really even a curse in this so-called sequel!  Clark’s problems are all due to the snake being radioactive.  (Once again, science is to blame.)  It’s a typically cheesy, low-budget 80s horror film but it does have a few things to recommend it.  The special effects range between being enjoyably cheap and effectively gross.  Jamie Farr is entertaining as Harry Morton and seems to be happy to not be playing Klinger again.  The truckers that Harry enlists to help him search for Lisa and Clark are all colorful characters and they are a little more interesting than the usual horror movie canon fodder.  Bo Svenson also has a good cameo as the sheriff.

Best of all, the film features one the greatest scream queens of the late 80s and early 90s, Jill Schoelen.  Schoelen is best remembered for her role in The Stepfather but she actually appeared in several horror movies between 1987 and 1993.  As she was in almost all of her roles, Jill Schoelen is both sexy and believable in The Bite.  She had a talent for making even the worse dialogue sound natural and that was a talent that The Bite gave her many chances to display.

The Bite is hardly a great film but, by the standards of late 80s cable fare, it’s undeniably entertaining.

 

Silent Hill Memories

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

I was sixteen when Silent Hill first came out for the Playstation.

From the first minute I played it, I was hooked and Silent Hill would go on to become the first video game that I ever seriously got into.  I would study the game.  I would go online, in those early days of the world wide web, to read the theories of other players and visit the occasional Geocities-hosted fan page.  I actually got very upset when innocent nurse Lisa Garland was lost to the town’s curse.  I was also amazed to discover that the game’s storyline and ending could change depending on whether or not I saved Cybil Bennett.  A video game with multiple endings that went beyond just “good” and “bad?”  This was a big deal back in 1999!

Looking back after all these years, there are four main things that I remember about Silent Hill.

First off, and I know I’m not alone,I remembered the opening and especially the music that played during the scenes of Harry Mason driving down that foggy road:

Secondly, I remember the scenes that played after the game’s ending, which featured all of Silent Hill‘s characters blowing their lines, missing their cues, and laughing about it.  Today the animation may look primitive but back in 1999, seeing this at least provided some comfort if you got one of the bad endings, especially the “bad” ending where you defeated the monster but your daughter died (“Thank you, Daddy … goodbye.”) and then you ended up dead in your car.

I remember the nearly legendary fifth ending of the game, in which Harry Mason ended up getting abducted by aliens.  In the days before YouTube, when you had to trust word-of-mouth, there were some people who insisted that this ending was just an urban legend while there were others who couldn’t stop bragging about how they had gotten the alien ending while the rest of us just had to settle for the “saved the world and your daughter” ending.  When I finally managed to get the UFO ending, I was so happy that I felt like I was the one who had been abducted by aliens.

Finally, the main thing I remember about Silent Hill is that I was never very good at it.  I was the player who always ended up getting lost and walking around in a circle.  I can’t remember how many times I played before I managed to not die in the diner.  As soon as I heard the radio static that indicated that I was about to get attacked, I started to run because I know I wasn’t a good enough shot to fight off any of the game’s monsters.  Harry Mason was searching for his daughter and I was probably the worst possible person to lead him in that search because I somehow always managed to get Harry killed.  It didn’t matter how many times I played the game, I never really got good at it.  Even when I finally managed to get the best ending possible, it was only after saving and reloading the game a countless number of times.

I may have never been good at the game but I still enjoyed leading Harry to his death and occasionally to one of the good endings.  Silent Hill is what taught me that there was more to video games than just jumping and shooting and for that, I will be forever thankful.

Horror Scenes I Love: The Poltergeist Face Peeling Scene

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This is from the original, 1982 version Poltergeist.

It’s just a ghost movie about a mother’s love, suburban conformity, and a guy’s face falling into the sink.  For whatever reasons, the ghosts just seemed to take a really intense dislike to this guy.

“The house is clean.”

Not bloody likely.

“You moved the headstone but you left the bodies!?  WHY!?  WHY!?”

Whoops, different scene.

Anyway, let’s watch Marty lose face:

4 Shots From 4 Films: Anaconda, The Devil’s Advocate, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 2

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!

This October, we’re using 4 Shots From 4 Films to look at some of the best years that horror has to offer!

4 Shots From 4 1997 Horror Films

Anaconda (1997, dir by Luis Llosa)

The Devil’s Advocate (1997, dir by Taylor Hackford)

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, dir by Jim Gillepsie)

Scream 2 (1997, dir by Wes Craven)

Horror on the Lens: The Terror (dir by Roger Corman)

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: Life As A Vampire by 8-Bit Heroes (2018, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Wow.  Apparently, life as a vampire is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

This video reminds me of the classic Andrew Parkinson film, I, Zombie.  That film followed a young man who is forced to deal with the fact that he’s slowly turning into a zombie.  Apparently, being a vampire is just as depressing as becoming a zombie.  Maybe it would be best to avoid fraternizing with the living dead all together.

Enjoy!

Horror on TV: One Step Beyond 2.7 “The Open Window” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

If tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond seems familiar, that’s because it’s a remake of a story that was originally filmed as an episode of The Veil. 

This time, instead of witnessing a murder occurring in another apartment, it’s a suicide that is witnessed by artist Anthony March (Michael Higgins).  Of course, when he investigates, he discovers that the apartment in empty.  Is Anthony hallucinating or has he gone one step beyond and is he seeing the future?  Watch to find out!

By the way, that’s future Oscar winner Louise Fletcher playing Anthony’s model.

This originally aired on November 3rd, 1959.

Enjoy!

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: The Children (dir by Tom Shankland)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor Casey (Hannah Tointon)!

As 2008’s The Children opens, all she wants to do is celebrate New Year’s with her friends.  Instead, her mom and her stepfather are dragging her off to some stupid house in the middle of nowhere, where she’ll have to hang out with her aunt and her dorky uncle and she’ll also be expected to look after not only her two much younger cousins but her two half-siblings as well!  Even worse, once they arrive at the house, all of the young children start to complain about feeling sick.  One of them even throws up.  Everyone assumes it’s just car sickness but could it be something worse?

(Of course.  There’s always something worse!)

In fact, perhaps the only positive thing about the holiday is that it’s snowed!  All of the snow sure does look pretty and it’s a lot of fun to play in.  Once the kids get over being sick, they can’t wait to go outside and have some fun!  One of the adults accompanies them.  While he’s sledding, the kids use a garden rake to kill him.  They even disguise it to look like an accident…

Yep, there’s definitely something going on with the children.  At first, Casey is the only one who understands that the children have turned evil.  (Of course, her first clue comes when they attack her in the woods.)  All the adults are either in shock or denial.  At first, they refuse to even consider that their children are trying to kill them.  Of course, once the children lay siege to the house, the adults are in for a rude awakening…

This is actually the second film called The Children that I’ve reviewed for this site.  The first one was a film from the early 80s that featured a school bus driving through a toxic cloud with the end result being a bunch of homicidal, radioactively-charged children.  In the second version, it’s left a bit more ambiguous as to why the children have suddenly turned homicidal.  While it’s established that that they’re suffering from a virus, the film never tells us where the virus came from or even how it was contracted in the first place.  In fact, until the film’s last few minutes, the audience is never quite sure just how far the infection has spread.  That ambiguity is what gives this film its power.  There’s nothing scarier than not being sure what’s going on.

The Children is a grim and disturbing horror film, one the features very little humor and which ends on an ominous note.  It’s a film that exploits something that we all know but rarely want to admit, which is that children can be incredibly creepy.  We tend to idealize children, which is exactly what the children in this movie use to their advantage.

The Children is also a very well-acted horror film.  Hannah Tointon is sympathetic in the lead role while all of the killer children are played with a proper combination of savagery and innocence.  This may very well be the best killer children film ever made.

The Odyssey of Flight 33, Comic Review, by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

tw3

Yes, they have comic versions of The Twilight Zone! I really enjoyed this and I know that some of you are like….hmmm is this horror? Yes… Yes, it is. No further questions!  Besides, we have a Twilight Episode to discuss.  The Twilight Zone always leaned more into horror IMO.  The Outer Limits was all about teaching you a moral lesson, but TTZ was all about the scare factor.

I enjoyed this format too.  Face it, a lot of the TTZ episodes don’t hold up amazingly well.  It’s the truth….Deal With It!  The book has all the components of a good TTZ episode: the setup of perceived normality that takes a terrible left turn.  There aren’t many things more normal or boring than air travel.  The flight is just a typical run to La Guardia and the passengers appear very normal as well: the chatty passenger, the braggy passenger, and the emotionally unstable passenger.

These archetypal passengers pull us into the story much like the Stephen King stories do. Stephen’s characters are your neighbors and these passengers are too.  But, something isn’t right is the friendly skies! They feel hit a pocket of air and their speed goes into the thousands of miles per hour and whammo – they start time traveling! They arrive in 1939 and don’t stop because they want to get back to their own time- So no killing Hitler for these time travelers.  Then, they arrive in the Cretaceous and decide not to land because Jurassic Park is so five minutes ago, but then they arrive in the future.

This one troubled me a bit.  They are low on fuel and the future has cable and they can’t screw up time.  Really, they could just try to make a go of it in their new time.  No one seemed like things were that amazing for them in the present.  I mean, why not just land? You’d at least make a living on the talk show circuit. The comic ends with ambiguity.  They are low on fuel and lost in time.

I would recommend checking these issues out.  They’re a lot of fun and have a good creep factor.

 

Oedipus Mess: Rivals (1972, directed by Krishna Shah)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Christine (Joan Hackett) is a young single mother and widow who lives in New York City.  She has a son, Jamie (Scott Colomby, playing a ten year-old even though he’s obviously a teenager).  Jamie is an aspiring director who make a film of his classmates running around the playground while wearing Richard Nixon masks.  Jamie, who is described as having a genius IQ, is also unhealthily obsessed with his mother, which the film, via flashback, links to her taking a shower in front of him while he was still potty training.

Jamie is not happy when Christine meets Peter (Robert Klein), a loudmouth who gives tours of the city to New York residents only.  If you’re from out-of-town, don’t even try to get in Peter’s microbus.  Peter and Christine start to date and then, eventually, they get married.  Despite the fact that his older babysitter wants to have an affair with him, Jamie remains obsessed with his mother and refuses to accept Peter as his stepfather.  Peter knows that Jamie doesn’t like him and eventually gives up on trying to win him over.  What Peter doesn’t know is that Jamie has come up with an elaborate scheme to murder him.

Rivals is the type of strange and messy film that could only have been made in 1972.  I guess it would be considered to be a mix of a horror movie and a psychological thriller but the tone of Rivals is all over the place so it’s hard to know what the film is trying to say about Jamie or his mother.  Throughout the film, there are sudden montages that seem to have little to do with the plot.  For instance, the film comes to a halt so we can spend several minutes watching as Peter attempts to harangue people into getting in his bus.  Peter is supposed to be likable but he comes across as being so obnoxious that it is easy to see why Jamie would not want him for a stepfather.  As for Jamie, he’s supposed to be ten but looks like he should be starting middle school so his obsession with sex is never as shocking as it should be.  The ludicrous subplot about his babysitter goes nowhere and just seems to disappear.  The one bright spot in the film is Joan Hackett as Christine.  Hackett does the best she can with her inconsistent role and she’s the one person in Rivals who you will actually care about.

Rivals is a mess, perhaps worth seeing only for the location footage of New York in the early 70s.  Otherwise, this is a forgotten film that does not need to be remembered.