Horror on TV: One Step Beyond 2.25 “The Haunting” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

On tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond, a man suspects that his best friend is having an affair with his fiancee.  What better way to take care of the problem than by leaving his friend to die on the side of a mountain?

It seems like the perfect crime and the man might get away with it …. but only if he can do something about the ghost who seems to be stalking him in the days leading up to his wedding!

As always, this is supposedly based on a true story.

This episode originally aired on March 1st, 1960.

Enjoy!

Here’s The Trailer For The Electric State!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The trailer for The Electric State, the latest film from the Russo Brothers, dropped earlier today.  The film stars Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown and, if this trailer intrigues you, you’ve got a while to get ready for the film as it’s not set to be released until March of 2025!

 

Hillwalkers (2022, directed by Tom Cosgrove)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

A group of hikers decide to take a walk through the hills of Ireland.  Things do not go well.  First, one hiker is injured in an accident.  Then the other hikers ignore a “No Trespassing” sign while looking for help and end up being stalked and targeted by a the people living on the land.  The hikers have no one to blame but themselves.  If you look through your binoculars and see someone wearing a skull mask and carrying a rifle, that should be enough to make you turn around.

The story is basic and the characters are poorly drawn but the Irish landscape is stunning, even when people are fighting for their lives.  The budget is low and there are more than a few scenes where you can see the blood squibs under everyone’s clothes before their shot.  If you can overlook or forgive that, Hillwalkers is occasionally suspenseful and it has enough action to appeal to thriller fans.  This is a standard city folks vs country folks movie and there’s nothing surprising about it but it does a good job of showing why it’s best to stay on the approved path while hiking.  Pay attention to those warning signs.  They’re there for a reason!

Retro Television Review: Malibu, CA 1.14 “Murray For Mayor”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Malibu CA, which aired in Syndication in 1998 and 1999.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, Dennis Haskins guest stars!

Episode 1.14 “Murray for Mayor”

(DIr by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on January 24th, 1999)

Upset that his favorite tree stump has been slated to be destroyed to make room for a new road, Murray decides to run for mayor of Malibu.  When they discover that Murray’s father has given him a check for $20,000, Scott and Jason declare themselves to be Murray’s campaign managers.

Being two sociopaths, Jason and Scott proceed to spend the money on things for themselves.  It doesn’t matter, though.  Murray soon finds himself rising in the polls.

Who is Murray’s opponent?  It’s none other than Dennis Haskins, of Saved By The Ball fame!  Haskins plays himself in this episode, offering up a bunch of vacuous plans and slogans while continually having to explain to people that Mr. Belding was just a character that he played on television.  When Haskins learns that Scott and Jason have been using the money on things like a new television, he informs them that he will report them to the campaign board unless Murray loses.

Being two sociopaths, Jason and Scott try to sabotage Murray’s campaign by telling Murray to make increasingly outrageous promises.  But it doesn’t matter …. Murray wins the election!

Yay!  Jason and Scott are going to prison!  The show’s over!

No, not quite.  After making sure that his stump will be saved, Murray resigns as mayor.  Dennis Haskins announces that he’ll be running to replace Murray and, for some reason, this means that he’s dropping his investigation into Jason and Scott’s financial activities.  I don’t think that’s the way it works but whatever.

Meanwhile, Tracy is learning how to be a magician.  She accidentally handcuffs herself to Stads, totally ruining Stads’s date with some random guy.  Luckily, Tracy later handcuffs herself to the same guy and convinces him to give Stads a second chance.

(Where would mediocre sitcoms be without aspiring magicians and handcuffs?)

This episode was actually not as bad as it probably sounds.  Casting Dennis Haskins as himself and then having him spend the entire episode angrily saying that he’s tired of talking about Screech was actually kind of clever and probably a good reflection of what was actually happing in Haskins’s life at the time.  With its story of a washed-up celeb running for political office, this episode actually felt a bit prophetic.  (Just a few months before this episode aired, Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota.)  Just as Ben Savage had to spend his entire congressional run dealing with questions about why he no longer talks to the cast of Boy Meets World, Dennis Haskins finds his entire campaign defined by one role.

In the end, this episode predicts our cynical future.  Murray is elected despite being an idiot.  How often does that happen nowadays?

Horror Scenes That I Love: The Danse Macabre in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since today’s horror on the lens was the original Nosferatu, it feels appropriate that today’s scene of the day should come from Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake.  In this scene, Lucy (Isabella Adjani) observes firsthand the madness that has come to the town of Wismar, along with the vampire and ship full of  plague-carrying rats.  While the people of the town have a last supper and celebrate their impending doom, Lucy tries to figure out a way to save them from Klaus Kinski’s Dracula.

This scene is a perfect example of how the director of a remake can both pay respectful homage to his source material while also bringing his own concerns to the story.

Horror Film Review: Handling the Undead (dir by Thea Hvistendahl)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Handling The Undead opens, as many Norwegian films tend to do, with a shot of an overcast sky, an ugly apartment complex, and a forest that appears to be submerged in shadows.  From the opening shots, it’s a depressing film.  Again, that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever watched a Norwegian film.

Three families are dealing with death. A woman has buried her young son and is now struggling not only with her grief but also her loving but overbearing father, whose attempts to make her feel better have the exact opposite result.  An old woman’s longtime spouse lies in a coffin, having not yet been put back into the Earth.  A woman is rushed to a hospital after an automobile accident and is not expected to live.

At night something happens.  The lights turn off.  Static is heard on every radio.  When the lights come back, so do the dead.  The grandfather hears his grandson wheezing and beating on his coffin and promptly digs him up.  The old woman’s spouse climbs out of her coffin on her own and returns to the home where she lived for decades.  The car accident victims opens her eyes and is alive, even though the doctor say that her heart is not beating rapidly enough to sustain life.  While the local authorities try to figure out why the dead have come back to life and to try to keep track of where they’ve all gone, their relatives spend one more day with their loved ones.

The problem is that dead may be alive but they’ve come back as silent and unemotional empty shells.  They seem to have a slight memory of their former lives but they don’t react to anything in a normal way.  Instead, they stare straight ahead.  The child has already started to decay and his return brings no happiness to his mother.  In fact, there’s not much happiness to be found anywhere in Handling the Undead.  One gets the feeling that even Ingmar Bergman would want to tell this film to lighten up.

Handling the Undead unfolds at a leisurely pace.  There are a few creepy scenes but, for the most part, the horror comes from what we’re expecting the zombies to do than what we actually see them do.  Everyone watching the movie knows what is eventually going to happen with the zombies.   We know that eventually, the undead will attack the living.  Handling the Undead, however, is more concerned with how the living would react to the dead than how the dead will eventually destroy the living.  There’s very little dialogue and every scene is darkly lit and full of shadows.  The majority of the characters hope that the returned dead will act like their old selves but they soon discover that they can’t go back to the way things once were.  It’s an intelligent film about how we grieve and deal with loss.

That said, it’s also a rather dull film.  It’s a deliberately boring film and, at times, it’s low-key approach feels almost as gimmicky as the blood and guts that can be found in more traditional zombie films.  Stretched out to 90 minutes, the running time feels like an endurance test.  And again, that’s probably what the filmmakers were going for but it doesn’t make the film any easier to sit through.  When one reaches the end of a 90-minute film that is this purposefully slow, one has the right to expect more of an emotional or intellectual payoff than this film provides.  This is a film that I can grudgingly respect but it’s not something that I’ll ever watch again.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Lamberto Bava Edition

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 is all about letting the visuals do the talking.

Today’s director in Lamberto Bava, one of the most underrated directors in the history of Italian horror cinema.

4 Shots From 4 Lamberto Bava Films

Macabre (1980, dir by Lamberto Bava, DP: Franco Delli Colli)

A Blade In the Dark (1983, dir by Lamberto Bava, DP: DP: Gianlorenzo Battaglia)

Demons 2 (1986, dir by Lamberto Bava, DP: Gianlorenzo Battaglia)

Delirium (1987, dir by Lamberto Bava, DP: Gianlorenzo Battaglia)

Fear No Evil (dir. by Frank LaLoggia)

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

In the early 1980s, my Dad owned a RCA Videodisc player. Among the assortment of films he owned, a few were listed as “Do Not Watch” for the kids. The Omen films, Cruising, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Raging Bull, The Life of Brian, and Fear No Evil. There may be others, but those were the ones I remember in particular growing up. Over time, I’ve been able to see almost all of them save for Raging Bull & Cruising. I was able to catch Fear No Evil via AMC+ earlier this year, and honestly, I wish my Dad were still alive. I’d ask him what prompted him to get this film, and watch it on purpose. I’ll never know, but here’s this movie that he was curious enough to buy at one point.

Directed by Frank LaLoggia, Fear No Evil is the tale of three Angels – Mikhail, Gabriel, and Rafael – who are out to bring back or smite Lucifer (Richard Jay Silverthorn, who also did the make up for the film), running around on Earth as a man. Lucifer states he’ll be reborn and then smites himself. We then celebrate the baptism of Baby Andrew Williams, which really doesn’t go as planned. His parents, Greg (Barry Cooper, Johnny Firecloud) and Marion (Alice Sachs, Seems Like Old Times) struggle with Andrew (Stefan Arngrim, The A-Team) over the years until his 18th birthday. An incident with the birthday cake leaves the mother injured, a father at a loss, and a teen with more freedom than he needs.

Fear No Evil basically takes Damien: The Omen II‘s story and drops it into a public school. As the Antichrist, Andrew is pretty aware of what he is and has no real regrets about it. Having an eye for Julie (Kathleen Rowe McAllen, TV’s All My Children), Andrew stalks the grounds of his local high school. He’s found brooding from the building’s fire escape and tries his best to dodge Tony (Daniel Eden, St. Elmos Fire) and his crew. Outside of the religious themes, there’s a sequence where the bullies corner Andrew in the High School shower (though it doesn’t quite turn out the way it did in Brian DePalma’s Carrie). I’m thinking that probably was the big thing that caused my Dad to keep this off our radar. When Julie discovers she’s the reincarnation of Gabriel (now Gabrielle), she and Mikhail (Elizabeth Hoffman, NBC’s Sisters, Dante’s Peak) join forces. Will they be able to stop Andrew before it’s too late?

When it comes to the acting, Fear No Evil has some over the top performances. With the notable exception of Hoffman and McAllen, most of the cast amped up the camp level with their characters. Arngrim and Cooper both have moments where their characters are completely losing it. Whether it’s a Dad starting a bar fight because his son’s the devil, or a dodgeball sequence that goes off the rails (and had me laughing throughout), everyone kind of hams it up. I will give Arngrim some marks for his voice. When he speaks up, he reminds me of the Sister of Mercy’s Andrew Eldritch, for some reason.

I did enjoy the effects and makeup, for what it’s worth. Some of the effects are full of glitter and lasers, feeling a bit like Flash Gordon or the climax of The Manitou. Richard Jay Silverthorn, who also plays Lucifer at the beginning of the film, handled the makeup and the effects. For a movie with a pretty low budget, it’s not bad at all. The music may be the film’s greatest strength. With tunes like “Blitzkreig Bop” and “Psycho Killer”, the movie’s high school setting is peppered mix of classic rock and orchestral work. The film’s score does work well with the notion that evil things are afoot.

Overall, Fear No Evil isn’t that great a film compared to others before or after it. It does deserve some kudos for trying to deliver a tale with a small budget, and the effects are somewhat interesting. It comes across, however, as just a bit much with the acting. It’s more an “In your face” kind of evil than anything subtle.