A Blast From The Past: Mia & Roman (dir by Hatami)

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Mia & Roman is a short film that was filmed in 1968 to promote the release of the classic horror film, Rosemary’s Baby.

The film profiles director Roman Polanski and actress Mia Farrow, both of whom appear as being young and full of hope. (It’s sad to think that, just a year after appearing happy and optimistic in the film, Polanski’s wife and unborn child would be murdered by the Manson family. Polanski, of course, would later end up fleeing the country and he remains controversial to this day. Mia, meanwhile, would eventually become both the mother of Ronan Farrow and an overrated SyFy live tweeter.) Along with serving as a time capsule of the 1960s (and you know how much I love time capsules), Mia & Roman also features some behind-the-scenes footage from the making of Rosemary’s Baby.

Enjoy!

Horror on the Lens: Sisters of Death (dir by Joseph Mazzuca)

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Sisters of Death, which is included in a countless number of Mill Creek box sets, is not necessarily the greatest film ever made but it is a personal favorite of mine.

This 1977 film opens with a very baroque sorority initiation that ends with one of the sisters being killed in a game of Russian Roulette. A few years later, the surviving sisters are invited to an isolated and lavish estate where it turns out that the dead girl’s father (well-played by Arthur Franz) is looking for revenge. This film is predictable and a lot of the plot depends on people refusing to use any common sense but Sisters of Death is such a fun little melodrama that I can’t complain too much. The film plays out like a surprisingly violent Lifetime movie and it has one of those wonderfully cynical 1970s endings.

Enjoy!

Hallmark Review: Autumn Dreams (2015, dir. Neill Fearnley)

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Valerie Troutman

When I saw the ads for this I was worried that it was basically going to be Your Love Never Fails 2. While it does share some similarities, it’s just an average romantic comedy, nothing more.

The movie opens up in Iowa with a teenage couple. Annie (Jill Wagner) who is 18 and Ben (Colin Egglesfield) who is 19. In short order they elope. Her father catches them and says the marriage is going to be annulled. He takes her home. Cut to 15 years later and you can guess.

The marriage was never annulled, both of them are going to be married soon, and they never explain why it wasn’t annulled. They just quickly say there must have been a paperwork mix up and that’s all of that. However, that also assumes that her, at legal age as a judge reminds us later, would have had no part in the annulment process. It just doesn’t make sense.

Anyways, she still lives at home working the farm. He moved to New York City and works on the stock market. She goes to New York City so they can both get a divorce, but there’s a little problem. His wedding date requires a very quick divorce that the judge isn’t willing to supply especially after Annie and Ben have a little spat in the courtroom.

But enough of that, because you know exactly where that plot line goes. You don’t need me to lay it out for you. I want to draw your attention to one of the things that stands out in this film. It’s one of the supporting actors. His name is Matty Finochio who plays the lawyer trying to make the divorce happen for the couple. When they give him the chance he’s very funny. I’m not sure why they felt this already screwball comedy plot setup needed to fall back on so much of the traditional Hallmark romance formula.

There is this great scene where Ben’s fiancee comes up to him just after he got of court for the first time. From left to right: Annie, Ben, The Lawyer, and the Fiancee. It goes like this:

Fiancee: “I stopped by your office after seeing the architect. Guess what? You weren’t there. So I looked at your calendar. It said “court”. Nothing about a pretty girl.”
As the lawyer points to Annie: “This isn’t a pretty girl.”
Fiancee: “I think she could pass for pretty.”
Lawyer: “No. Annie’s my client…”

Obviously, I can’t do it justice with words alone, but trust me that he has good comedic timing. Every time he shows up he’s delightful.

I know the other two actors are probably not the most versatile, but they seemed like they could have done this in a more comedic manner. It’s a lost opportunity.

The only other thing to mention is a goof I spotted. The same paragraph appears twice in the same newspaper article back to back.

The rest of the movie is exactly what you expect. Perfectly average Hallmark romance with somewhat lackluster acting from the leads. Just remember that if you watch it, pay attention to the lawyer. If you want to see Matty Finochio some more afterwards then he is also in the Hallmark film So You Said Yes.

The Daily Horror Grindhouse: Burning Dead (dir by George Demick)

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Many years ago, a teenager named Jim Reed was one of the few people to survive a fire that burned down the entire town of Maxwell and killed nearly the entire population, including his parents. As you might guess, even after he grows up, Jim has some issues. He feels tremendous guilt. He has nightmares. He feels he’s responsible for the deaths of thousands. And even worse, he can’t really remember how the fire started or why. All he knows is that he keeps seeing terribly burned people and they all keep telling him that it’s all his fault.

After spending years just drifting, an adult Jim (played by D. Vincent Ashby) returns to the town of Maxwell. It’s been rebuilt and, amazingly enough, there seems to be next to no sign that it was ever the site of a huge apocalyptic fire. (I suspect this has more to do with the film’s budgetary limitations than anything else.) He ends up staying with his brother and occasionally, he seems to be possessed by some unseen force. (For example, there’s the time that he wanders into his nephew’s bedroom while wielding a hammer.) Jim meets his ex-girlfriend Shelly and an old friend named Bill. And, through it all, he continues to have visions of horribly burned zombies telling him that everything is all his fault…

It’s always tempting to get snarky when talking about a movie like 2004’s Burning Dead. This is a microbudget film that was obviously made with a largely amateur cast, the majority of whom are quite stiff as they deliver their overdramatic dialogue. Yes, it would be easy to make fun of Burning Dead but you know what? For what it is, it’s not that bad. It’s a horror film that had a lot of interesting ideas but not the budget to really execute them. But there are films with huge budgets that have absolutely no interesting ideas. Ridicule the limitations of Burning Dead if you must but, as far as I’m concerned, the filmmakers deserve some credit for trying to create something more than just your standard low-budget zombie film.

Add to that, I am an admirer of the stoned nonchalance of D. Vincent Ashby’s lead performance. It may be a the result of a lifetime of trauma but Jim, at times, seems to be one of the most mellow in protagonists in the history of horror cinema. No matter what he’s confronting or explaining, Jim retains the same casual attitude.

My favorite moment in the film came when Bill asked Jim if his parents lost anything in the fire.

“Their lives,” Jim replies with a slight shrug.

Obviously, Burning Dead is not the easiest of films to find. It’s included in the Decrepit Crypt of Nightmares Boxset and that’s where I found it.

(One final bit of trivia: according to his imdb page, director George Demick previously played a zombie in George Romero’s Day of the Dead.)

D. Vincent Ashby considers Burning Dead.

Hallmark Review: Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Impossible Dream (2015, dir. Kevin Fair)

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Valerie Troutman

As always with the Signed, Sealed, Delivered movies, if you can, you should go back and start with the Christmas one, then work your way forward to this one. However, if that’s not possible, then you should at least see the one right before this entitled Truth Be Told. I say that because while the series very much builds on each and every episode, this and Truth Be Told are a two part episode. Not in the way you would see a two part episode of say Star Trek: The Next Generation, but more like a crossover between two different shows. Except it’s the same show. By that I mean Truth Be Told can be watched and viewed as a whole, but there is an unresolved element that is then picked up and finished by this film.

The episode opens in Afghanistan where we see Lieutenant Randilynn Amidon (Tammy Gillis) from Truth Be Told is alive. She is trying to help a woman who is in labor. After Amidon is told that she doesn’t have much time left, we see a letter go out. Cue the titular music!

Now we see The Postables going in to meet with a congressional committee. They’re there because they want to plead their case that a rescue mission be sent in to save Lieutenant Randilynn Amidon. She was thought to be missing or to have even gone over to the enemy side in Afghanistan. Of course the committee wants to hear why, so Oliver O’Toole (Eric Mabius) takes us back to tell the story.

Turns out they came to Washington for, I kid you not, the Miss Special Delivery pageant that Rita Haywith (Crystal Lowe) is going to be in. As much as that is the lamest excuse for them to end up in Washington, it does serve a purpose beyond just putting them there for the main plot.

While they are in Washington they also go to visit Shane McInerney’s (Kristin Booth) childhood home, but it’s no longer there. Meanwhile, Rita checks in at the pageant while Shane, Oliver, and Norman (Geoff Gustafson) run into Amidon’s daughter and who I assume is Amidon’s grandfather. They probably said it at some point in this or Truth Be Told, but I missed it. However, the grandfather is played by William B. Davis so it’s probably Amidon’s grandfather given his age. They find out they are trying to get someone in Washington to listen to them about Randilynn. And I have to say, it’s kind of humorous to see this scene because of the character William B. Davis is probably most famous to people for playing. That being the mysterious Smoking Man from The X-Files. It’s funny to see him having trouble getting someone in the government to listen to him.

This is when the blast from the past shows up, and you know what? One of my wishes was fulfilled with this entry in the series. He’s not there to take up the majority of the film giving us backstory on one of the main characters. Nope. He’s an ex of Shane’s who works in the government. She called him thinking that he might be able to help in getting someone to listen to Amidon’s family. And that he does because he has the letter that we saw go out at the beginning of the film.

They can’t take the letter with them, but luckily Rita got a quick look at it and has a very good memory so she is able to recall details about it.

What follows is largely the other wish I had about future episodes of Signed, Sealed, Delivered. The rest is mainly them working to decipher the letter and explain to the committee what that means, and where they need to go in order to rescue her in Afghanistan. So, yay for me, and I hope future episodes do this sort of thing more.

There are only two other things I think are worth mentioning.

The pageant serves a purpose beyond just giving them an excuse to be in Washington. While this movie doesn’t have someone show up to give us a character backstory dump, the pageant and what happens with it does move the Rita and Norman love story forward. Also, we see Oliver inherit the money from his father that we found out about in Truth Be Told and he uses it to buy McInerney’s old lot to build a house for retired postal workers. The first acquisition he plans to use the money for in order to do good things.

The second thing is that while I’m sure that shot and all the shots in Afghanistan are in California or Canada, they don’t screw it up. They often shoot at night or with dust in the air. They shoot in areas that aren’t obviously not where they claim to be. And most importantly, they don’t linger on anything long enough for you to call BS. Sadly, this is not a usual thing for Hallmark, so kudos to the production crew of this particular one.

I recommend it, but at least see Truth Be Told first. However, you won’t be lost with the short mention about Oliver’s wife and I think you can pick up Rita and Norman’s story anywhere a long the line without any issue.

Horror Film Review: Shock (Directed by Mario Bava)

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Though it seems that he’ll never get the credit that he truly deserves, Italian director Mario Bava was truly one of the most influential and important filmmakers of all time. While he spent most of his long career making genre films, Bava was also an artist who put his own unique stamp on the horror film and whose influence continues to be felt in film today. With Blood and Black Lace, Bava helped to launch the entire giallo genre and every slasher film that has ever been made owes a debt to Bava’s Bay of Blood. While Bava’s final work as a director, 1977′s Shock, may not be as well-known as some of his other films, it’s one of his best works and it’s certainly worthy to be listed with the rest of Bava’s oeuvre.

Shock is a haunted house film. Dora (played by the great Daria Nicolodi) is a mentally fragile woman who is still in the process of recovering emotionally from the suicide of her first husband. When Dora marries Bruno, an apparently well-meaning airline pilot (but he’s played by John Steiner and anyone who loves Italian exploitation knows that it’s always dangerous when Steiner shows up as a sympathetic character), it briefly appears that Dora’s life might be getting back on the right track.

Except, of course, for the fact that, whenever Bruno leaves the house, Dora gets the feeling that she’s not alone. Things fall off of shelves. A razor blade suddenly shows up hidden between the keys of a piano. Worst of all, her young son Marco (David Collin, Jr.) starts to act differently. When he’s not sneaking into the master bedroom and using a kitchen knife to chop up Dora’s underwear, Marco is doing things like aggressively wrestling with his mother and cutting Bruno out of all the family pictures.

Dora quickly becomes convinced that the spirit of her first husband is both haunting the house and possessing young Marco. Bruno, meanwhile, worries that Dora may be having another nervous breakdown. As for Marco, he’s busy spying on Bruno and Dora while they’re sleeping and calling them dirty names under his breath…

The plot of Shock will probably not shock anyone who has seen a haunted house film but one doesn’t really watch a Bava film for its plot. With a Bava film, the story is never quite as important as the way that Bava tells it. Working in the years before CGI, Bava was a master at creating special effects that were cheap, simple, and ultimately very effective and that’s what Bava does here. In perhaps the film’s most effective (and famous) moment, Marco seems to transform into Carlo right before our eyes. It’s pretty easy to figure out how Bava achieved the effect but that doesn’t make it any less of a frightening moment.

However, the main reason that this film works is because of Daria Nicolodi. Bava was never known for being a great director of actors but, for this film, he managed to capture one of the best performances in the history of horror cinema. In the role of Dora, Nicolodi is like an exposed nerve. It’s impossible not to sympathize with her, even if you’re never quite sure just how sane or insane that she may actually be. Watching Nicolodi’s performance in this film, it’s hard not to regret that, in the years to come, her talent would be so overshadowed by both her former boyfriend Dario Argento and their daughter, Asia.

By all accounts, Mario Bava was in failing health during the making of Shock (and perhaps that’s why he showed so much empathy for the similarly frail Dora) and he was aided, in the making of the film, by his son Lamberto Bava (who would later become a well-known horror director himself). Sadly, Mario Bava died three years after completing Shock and the film has never quite gotten the amount of attention that it deserves. Shock is a worthy end to a brilliant career.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Messiah of Evil, Burial Ground, Happy Birthday To Me, Zombie Lake

Posted on October 5, 2015 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.

4 Shots From 4 Films

Messiah of Evil (1973, directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz)

Burial Ground (1981, directed by Andrea Bianchi)

Happy Birthday To Me (1981, directed by J. Lee Thompson)

Zombie Lake (1981, directed by Jean Rollin)

Horror on the Lens: Plan 9 From Outer Space (dir by Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Watching Ed Wood’s infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space is something of an October tradition here at the Shattered Lens! And you know how much I love tradition!

Incidentally, I know this film has a reputation for being the worst film ever made. Personally, I don’t think that it deserves that reputation. Is it bad? By traditional standards of quality, I guess it can be argued that Plan 9 From Outer Space is a bad movie. But it’s also a lot of fun and how can you not smile when you hear Criswell’s opening and closing statements?

Enjoy!

Late Night Cable Horror: Erotic Ink/Love Is a… Dangerous Game (2011, dir. Eddie Powell)

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Valerie Troutman

Two things first:

1. I saw the TV cut of this movie, not the original X-rated version. I could see a few edits, but they were only during the sex scenes to bring it down from hardcore to softcore.
2. I am assuming no one reading this is actually going to see it so I am going to talk about the ending. If you are that one person that is going to see it, I recommend it. Go watch it.

The movie opens up with a couple running through what looks like a storage area of sorts. Maybe a backroom of a museum or something. Immediately you know that this is not like other late night cable movies. It actually has a budget, better actors, an actual script, real camerawork, etc. Presumedly someone is chasing them, but we never see them. They make it to a particular place where they kind of just give up and she asks him to make love to her as if it’s their last day on Earth. They do just that, but this is miles above anything in the other movies I have reviewed. It’s like two people are actually having sex here. And I don’t mean the difference between simulated and unsimulated. Then the film cuts to a woman reading the story of these two characters before cutting back to them. It zooms in on a door handle, their scared faces, then boom. The book is closed.

This is our main character named Paulina Connelly (Natasha Nice). She was reading a book by her favorite horror novelist named Wes Mueller (Richie Calhoun). Connelly writes children’s books, but she would like to try her hand at a horror or thriller novel. Enter her boss.

He’s a little frustrated because he just had a 23 year old lady try and pitch him her 300 page autobiography. He of course explained that she’s 23, what life does she really have to write about. Now Connelly sits down and drops the bomb on him that she would like to write a horror novel. He tries to talk her out of it saying that’s quite a shift considering she started a series of books called “Molly the Magical Meerkat”, but she’s insistent, and he gives in.

Now she goes to her sister and her husband to talk about her idea. They think it’s a terrible idea to want to write stuff like Wes Mueller. To them it’s obvious that he’s not right in the head to write some of the stuff he does. The sister kind of reminds me of Lilith from Cheers. Anyways, we now cut to Wes Mueller and he does seem a little odd.

Yep, he’s just standing out there with his chainsaw. There’s no explanation given here. We just see him out there holding it with his eyes closed.

She cold calls Mueller and tells him she’s a fan. Turns out he knows who she is cause his niece is a big fan of her books. They have a few phone calls and we get more hints that Mueller is a little weird.

Then it’s back to the sister and her husband who inform her that Mueller was once in a mental institution.

The girl on the right is Jacky St. James who wrote the script for the movie. She has written numerous films like this and directed many of them as well.

Believe it or not, there was no sex scene during any of that. But now we get two in quick succession. First, we find out that the sister and her husband are not so puritanical as they seem. The sister knows about Mueller because she secretly reads his stuff. In fact, she has her husband sneak up on her as if he’s going to kill her. Then they have sex.

Back to the boss and we find out Mueller dropped off a cactus for her. Before that conversation goes anywhere Miss 23 comes in with a cookbook to pitch him. He points out that she is an English major, so what does she know about cooking. She doesn’t, but she does know a thing or two about how to get her way a la Baby Face (1933). By that, I mean she sleeps with him. This scene, like all the sex, is well acted. Especially this one because all of her moaning and reactions feel faked. Considering the quality of all the other sex, I think this was done on purpose since she is just using sex to get what she wants. She’s not actually enjoying it.

Then something happens that would never happen in any of the other late night cable movies I have watched so far. The sister surprises Connelly while she is in the shower, but they don’t join each other to go at it. She just drops off a gift, gives her a hug, and leaves. Then Mueller shows up right after the sister leaves.

They talk it out and she realizes that he really is okay. Quirky for sure. I mean part of his writing process is to go outside and mediate while holding a chainsaw. He also willingly checked himself into a mental hospital for research. This is when we get the best scene in the whole movie. She gets the brilliant idea to have him over to her sister’s place and do his best to freak them out.

He keeps just cutting at the meat without eating it and giving psycho looks at them. It’s pretty funny.

After they’ve had their fun messing with her sister, they go home and have sex.

Then we get the final scene of the movie when she returns to her boss with a manuscript for a new book. She wrote a romance novel based on her experience with Mueller. As the boss points out, “people aren’t always who they appear to be”. That’s the ultimate lesson of this film. That’s when she leaves. He pulls out a picture of himself. Proceeds to cut off the head. Then we see a picture of the 23 year old with a man, his head scratched out with a marker. He then places his own head over the other man’s. Yep, people aren’t who they appear to be. THE END.

Well, almost. After the credits roll, we get a quick shot of the sister coming in on Connelly and Mueller in bed together, screaming, and then passing out.

I really enjoyed this one.

The Daily Horror Grindhouse: Dead 7 (directed by Garrett Clancy)

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I recently opened up Decrepit Crypt of Nightmares DVD box set from Mill Creek and went searching for a movie to review for October. The movie that I picked was Dead 7, a slasher film from the year 2000.

Dead 7 — or, I should say, the version of Dead 7 that I saw — got off to a pretty bad start when the douchebag pictured below appeared on the screen.

Speaking in a low, guttural voice that I guess was supposed to sound scary, this guy introduced the movie and explained that it was about a meth dealer who tossed a deaf kid in a hole and who suffered an appropriate fate as a result. Okay great, I thought. But then the guy kept talking and, to be honest, his voice was so annoying that I have no idea what he was talking about. It reminded me a bit of that old episode of Saved By The Bell where the gang found the old radio station and Screech got to host Screech’s Mystery Theater.

However, Dead 7 should not be judged by that introduction. For one thing, I get the feeling that the introduction was tacked on by the film’s distributor, Brain Damaged Films. (In fact, the credits even state that the intro was filmed by a separate director.) And once you get past the intro, Dead 7 is actually a fairly effective slasher film.

Now, don’t get me wrong. According to the imdb, Dead 7 was made for $7,000 and it definitely looks like it was made for $7,000. This is an ultra low-budget film and it really doesn’t do anything to redefine the slasher genre. This is one of those films where a group of people do something bad in the past and then, a few months later, they die as a result. There are no great surprises but still — when taken on its own terms, Dead 7 is an effective film.

Just as the toadsucker in the intro promised, a group of meth dealers toss a deaf kid into a mine shaft and leave him to die. Three months later, the kid’s odd sister, Venus (Delia Copold) performs some sort of odd ceremony in the wilderness and soon the meth dealers and their girlfriends are all dying in various bloody ways. Can you figure out what’s happening? Of course, you can!

That said, Dead 7 definitely works. Garrett Clancy makes the best possible use of his low-budget, filming with a constantly roaming camera and using properly askew angles to keep the audience off-balance. The gore is surprisingly well-done for such a low-budget film and, while the acting won’t win any awards, all of the lowlifes are appropriately scuzzy. (Delia Copold probably gives the best performance in the film, especially when taunting the main dealer.) The film ends on a properly ironic note and, all in all, watching Dead 7 is not a bad way to waste 72 minutes in October.