Category Archives: Horrorthon

Horror Film Review: The Pit and the Pendulum (dir by Roger Corman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The second of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, 1961’s The Pit and The Pendulum opens in much the same way as The Fall of the House of Usher.  A young Englishman (played by John Kerr) rides a horse across a colorful but desolate landscape.  A castle sits in the distance.

Of course, as opposed to  the 19th Century British setting of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum takes place in 16th Century Spain, at a time when the country was still scarred by the horrors of the Inquisition.  And Francis Barnard is not traveling to the castle to see his fiancée but instead, he’s searching for information about the disappearance of his sister, Elizabeth (played by the one and only, Barbara Steele).  At the castle, Francis meets Elizabeth’s husband, Nicholas (Vincent Price) and Nicholas’s sister, Catherine (Luana Anders).  Nicholas explains that Elizabeth died under mysterious circumstances, while suffering from a rare blood disorder that seemed to quickly sap away her will to live.  Nicholas’s best friend, Dr. Leon (Anthony Carbone), explains that Elizabeth died of fright after she locked herself in one of the iron maidens in the castle’s torture chamber….

Oh yes, the castle has a torture chamber.  Nicholas’s father was a leader of the Inquisition and he used the castle as a place to conduct his business.  Nicholas’s father was a madman who suspected that his wife was cheating on him.  One day, while young Nicholas was exploring the torture chamber, he witnessed his father murder both his wife and his brother.  Nicholas watched as his mother was entombed alive and ever since, he’s been terrified of the idea of premature burial.  In fact, his fear that he may have buried alive Elizabeth while she was still alive is driving him mad.  The sudden arrival of the suspicious Francis doesn’t help matters….

The Pit and the Pendulum opens with splashes of color spreading across the screen, a sign that Corman was once again in a pop art state of mind when he directed this film.  The Pit and The Pendulum takes everything that worked (and didn’t work) about The Fall of the House of Usher and it turns it all up by a notch or two.  The castle is even more gothic.  Vincent Price’s Nicholas is even more mentally fragile than his Roderick Usher, though Nicholas is also a quite a bit more sympathetic.  If Roderick was a control freak who used his family’s curse as an excuse to embrace his own authoritarian tendencies, Nicholas is just a frail man suffering from PTSD.  He’s definitely more of a victim than a victimizer … or, at least, he is at first.  Much like Mark Damon is The Fall of the House of the Usher, John Kerr is a bit of a stiff in the role of Francis but it doesn’t matter.  Vincent Price is the main attraction here and Corman’s direction shows that he understood that.

And then there’s the Pendulum.  It takes a while for the Pendulum and its swinging blade to make an appearance but when it does, it lives up to the hype.  The Pendulum swings and Corman goes all out, zooming into Price’s crazed eyes while the Pendulum comes closer and closer to its latest victim.  The images are tinted red and green and the Pendulum itself seems to swing in a slow motion, the cinematic equivalent of a nightmare come to life.

The Pit and the Pendulum is a wonderful work of gothic pop art.  Featuring Vincent Price at his most wonderfully unhinged, this is a film we should all watch this Halloween.

Pit and the Pendulum (1961, dir by Roger Corman, DP: Floyd Crosby)

 

Horror On the Lens: Creation of the Humanoids (dir by Wesley E. Barry)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Creation of the Humanoids (1962, dir by Wesley Barry)

What makes us human?  What does it mean to have free will?  What is love?  What is freedom?  The questions and more are asked in the low-budget (and rather odd) science fiction epic The Creation of the Humanoids, which you can view below!

Now, I should warn that Creation of the Humanoids is an extremely talky film.  And the plot is occasionally difficult to follow. There’s a lot of ennui to be found in this particular film, both from the humans and those who have been built to serve them  However, I find it impossible not to love this one because it’s just such a strange movie.  I love it for the colorful set design, the contrast between the resentful robots and the paranoid humans, and the fact that the film — despite being made for next to nothing — actually has more ambition than anything ever made by several of the more successful directors working today. And, while it may not really be a horror film in the way that some of our other October films are, it still feels appropriate for the Halloween season. It just has the perfect holiday atmosphere.

First released in 1962, Creation of the Humanoids was reportedly one of Andy Warhol’s favorite films.  Keep an eye out for Plan 9 From Outer Space‘s Dudley Manlove.

Music Video of the Day: The Show Must Go On by Three Dog Night (1975, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Three Dog Night was a band that was prominent in the days before music videos but fortunately, they left us with a wealth of live performances that were captured for television.  I don’t know what show this was filmed for, just that it’s from 1975.  For our purposes, the MVP of this video is the keyboardist who goes out of his way to bring some Halloween flavor to the proceedings.

Originally written and performed by Leo Sayer, this cover of The Show Must Go On was Three Dog Night’s final Top 10 hit in the United States.  The best part of the song, the intro, was severely shortened for the song’s radio edit but it still became a hit.

Enjoy!

Horror On TV: One Step Beyond 1.3 “Emergency Only” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond features Jocelyn Brando (sister of Marlon) as a purported psychic who warns a skeptical man that he will soon be traveling by train, that he will meet a woman with an usual, snake-design ring, and that she will end up chasing him with a knife.

The man laughs her off.  Why, he never travels by train!  Sure, he has a trip coming up but he’s already paid for his plane tickets.  This just proves what the man has always suspected, that psychic’s are all phony!  But then he gets a message that his flight has been cancelled and he’s going to have to travel to his destination by …. TRAIN!

CAN YOU PROVE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN!?

This episode originally aired on February 3rd, 1959.

Horror Film Review: The Hunger (dir. by Tony Scott)

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

Whoa! Hold your horses! This isn’t the only review for The Hunger. Take a look at Lisa’s Review and if you’re so inclined, feel free to double back here.

It seems fitting that we start our descent towards Halloween with Tony Scott’s first feature film, The Hunger. As a fan of Vampires in general, it may not be a great film, but I feel like it does have a place in history where creatures of the night are concerned.

When I think of Whitley Streiber, Wolfen comes to mind and anyone who knows me also knows how much I adore that film. I don’t usually associate him with Vampires, but 1983’s The Hunger is pretty interesting. To me, there’s a nice beauty and mystery to the film as the undead involved could just be regular people asking the same questions about mortality we do, all to some beautiful movie throughout. They are practical vampires. There’s no real explanation as to how John and Miriam move about through the day. Rather than biting, they use small knives to acquire blood. The powers they wield are subtle, putting the story on par with Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark when it comes to avoiding vampire cliches. Additionally, this film also never mentions the word ‘vampire’.

Miriam (Catherine Deneuve, Belle de Jour) and John Baylock (David Bowie, Labyrinth) are vampires living in present day Manhattan. Enjoying their existence as any member of the undead would, they spend their nights mingling among the living and discarding bodies by dawn. What seems like a great unlife takes a turn when John finds himself unable to sleep. This restlessness escalates as he finds he’s losing his hair and gaining more wrinkles. The pair stumble on the Park West Sleep Clinic, and Dr. Sarah Roberts’ (Susan Sarandon, Blue Beetle) studies on sleep and aging. For me, one of the best scenes of the film was a parallel between John’s rapid aging while waiting in the Clinic alongside a lab monkey that is also suffering a similar issue. Sarah doesn’t really get to check in on John (who ages a quick 15 years during the wait), but their meeting does eventually introduce her to Miriam.

Miriam eventually loses John after he falls into a near mummified state. Although he becomes incredibly old, he’s still far from death’s touch. I love her explanation for him: “Humankind die one way, we another. Their end is final. Ours is not. In the earth, in the rotting wood, in the eternal darkness, we will see and hear and feel.” We also learn that this has happened with all of Miriam’s former lovers over the ages. Miriam then turns her sights on Sarah, which blossoms into a mix of a romance at first. Trivia fans will recognize the piano piece Miriam plays for Sarah (Lakme by Delibes), which Scott reused for True Romance. That was a nice touch. Needing a new partner, Miriam’s approaches become more predatory after Miriam’s true nature is revealed.

The cast in The Hunger all do well, but let’s face it, the real draw here was always Bowie (at least for me, anyway). It’s a shame his character doesn’t stay on screen for long, but he makes good use of the scenes he has and he’s there for at least half the movie. The film essentially belongs to Deneuve, who brings some charisma to Miriam’s character. Whether she’s being playfully flirtatious or deadly serious, she seems to be in control. I don’t have anything particular against Susan Sarandon as an actress. She’s quite good in this, but part me kind of imagined Lesley Ann Warren (Clue) doing all this a bit better.

Tony’s directing style is beautiful but slightly disjointed, with flashbacks giving an idea to Miriam’s past. On the one hand, they aren’t enough to be too revealing, but they’re also accompanied with some strange sound zingers that could be a bit off-putting. He moves quickly between scenes, but the general ideas of immortality and her longevity are suggested. Cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt (Outland) would go on to work on the Lethal Weapon films and Schumacher’s Batman films. There are some good uses of shadow and light here.

The music a mix of classical pieces, mixed with what sounds like either wind chimes and synth keyboards. The classical music stands out. The score, not so much. It’s not a terrible thing by any means, but it’s a strange selection of sounds. Other than the music, I was bothered by the film’s ending. What occurs seems like it could have happened at any time, and why it does is never explained in any way. I guess it worked. By the end, though, I felt like I watched something where the first 3 acts were fully thought out and the production team threw a dart at a board full of possible endings.

Overall, The Hunger is a interesting film to watch if you catch it late at night. Every director has to start somewhere, and while it’s a little sketchy in the end, there’s some style and grace to it all.

October Hacks: Behave (dir by Francesco Gabriele)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s been a murder.

A young woman has been murdered and her friends, who are all kind of in mourning but not really, have retreated to a villa near London.  The villa is owned by one of their mothers, who is very Italian.  She is also very protective of her son and hopeful that she can teach him and his friend some proper etiquette lessons.  To accomplish this, she has invited a TikTok etiquette expert to come lecture the group.  (The expert turns out to be an alcoholic.)

Needless to say, the majority of the group is not interested in learning about etiquette.  They want to drink.  They want to party.  Some of them want to have sex.  Lily (Eleanora Bindi) is interested in the villa’s reputation for being haunted and she especially has an eye for Charles (Christian Vit), the enigmatic and taciturn groundskeeper.  Mostly, everyone just wants to have a wild weekend …. including the stranger in the mask who not only killed their friend but who has apparently followed them to the villa!

Released this year, Behave is one of the most mind-numbingly boring films that I’ve ever seen.  For a slasher film that doesn’t even run for longer than 80 minute, it’s an amazingly talky film.  Being talky is not necessarily a bad thing for a horror film, as long as the characters are interesting and the dialogue is witty.  It also helps if the cast is talented enough to hold your interest even when they’re just sitting around and shooting the breeze.  Unfortunately, Behave doesn’t have any of that.  The characters are all so thinly drawn and their conversations are so entirely devoid of wit that listening to them try to communicate is the equivalent of torture.  One gets the feeling that this movie could be used to force people to confess to committing crimes that they didn’t actually commit because it would be preferable to go to prison than to listen to another line of the film’s dialogue.

What’s behind the talkiness that seems to have infected so many recent low-budget horror films?  Personally, I blame the drawn-out television shows and miniseries that dominate the streaming era.  People have become so used to shows that are full of filler and which take forever to actually go anywhere that the pleasure of a well-paced story is in danger of becoming a distant memory.  When even a 79-minute film like this one features scenes of people talking about things that have nothing to do with the overall plot, it’s obvious that there’s a problem.

The killer shows up throughout the film, though mostly mostly just so it can stand outside of a window and look …. well, not really menacing.  We don’t actually see the killer in action until about 65 minutes into the film.  For a slasher film, that’s way too long to wait.  If the filmmakers wanted to make an indie comedy-drama about a bunch of friends spending the weekend at a villa, that’s what they should have done.  If you’re going to make a horror movie, you have an obligation to work in some scares before your movie is nearly over.

Anyway, boring film.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Boogeyman II (dir by Ulli Lommel)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Filmed in 1982 but not released until 1984, Boogeyman II is — as the name implies — the sequel to 1980’s The Boogeyman.

What’s that, you say?  You don’t remember anything about The Boogeyman and you don’t want to take the time to read my review of it?  Well, don’t worry.  It’s not necessary to have seen the original Boogeyman to follow the sequel, largely because the sequel is full of flashbacks to the first film.  Boogeyman II is only 79 minutes long and 30 minutes of that running time is taken up with footage from the first Boogeyman.  Indeed, if you want to see the good parts of Boogeyman without having to deal with any of the filler, I would recommend just watching the first 30 minutes of Boogeyman II.

There is a plot to Boogeyman II, kind of.  Having survived the massacre of her family at the farm, the now-divorced Lacey (played by Suzanna Love, the then-wife of director Ulli Lommel) goes out to California to visit her friends, actress Bonnie (Shannah Hall) and her husband, director Mickey (Lommel).  How is it that Lacey, who was portrayed as being a simple and not particularly worldly farm wife in the first film, happens to be friends with a wealthy actress and director?  It’s never really explained.

Bonnie and Mickey ask Lacey whether or not the people who killed her family were ever caught.  Lacey replies that they can’t be caught because they’re spirits.  Over dinner, Lacey tells Bonnie and Mickey the story of the shattered mirror and the killer whose spirit was trapped in the broken glass.  Bonnie and Mickey listen sympathetically, though they both think that Lacey’s crazy.  (Perhaps they noticed that Lacey’s flashbacks include scenes in which she wasn’t even present.  Or maybe they’re wondering why Lacey would take the time to apparently describe a lengthy, bondage-themed nightmare that she had during the first film.  Or maybe they’re just amazed by the presence of John Carradine in the flashbacks.)  Bonnie and Mickey also think that Lacey’s story would make a great movie!

For some reason, Lacey is still carrying around a piece of the haunted mirror.  This is the mirror that contains the spirit that possessed her during the first film and which killed the majority of her family.  I would throw that piece of the mirror away but I guess Lacey’s more sentimental than I am.  A creepy butler named Joseph (Sholto von Douglas, a rather stiff actor who still had a fascinatingly menacing screen presence) steals the piece of the mirror and soon, Hollywood phonies are dying.

Boogeyman II was directed by the late Ulli Lommel, a German director who got his start as an associate of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s and who eventually came to America, where he hung out with Andy Warhol, directed some documentaries about the American punk scene, and married heiress Suzanna Love.  Love bankrolled Lommel’s early films, including The Boogeyman.  With Lommel, it was always a challenge to figure out how seriously he took any of his films.  In interviews, he would joke about being an exploitation filmmaker while, at the same time, claiming that his films were designed to expose the hypocrisy of American society.  Boogeyman II is full of phony Hollywood types and there’s a scene where Mickey comments that, in America, “exploitation is a genre.”  It’s probably not a coincidence that it’s the servant, Joseph, who uses the mirror to take out the film’s wealthy victims.  The opening credits of Boogeyman II appear to literally be written in magic marker.  Is Lommel mocking expensive Hollywood productions or could Lommel only afford a box of magic markers?  I suppose both could be true.

The best parts of Boogeyman II are the flashback to the first film, which was a genuinely atmospheric horror film with some serious pacing issues.  The rest of Boogeyman II is dull, though you do have to appreciate the sense of ennui that Lommel brings to the proceedings.  Was the ennui intentional?  That’s the mystery of Ulli Lommel.

As for Lommel, he and Love eventually divorced and Lommel ended his career making trashy true crime films that went direct-to-video.  As usual, Lommel claimed that his crime films were meant to be a serious critique of everything that was wrong with America.  Lommel’s true crime films have none of the atmosphere or occasional flashes of wit that distinguished Lommel’s earlier films.  Was Lommel an incompetent director or was he a subversive artist?  Again, both could be true.  Lommel died in 2017, bringing to close an enigmatic career.

The Strange Case Of The End Of Civilization As We Know It (1977, directed by Joseph McGrath)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It should have been so much funnier.

After someone is obviously meant to be Henry Kissinger (played by Ron Moody) is assassinated when he loses his diary and extends the wrong greeting to a welcoming party in the Middle East, someone claiming to be a direct descendant of the infamous Prof. Moriarty sends a letter to the U.S. President (Joss Ackland) taking responsibility and claiming that it’s the first step in a plan to control the world.

Who better to stop the descendant of Moriarty than the descendant of Moriarty’s greatest enemy?  Arthur Sherlock Holmes (John Cleese) operates out of Baker Street with Dr. Watson (Arthur Lowe), who is bionic, and their housekeeper, Miss Hudson (Connie Booth).  Holmes solution to bringing out Moriarty is to host a gathering of the world’s greatest detectives and to dare Moriarty to try to take them out with one fell swoop.  Soon, everyone from Sam Spade to Columbo to McCloud is showing up at Baker Street.

This is a joke-a-minute comedy.  The jokes that work are funny but, unfortunately, there aren’t many of them.  Some bits, like Joss Ackland’s impersonation of Gerald Ford, start off well and then go on for too long.  Other bits, like the famous TV detectives showing up at Baker Street, have potential but fail due to poor execution.  Unfortunately, much of the humor is just not that clever to begin with, which is not something that anyone would expect from a script co-written by John Cleese.  As an actor, John Cleese is funny but underused, playing Sherlock Holmes as being an even denser version of Basil Fawlty.  Arthur Lowe’s comedic befuddlement is consistently amusing but I wish the script has done more with the idea of him being bionic.  Connie Booth is both funny and sexy and the best reason to watch this misfire.

Scenes That I Love: Lou Ferrigno Battles A Bear in Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s scene that I love comes from Luigi Cozzi’s 1983 epic, Hercules!

In this scene, Hercules (Lou Ferrigno, making up for his lack of range with nonstop and likable sincerity) shows us the proper way to deal with a rampaging bear.  There have been a lot of film versions of Hercules, some good and some bad.  But none were quite as cheerfully weird as the Hercules that was given to us by Lou Ferrigno and Luigi Cozzi.