Category Archives: Horrorthon

Horror Film Review: Dark Intruder (dir by Harvey Hart)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1965 film, Dark Intruder, takes place in San Francisco in 1890.

Murders are being committed on the foggy streets of the city that was once known as Yerba Buena.  Women are being stalked through allies and attacked by a caped figure who seems to thrive on the darkness.  At each murder, a hideous statuette is left behind.  The statuette seems to depict a winged demon emerging from the back of a man’s head.  With each murder, the demon appears to be growing closer and closer to fully escaping from the man.

The police are baffled and the press is suggesting that London’s infamous Jack the Ripper has come to California.  (Well, where else would he go?  I kid, California, I kid!  I love you, California.  Well, I love some parts of California, at least.)  As the police often due when they have a case with supernatural overtones, they turn to local socialite and bon vivant, Brett Kingsford (Leslie Nielsen).

Brett lives in a mansion, where he wakes up nearly every morning with a hangover.  He enjoys life but he’s also found time to become an expert on the occult.  He even has a giant plant in his library that perks up whenever there’s a paranormal presence nearby.  Brett is engaged to Evelyn Lang (Judi Meredith), who speaks in an annoyingly high voice.  When the police bring the statuettes to Brett, he takes them to a psychic named Chi Zeng for advice.  Chi Zeng (played by Peter Brocco, who you may have guessed was not Chinese) reveals that the statuette represent a Sumerian demon that is inhabiting the body of a human.  The demon has to commit seven murders so that it can freed from its host and then allowed to commit as many terrible acts as it wants.

Who is the demon possessing?  Brett’s friend, Robert Vandenburg (Peter Mark Richman), fears that it could be him.  Brett tries to assure Vandenburg that he has nothing to worry about but as Brett continues his investigation, he comes to realize that Vandenburg actually may have a lot to worry about….

Dark Intruder is a short film, clocking in at a little under an hour.  It was originally developed as a pilot for a television series that would have featured Leslie Nielsen solving occult crimes on a weekly basis.  Unfortunately, the series wasn’t picked up (it sounds like it would have been fun!) and Dark Intruder was given a theatrical release as part of a double feature with William Castle’s I Saw What You Did.  It’s an effective little film, full of gothic atmosphere, misty streets, and a frightening (and clawed) villain.  The murder that opens the scene seems as if it would have been quite graphic by the standards of 1966 television.  Perhaps that’s why the pilot didn’t lead to a series.

Of course, for a lot of people, the main appeal here is Leslie Nielsen, playing one of his “serious” roles.  Usually, it’s difficult to watch Nielsen’s dramatic work because it’s impossible not to be amused at his signature deadpan line delivery.  But he’s actually very good in Dark Intruder.  It helps that Brett Kingsford was written as being someone who had a sense of humor, as opposed to the stiff characters that Nielsen usually played in his dramatic roles.  Nielsen appears to be having fun in the role, which is not something you can say about most of Nielsen’s dramatic work.  Again, it’s a shame that Dark Intruder was apparently too ahead of its time for 1965.

Horror on the Lens: The Last Man on Earth (dir. by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi there and Happy October 8th!  For today’s treat from the ranks of horror films that have fallen into the public domain, I present to you one of the most important films in horror history.  Though it wasn’t appreciated when it was first released back in 1964, The Last Man On Earth was not only the 1st Italian horror film but George Romero has also acknowledged it as an influence on his own Night of the Living Dead.

It’s easy to be a little bit dismissive of The Last Man On Earth.  After all, the low-budget is obvious in every scene, the dubbing is off even by the standards of Italian horror, and just the name “Vincent Price” in the credits leads one to suspect that this will be another campy, B-movie.  Perhaps that’s why I’m always surprised to rediscover that, taking all things into consideration, this is actually a pretty effective film.  Price does have a few over-the-top moments but, for the most part, he gives one of his better performances here and the black-and-white images have an isolated, desolate starkness to them that go a long way towards making this film’s apocalypse a convincing one.  The mass cremation scene always leaves me feeling rather uneasy.

The film is based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and no, it’s nowhere as good as the book.  However, it’s still a worthy adaptation and one that stays true to the tone of the text, including the fact that Price’s main tormenter was also once his neighbor and best friend.  This is one of those films that just hits differently in the wake of 2020’s COVID hysteria.

If you have 87 minutes to kill, please enjoy The Last Man On The Earth.

Music Video of the Day: Poison by Slaughterhouse (2023, directed by Meriel O’Connel and Anna Tse)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Because I’m getting old and I still don’t want to admit that the music I grew up with is now considered to be “classic” rock, this South Bay band is new to me but I like their sound and I like this video, which feels like a throwback to the days before music got boring and corporate.

I found an interview in which the lead singer (and director of the video) Meriel O’Connel had this to say about Poison:

The song is about society being subjected to constant overwhelming stimulus on our phones, devices, etc that creates this culture of comparison, disposability, and lack of fulfillment in our daily lives. There’s another component where these companies and corporations who push apps, social media, etc aren’t making these things just for fun, it’s all for profit. To keep us searching for more rather than being satisfied by ourselves and our immediate surroundings, and ultimately them knowing & tracking everything about us algorithmically.

It’s this lack of escapism that makes it more difficult for us to turn inwards & go into our own internal lives and spaces, and makes us place value on what we’re putting out externally rather than consider how we can be internally fulfilled, fill up our own cups.

That’s not bad!

Enjoy!

Horror On TV: One Step Beyond 1. 16 “The Burning Girl” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 16th episode of One Step Beyond was called The Burning Girl and it dealt with a teenage girl (Luana Anders, who would later star in Dementia 13 and appear as a hippie in Easy Rider) who, whenever she got upset, could apparently cause fires to spontaneously erupt.  It was written by Catherine Turney and directed by host John Newland himself.

It was originally broadcast on May 5th, 1959 — presumably long before Stephen King even had the idea to write about a girl named Carrie.

Can you prove this didn’t happen!?

October Hacks: Party Night (dir by Troy Escamilla)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s prom night!

Except these students aren’t going to prom.  Instead, they’re going to have a party all their own.  They’re heading out to a house with quite a history, the perfect place to have a night that they’ll never forget.  And a night that they’ll be lucky to …. SURVIVE!

There.  Was that cheesy enough?

If my introduction was a bit over-the-top, it fits the general mood of 2017’s Party Night.  Party Night is a deliberate throwback to the slasher films of the 80s and the early 90s, before the genre started to take itself a bit too seriously.  (The worse thing that ever happened to the slasher genre is that a few of the films started to get positive reviews from critics who praised them for being subversive.  The end result of all that was David Gordon Green changing Michael Myers from a nightmarish boogeyman to just another buffoon living in a sewer.)  As such, Party Night is a film where a bunch of attractive young people go to a place that common sense say they shouldn’t go to.  And then they proceed to the dumbest things possible, like wander off by themselves.  The joy of the film comes from yelling at the screen, “Don’t do that, you idiot!” and then discovering that you were right to warn them not to do what they did.

I’ve made this point before but it is worth repeating.  The common complaint with most old school slasher films is that they feature characters who do stupid things.  That’s a valid comment but, to be honest, most people are pretty stupid.  And when you’re a teenager and it’s prom night and you’re hanging out with your best friends, you’re going to be even more stupid than usual.  In my case, when I sit there and roll my eyes at the girl in a slasher movie who wanders around outside in her underwear in the middle of the night, it’s because I’m trying to forget about all the times that I’ve walked up and down the alley in my sleepshirt, socks, and bathrobe while looking for the cat at two in the morning.  The fact of the matter is that we all do stupid things.  Some people do stupid things because they’re stupid.  Some people do stupid things because it’s just easier and takes less effort.  (In my case, it was more convenient to just throw on a bathrobe before I went out to look for the cat as opposed to actually taking the time to put on …. well, clothes.)  We recognize our stupidity in the characters who populate the slasher films of the 70s and 80s.  And the reason why so many people instinctively make fun of those films is because they know they would not survive an old school slasher film.  Myself, I’d probably be dead within the first fifteen minutes.

As for Party Night, it’s a low-budget film with a simple plot and an enthusiastic cast and an obvious love for the genre.  Fans of old school slasher films will appreciate the way the story pays homage to the films of the past.  It’s a film that understands that, at a certain age, everyone’s too stupid to survive a horror movie.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The New Kids (dir by Sean Cunningham)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh my God, this movie is awesome!

Within the first five minutes, the film features not only a training montage but also a scene where a family cheering good news immediately gets a phone call delivering bad news.  (“SHUT UP!” our hero yells at his friends and family.)  By the time the film hits the five minute mark, it has managed to denounce communism, terrorism, laziness, and drunk driving!  And that’s even before James Spader shows up as a cocaine-sniffing teenage crime lord!

First released in 1986 and directed by the same guy who did the first Friday the 13th, The New Kids tells the story of Loren (Shannon Presby) and his sister, Abby (Lori Loughlin).  Their father (Tom Atkins) was a badass army colonel who fought communists, received commendations from the President (and that President was Ronald Reagan so you know those commendations were for doing something cool and not just for posting memes on twitter), and who taught his children self-defense.  Every morning, he exercised with them and drilled into their heads the importance of being disciplined and willing to stand up for themselves.  Sadly, their father and mother were both killed in a car accident after meeting with President Reagan at the White House.

Though they’ve been taught how to survive in the world by an expert, Loren and Abby are both teenagers and the law says that they need adult supervision.  They move down to Florida and stay with their Uncle Charlie (Eddie Jones),  Charlie owns a run-down amusement park that he’s decided to call Santa Land.  He figures that tourists who are driving to “Walt Disney World and Epcot” will want to stop off at Santa Land.  Personally, I think the tourists will probably want to keep driving to where they actually want to go but who knows?  Uncle Charlie does have a petting zoo and there is something oddly charming about the idea of Santa hanging out in the bayous of Florida.  I mean, there’s a reason why Santa Claus And The Ice Cream Bunny is beloved by viewers all over the world.

At the high school, everyone notices Loren and Abby.  Abby gets  a dorky boyfriend named Mark (Eric Stoltz …. no, really!) and Loren starts dating the sheriff’s daughter, Karen (Paige Lynn Price).  Unfortunately, the new kids have been noticed by Eddie Dutra (James Spader) and his gang of inbred rednecks.  Dutra and his gang deal drugs and have a pit bull who they’re hoping to enter into dog fights.  (“Went straight for the jugular,” one gang member says at one point.)  Dutra decides that he likes Abby, which leads to Loren getting protective, which leads to Dutra and the boys waging their own war on Abby and Loren and everything eventually comes to a deeply satisfying Straw Dogs-style conclusion at Santa Land.

The New Kids is one of those films that succeeds by being thoroughly absurd and over-the-top.  Dutra and his gang aren’t just evil.  Instead, they’re downright Satanic in their determination to destroy the new kids.  The gang is fearsome enough, especially Gordo (Theron Montgomery), who is the fat future forklift operator from Hell.  But what really makes this gang memorable is the fact that their leader is James Spader, with bright blonde hair, a smooth Southern accent, and moves that are so assured that he sometimes seem to be dancing across the screen.  Dutra’s evil and the cocaine that he snorts leads to him making some bad decisions but he’s got style.  As for the New Kids, Shannon Presby is a bit bland as Loren but that blandness actually provides a nice contrast to Spader’s more flamboyant performance.  Lori Loughlin is likable and kicks Gordo in the balls, which is pretty cool.  (Gordo more than deserved it.)

Cheerfully sleazy and unapologetically ridiculous, The New Kids is 80s exploitation cinema at its best.

Party Line (1988, directed by William Webb)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“Hot singles are waiting to speak to you!”

Remember those party line commercials that used to air late at night in the 90s?  For just a few dollars a minute, you could call and talk to someone claiming to be a hot woman in your area of town.  (The commercials always featured women because everyone understood that only men would be dumb enough to call the number.)  Even when I was a teenager, I knew that there was no way that a young, hot woman was sitting at home alone and waiting for a stranger to call her.  But obviously, some people thought they were true because those party lines commercials aired for a long time and really only went away once everything moved online.

In Party Line, Greta Blackburn and Leif Garrett plays homicidal siblings who have money to burn so they spend all of their time on the party line, enticing men to sneak away from their wives and come to their mansion so that they can be murdered.  Detectives Richard Hatch and Shawn Weatherly are assigned to find out why so many married men are turning up dead.  The chief of police is played by Richard Roundtree, who is so smooth that his main purpose in the movie is to remind us that not everyone has to use a party line to pick up women.  It’s a standard 80s thriller that has some moments of unexpected humor, largely due to the contrast between the beautiful and rich killers and the people that they target.  Richard Hatch is wooden in the role of the detective but Shawn Weatherly is attractive and likable as his partner,  Greta Blackburn makes for an excellent femme fatale while Leif Garrett is twitchy but convincing as a killer who likes to wear a bridal gown.

Party Line was made when the idea of adult phone lines was still a new one.  Apparently, when those lines first started to advertise, the part about it costing money wasn’t actually mentioned and could only be discovered by reading the small print at the bottom of a television screen.  Since the small print was not only very small but also usually accompanied by a picture of a blonde in lingerie, no one ever bothered to read it.  I was not one of them but I do know more than a few 90s kids who came home from school to discover a parent waiting to talk to them about the phone bill.  The world was a different place back then.  Today, everyone should know that most hot singles have something better to do than to talk to you and if they don’t, they’re probably killers like people in Party Line.  It’s not worth a dollar for each additional minute.

 

Horror Scene That I Love: The Wishmaster grants a wish in Wishmaster 2

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I can’t let this Horrorthon pass without sharing a scene featuring one of my favorite horror movie characters, the Whishmater (Andrew Divoff)!

In the scene, from 1999’s Wishmaster 2, our favorite literal-minded Djinn grants another wish to someone who did not choose his words carefully.  Andrew Divoff really makes this scene work.  That smile is a thing of terrifying wonders.

Book Review: The Mall by Steve Kahn

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Just from the cover, you would think that The Mall, which was first published in 1983, was a horror novel about a bunch of shoppers getting trapped by a collection of angry spirits whose slumber was disturbed by the titular building being constructed on an ancient burial ground.

Or you might think that The Mall was a sci-fi story in the style of Jim Wynorski’s Chopping Mall, in which The Mall of the Future turned on shoppers and refused to let them escape while a bunch of robots struck a blow for machine rights everywhere.

That’s certainly what I thought when I came across this book and spent a few minutes starting at the cover at Half-Price Books a few months ago.  The cover seemed to show a man melting as he tried to open the doors of the mall!  I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t be intrigued by such a horrific image?  (If I did die at a mall, I would hope that I would at least die in an expensive store so people would be impressed when they heard.)  I bought the book because of the cover and the cover is why I waited until horrorthon to read it.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the cover is the best thing about the book.  It’s not really a horror novel, either.  Sure, it’s listed as being a part of the horror genre on every online listing that I’ve found for it but the book itself is more of a Die Hard rip-off.  (Yes, the book was published before Die Hard even went into production but that’s the power of Die Hard!  It was being ripped off before it even existed.)  The plot is that The Mall is a state-of-the-art playground for the upper and middle-classes.  It was built by Mel Goodman, an industrialist who built himself up from nothing.  On the same day that Mel is having his birthday party in the mall’s offices, his former employee, Jeffrey Prince, leads a group of criminals in an armed but surprisingly dull takeover of the mall.  Prince threatens to kill everyone unless his financial demands are met.  Unfortunately, no one can escape or enter the mall because the doors, I kid you not, have been superglued shut!

The frustrating thing about The Mall is that we are told that there are 40,000 people in the mall.  And yet none of them really try to do anything to thwart Prince’s plans.  Instead, they just wait patiently and some even continue to shop.  That might seem like a satirical commentary on American consumerism but this isn’t half as clever (or emotionally resonant) as Dawn of the Dead.   If anything, it’s the literary equivalent of one of those disaster films where a bunch of different people find themselves trapped in one location and they deal with their personal issues while waiting for the crisis to end.  I’m a little bit surprised this was never turned into a made-for-TV movie.

In the end, it’s not a very good book but the cover continues to haunt me.  Seriously, let that man out of the mall before he dissolves!