4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More 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!
4 Shots From 4 Horror Films
The Exorcist (1973, dir by William Friedkin)
Torso (1973, directed by Sergio Martino)
The Iron Rose (1973, dir by Jean Rollin)
The Crazies (1973, dir by George Romero)
by Rudolph Zirm
Look who hanging around! This cover is from 1937.
Everybody happy as the dead come home! You’ll never get that chorus out of your head after listening to Nemesis.
Director Tony can den Ende has also done music videos for The Proclaimers, Meat Loaf, Melissa Etheridge, Joe Cocker, Thomas Dolby, Manic Street Preachers, and Guns N’ Roses.
Enjoy!
“Well hello, Mister Fancypants. Well, I’ve got news for you, pal: you ain’t leadin’ but two things right now: Jack and shit… and Jack just left town.” — Ash Williams
Few cult movies embrace their own insanity as joyfully as Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness. Directed by Raimi and released in 1992, the third chapter in the Evil Dead series takes Ash Williams out of the isolated-cabin horror setting of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II and drops him into a sword-and-sorcery adventure full of skeleton armies, haunted forests, miniature doppelgängers, exploding Deadites, and more quotable one-liners than most action comedies manage in an entire franchise. It is still technically a horror movie, but calling it just a horror movie misses the point. This is a slapstick fantasy-action comedy with monsters, and its ridiculousness is exactly why it has endured as a cult favorite.
The story picks up almost immediately after the end of Evil Dead II, with Ash getting sucked through a portal and landing in medieval England. Rather than being welcomed as some prophesied savior, he is immediately treated like a suspicious outsider and thrown into a pit with a Deadite. That opening alone tells you what kind of movie this will be. Ash is no longer simply a terrified everyman trying to survive an impossible nightmare. He is now a chainsaw-handed loudmouth who shoots first, insults everyone around him, and somehow carries himself like the greatest warrior in history despite constantly making situations worse through his own arrogance.
Bruce Campbell is the entire engine of Army of Darkness. Ash has become a full-blown cartoon hero by this point, halfway between a B-movie John Wayne, a professional wrestler cutting a promo, and a smug department-store employee who has somehow convinced himself he is a legendary warrior. Campbell plays the role with total commitment, which is the key to why the comedy works. He never acts embarrassed by the dialogue or tries to make Ash seem cooler than he is. The character is funny because he is deeply incompetent beneath all the bravado. Ash talks like a conquering hero, but his victories usually involve panic, luck, explosives, and a lot of property damage.
The familiar “Groovy” attitude from Evil Dead II gets pushed even further here. Ash is not meant to be a noble fantasy protagonist. He is selfish, crude, lazy, and usually more interested in returning to modern life than helping the people trapped in a medieval war. That makes him a funny fit for the genre. In a normal fantasy film, the chosen hero would humbly accept his destiny, train with a sword, and unite the kingdoms. Ash complains about the inconvenience, makes demands, insults the locals, and uses his knowledge of basic mechanics to become a magical figure in their eyes. His improvised metal hand, shotgun, chainsaw, and homemade weapons make him look like a mad scientist dropped into an old Ray Harryhausen movie.
Raimi’s direction is as energetic as ever, even if Army of Darkness is noticeably cleaner and more studio-sized than the first two films. The early Evil Dead movies had a grimy, do-it-yourself quality that made their horror feel unusually mean and immediate. This one has a broader, more polished adventure-movie look. There are castles, battlefields, elaborate costumes, large-scale miniature work, and a full army of stop-motion skeletons. It is still cheap-looking in places, but that is part of its charm. The effects do not need to be seamless because the movie’s entire personality is built around heightened artifice. When skeletons leap around in exaggerated stop-motion or a tiny Ash attacks the full-sized Ash in a windmill, the film feels like a live-action cartoon with blood, dirt, and medieval armor.
The windmill sequence is probably the purest expression of what makes the movie special. Ash enters a windmill to escape danger and ends up trapped with miniature versions of himself, eventually swallowing one by accident. It has almost nothing to do with the larger plot in any serious sense, yet it is hilarious because Raimi keeps escalating the gag. Instead of treating the tiny Ash as a brief visual joke, the movie turns him into a recurring problem that literally grows into Evil Ash, Ash’s undead double and the leader of the titular army. That progression makes perfect cartoon logic: a small annoyance becomes a full-scale apocalypse because Ash was too careless to deal with it properly.
The horror elements are lighter than they were in the first two films, and that will probably be the biggest dividing line for viewers. Anyone expecting the nasty isolation, body horror, and relentless dread of The Evil Dead may be surprised by how openly silly this installment is. The Deadites are still grotesque enough to keep the supernatural threat alive, especially in the opening pit fight and the later siege, but they are no longer as frightening as they are funny. Raimi is much more interested in visual gags, wild camera movement, and action-movie momentum than scares.
That tonal change does not make Army of Darkness a lesser movie; it just makes it a very different one. In fact, it may be the most accessible entry in the original trilogy for people who do not normally enjoy horror. You can watch it without being especially invested in the mythology, because the plot is basically a delivery system for set pieces. Ash needs the Necronomicon to get home. He says the magic words wrong. Evil Ash rises. A skeleton army attacks. Ash helps defend the castle. The movie keeps moving, rarely pauses to explain itself, and never tries to make its fantasy world feel more serious than necessary.
The final battle is a great example of Raimi getting the maximum entertainment out of a relatively limited toolbox. Ash turns medieval villagers into a makeshift modern army, complete with explosives, contraptions, and a vehicle that feels hilariously out of place in the period setting. The action is messy, noisy, and deliberately overblown, with exploding skeletons and clashing armies staged more like a rowdy theme-park spectacle than a conventional epic. Raimi understands that the point is not realism. The point is seeing Ash yell at an undead army while wielding a chainsaw and acting like he personally invented warfare.
The movie’s dialogue is another major reason it remains so beloved. “This is my boomstick” has become the obvious classic, but Army of Darkness is packed with lines that sound like they were designed to be repeated by friends after midnight screenings. Campbell’s delivery turns even the dumbest insult into something memorable. The movie knows Ash is absurd, but it also understands that he needs to be just cool enough for the audience to enjoy watching him survive. He is a lovable jerk because he is never actually in control for long. The universe keeps humiliating him, and Campbell makes every humiliation feel like another opportunity for a louder comeback.
Army of Darkness is not the scariest Evil Dead movie, the most atmospheric, or even necessarily the best constructed. It is uneven, shamelessly goofy, and occasionally held together by pure momentum. But it has a distinct personality that most franchise sequels would kill for. Raimi and Campbell take a low-budget horror premise and stretch it into a medieval monster comedy without losing the series’ manic spirit. It feels handmade even when it is big, silly even when it is violent, and weirdly triumphant despite Ash being one of the least heroic heroes in fantasy cinema. For fans of practical effects, stop-motion creatures, quotable cult movies, and Sam Raimi operating with absolutely no interest in restraint, Army of Darkness remains a blast.
Over the past decade, Cancel Culture was has gone though an interesting evolution. Whether or not its exists often seems to depend on who you ask or whether or not they feel that they’re the ones getting canceled.
Before 2016, it was agreed that Cancel Culture was real but it was viewed as largely being an internet meme. On Twitter, people would announce that “so-and-so is canceled” because that person had failed to mouth the right political platitudes or they were friends with someone else who had been canceled. Cancel Culture was around but few took it seriously because the main advocates were anonymous social media users who spent way too much time obsessing on Glee.
During the 2016 election and the year 2017, the Right claimed that the Left was trying to cancel anyone who voted Republican. This led to the Left declaring that Cancel Culture was a myth and that the Right was just being whiny.
In 2018, when Al Franken resigned from the Senate, the Left briefly decided that Cancel Culture was real and it was a bad thing if it led to someone that they liked getting in trouble. Once the Right started calling them out on this, the Left went back to saying that Cancel Culture was a myth but it was still bad in that it caused Al Franken to have resigned. And that’s why Kirsten Gillibrand will never be President.
In 2020, the Left decided that Cancel Culture was fine as long as the only people being canceled were people who didn’t wear masks or who had doubts about the lockdowns. However, at the same time, it was also decided that anyone who lost a job opportunity due to Cancel Culture would have lost that opportunity anyway because of …. reasons. It doesn’t matter if, like Gina Carano, you were one of the most popular actors on a show that was, for the moment, capturing the pop culture zeitgeist. The message seemed to be, “Yes, we’re cancelling people but it’s not anybody truly important so what do you care?”
Then, from 2022 to roughly 2026, the mainstream once again decided that Cancel Culture didn’t actually exist, except for when people like Eric Swalwell and Graham Platner were the ones getting canceled and that it was hypocritical of those who were previously canceled for tweeting a joke to take any joy over people being canceled for sexual assault.
In other words, Cancel Culture doesn’t exist except for when it does and hey, why do you care? Are you looking to get canceled?
As you can probably guess from the title, 2024’s Cancel Me Not is a film about Cancel Culture. Actor Chase Murray (Eddie McClintock) is accused of sexual harassment and assault by an actor who just wants to further their career. Chase is acquitted by a jury of his peers but after spending a year being relentless attacked online, he’s not ready to return to the spotlight. He travels to Florida, where he finds himself staying next door to Heather Campbell (Jana Lee Hamilton), who has just left her husband. Heather’s daughter, Emma (Arabella Weaver), is attending a college where the dean refers to the students as being his “children.” When Emma is harassed for being a Christian, it looks like it’s time for Chase to go to the school and give a speech at an assembly.
Cancel Me Not is another low-budget, faith-based film from Jason Campbell. On a technical level, the sound recording is often muddy and, despite only running for a little over an hour, it still feels a bit overlong. On the plus side, while it’s not a film that’s likely to change anyone’s mind about Cancel Culture, it is a film that is specifically designed to annoy those who claim that it doesn’t exist. It’s a “let’s tick off the other side” film and, when it works, it’s in a “Oh, I can’t wait to trick my Bernie-loving, DSA cousin into sitting through this” sort of way. There’s nothing subtle about it but it’s entertaining as long as you already agree with the film’s conclusions.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.
This week, the fourth season comes to a close.
Episode 4.22 “The Right Thing”
(Dir by John B. Moranville, originally aired on April 25th, 1999)
Businessman John Patrone (Fred Saldone) has negotiated a peace treaty between two gangs, one black and one Latino. Finally, there will be peace in Santa Monica! However, at a rally to celebrate the treaty, a sniper shoots Patrone dead. At first, I was amazed that the police didn’t have anyone on those rooftops to prevent something like this from happening. Then I realized that security for the rally was being provided solely by Pacific Blue. Of course, the bicycle cops would screw this up.
Despite the fact that John Patrone was a major figure in Santa Monica, we never see any Homicide detectives working the case. Instead, it somehow falls to the bicycle cops to investigate. What they discover is that, despite his altruistic image, Patrone was actually a monster who sold weapons and drugs to the gangs and who raped and impregnated the daughter of Bruce Best (Kevin McClatchey). Bruce’s daughter killed herself and that’s why Bruce assassinated Patrone.
Bruce doesn’t make any effort to disguise the fact that he killed Patrone. He admits it to Bobby, Granger, Jamie, and Monica. However, the four rookie cops are convinced that Patrone deserved to die and that Bruce did “the right thing” by shooting him. In a move that is totally out-of-character for him, Bobby decides to throw all of the evidence implicating Bruce into harbor. Unfortunately, Bobby is being watched by Susan Jessup (Holly Gagnier) of Internal Affairs. Susan goes to TC and offers to let Bobby off the hook in exchange for sex. (As ludicrous a character as Susan may be, Holly Gagnier’s wonderfully unhinged performance was the highlight of the episode.) TC replies that he will arrest Bobby and Bruce personally. This episode ends with a cliffhanger as all four of our rookies pose for their mugshots.
Meanwhile, Chris and Cory deal with a teenager who wants to shoot himself out of a cannon. It’s a bit odd that the bike patrol’s two most experienced cops aren’t working the Patrone murder but whatever. I’ve given up on trying to follow Pacific Blue logic.
We’ll find out the fates of Bobby, Jamie, Granger, and Monica next week, when we start the final season of Pacific Blue. I really can’t wait for all this to be over with!
Tonight’s episode of Fear Itself is a macabre zombie story that takes place on New Year’s Day and which features a twist ending! Watch this one with the lights off.
The episode originally aired on July 17th, 2008. Director Darren Lynn Bousman is best-known for his Saw films. Personally, I’m a fan of his 2010 thriller, Mother’s Day.
There are certain films that have scenes that make you laugh even though you really shouldn’t. When I finally got around to watching 2017’s The Bye Bye Man earlier this year, there was one scene that almost caused me to fall off my couch from excessive giggling.
It really shouldn’t have made me laugh, but I couldn’t help it. It’s hard for me to explain what was so funny about it, but I’ll try. One of the film’s characters is standing in the middle of some train tracks. A train is rapidly approaching. Yikes! Nothing funny about that. The character does not move. She fully intends to get struck by the train. We get a close-up of the character on the tracks, and then we get a close-up of the train’s engineer suddenly realizing that she’s standing in front of his train.
“NO!” he says.
It’s the “No!” that gets me. He doesn’t yell, “Get out of the way!” He doesn’t yell, “STOP THE TRAIN!” In fact, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t even try to stop the train, and seeing as how he’s the engineer, one would think that would be something he would know how to do. Instead, he sees her and he goes, “NO!” When he says it, he uses the same tone of voice that I use when I’m telling a cat not to sharpen its claws on the furniture. He’s not saying, “No, this can’t be happening!” He’s not saying, “Oh God, NO!” Instead, he’s saying, “No, don’t you stand on those tracks!” It’s such a fake and awkward moment that I couldn’t help but laugh. Later, I couldn’t help but wonder why no one was willing to say, “Well, let’s just leave that NO! on the cutting room floor. It’s not like it really adds anything to the film.”
That’s the type of film that The Bye Bye Man is. It’s inept in almost every way, from the acting to the script to the editing to …. well, everything. It’s a film that was obviously meant to launch a franchise. The Bye Bye Man was meant to be the type of evil presence who would haunt the nightmares of a generation of filmgoers. If you don’t want The Bye Bye Man to come after you, all you have to do is not say or think his name. But as soon as you see that name, that’s all you can think about. He’s kind of like Candyman, just without any sort of subtext. One has to wonder how he ended up with a name like Bye Bye Man. Maybe it’s explained in the film and I was too busy laughing at that awkward “NO!” to notice. It’s entirely possible.
I may have also been busy wondering what Faye Dunaway was doing in this film. She only has a small role. It’s really more of a glorified cameo than anything else. She plays the widow of a reporter who, years earlier, discovered the existence of The Bye Bye Man. This film came out a month or so before Dunaway and Warren Beatty accidentally gave the Best Picture Oscar to the wrong film at the 89th Annual Academy Awards. I’d like to think that was her getting revenge on Hollywood for not giving her better roles.
The Bye Bye Man did not lead to a franchise, which is a shame. I would pay money to see the future adventures of that engineer.
First released in 1998, Vampire Time Travelers is not an easy film to describe.
The film opens with a title crawl that informs us that, years ago, a vampire stalked the members of a sorority but fortunately, the vampire was defeated. In fact, vampire Lorelei (Jillien Weisz) was forced into a coffin. A cross was put on the coffin, trapping her there. This was all apparently engineered by her sister, Natalia, who is never fully seen but who is often heard. In the five years between Lorelei getting put in the coffin and the rest of the film, Natalia is killed by a sorority girl named …. wait for it …. Buffy. Now, Buffy’s younger sister, Susan Ann Marie (J.J. Rodgers), is pledging to the same sorority and Natalia’s spirt wants revenge. A man in a hood whispers to two kids that there’s copies of “Pet House” stashed in the coffin. (Both boys look directly at the camera as a guitar riff plays on the soundtrack.) The boy remove the cross and Lorelei is set free.
Sam — as Susan Ann Marie prefers to be called — is attending a sorority initiation at a professor’s house. Also at the initiation is bitchy Vaughn (Lynne Baker), former tennis star Heidi (Ali Elk), surprisingly tall Jenna (Micky Roth), and aspiring rock star Zoe (Kat Facchino). Natalia attempts to bite Sam’s neck while she’s sleeping but it turns out that she’s not strong enough. She has to drink the blood of the other sorority sisters first. But since she can’t find the strength to pierce anyone neck, she has to bite a different location. “Bite her in the butt!” a bearded man says. “Ewww, gross!” Lorelei says. I agree!
Lorelei is not the only monster lurking in this film. There’s also the Man Who Lives In The Closet (JC Grigg), who represents the childhood fear of something hiding in the …. well, the closet. And then there’s The Man Who Won’t Call Back (played by the film’s director, Les Sekely), who haunts Zoe’s nightmares. While Lorelei is forced to undergo remedial vampire training, Zoe bonds with The Man Who Lives In The Closet and Heidi seeks revenge against those who she blames for ending her tennis career.
Got all that?
There’s a lot going on in this 69-minute film and none of it is meant to be taken seriously. Vampire Time Travelers is a SOV horror film that cheerfully sends up all of the cliches that one associates with SOV filmmaking. The acting is intentionally over-the-top. The dialogue is full of deliberately bad puns. The plot is so twisty that it’s impossible to follow. Usually, all of this would be a problem but, in this film, the incoherence is the point. It’s not supposed to make sense. Instead, the film is about tossing out one joke after another and seeing how many of them work. For every joke that falls flat, there’s one that works wonderfully. I laughed a lot more than I thought I would. This movie may be crude but it’s also surprisingly clever.
Vampire Time Travelers is an effective SOV mix of horror and comedy. It took me totally by surprise.
Brian Dennehy was one of the great American character actors.
Rugged and exuding a sense of weariness, as if he were someone who had seen it all, Brian Dennehy cut a uniquely American figure. He was one of those actors who could play a New York fireman as easily as he could play a Tennessee farmer. He had those eyes that said, “Don’t mess with me,” but also the manner that made you feel everyone was welcome in his house as long as they didn’t think they were better than anyone else. He was one of those actors who could be both likable and intimidating. He was perfectly cast as Sheriff Teasle in First Blood because, even if he was a bit too hard on John Rambo when he first picked him up, it was still easy to see that Teasle didn’t mean to be a jerk. He was just doing his job. He thought he was keeping his town safe. Dennehy was just as credible playing a benevolent alien in Cocoon, a western outlaw in Silverado, or a burned-out cop in F/X. When Dennehy played a hero, you felt safe whenever he was onscreen. When he played a bad guy, he was absolutely terrifying.
Dennehy played one of the worst of the real-life bad guys in the 1992 television film To Catch a Killer. He plays John Wayne Gacy, a contractor considered a pillar of his community in the suburbs of Chicago. He runs a successful business. He hires young men who really need the money. He has a big smile. He’s involved in local politics and even has a framed picture of himself with President Jimmy Carter’s wife. In his spare time, he dresses up like a clown and entertains the children at the local hospital. He uses the name Pogo and paints sharp points at the corners of his mouth, giving him a somewhat sinister appearance. Everyone seems to like him. Of course, most people don’t know that Gacy is an ex-con who did time for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in Iowa. This film takes place in the late ’70s, before anyone could just hop online and look up public records.
To Catch a Killer follows Detective Joe Kozenczak (Michael Riley) as he investigates the disappearance of a young man last seen being offered a job by Gacy. Joe suspects Gacy from the start, but he’s continually told that Gacy is a pillar of the community. What makes this film so effective is that Brian Dennehy plays Gacy as someone so arrogant he barely bothers to hide his guilt, but also as someone with such a victim complex that he won’t stop whining about being suspected of doing something he definitely did. The scene where Gacy demonstrates a handcuff trick is frightening because Gacy seems so desperate for companionship, and so goofy, even while he’s preparing to murder someone. Personally, I prefer it when Dennehy is playing a good guy (or, at the very least, a misguided bad guy like in First Blood), but that doesn’t change the fact that he was frighteningly believable as John Wayne Gacy. Dennehy was Emmy-nominated for his performance here.
As for the real John Wayne Gacy, he killed at least 33 people before he was apprehended in 1978. (It’s thought that the actual number is much higher.) He was executed in 1994, two years after this film aired. Reportedly, his last words were, “Kiss my ass.”
