First released in 1955 and directed by the legendary Ed Wood, Bride of the Monster is a classic mix of a haunted house, a mad scientist, a lumbering assistant, and a giant octopus. The plot may be impossible to follow but it doesn’t matter when you’ve got Tor Johnson grunting and Bela Lugosi giving a surprisingly good performance as the persecuted Dr. Vornoff, a man who “tampered in God’s domain.”
A lot of people consider this to be Wood’s best film. Personally, I would go with Plan 9 From Outer Space but Bride of the Monster is still an entertaining look at monsters and madmen.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly watch parties. On Twitter, I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday and I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday. On Mastodon, I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting #FridayNightFlix! Join us for 1992’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, find Buffy The Vampire Slayer on Prime, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! I’ll be there happily tweeting. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Today’s song of the day the main theme from Dario Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails. Ennio Morricone’s score brought a lot of atmosphere to Argento’s classic giallo.
In 2013’s Storm Rider, Dani Fielding (Danielle Churchan) is a rich, spoiled teenager who loves to compete in horse shows with her horse, Admiral. However, when Dani’s father (C. Thomas Howell), is arrested and charged with financial fraud, Dani’s life changes forever. The government seizes Admiral and sells him to Dani’s rival. When Dani’s younger half-brother, Jordan (Jacob Buster), is sent off to live with his gold digging mother, Dani is sent to live with her uncle, Sam (Kevin Sorbo).
Sam is a taciturn veterinarian who lives on a ranch in …. well, I assume it’s Montana. Don’t most of these movies take place in Montana? Wherever the film was shot, the scenery is absolutely gorgeous. Sam’s not really comfortable with people in general and he has no idea how to deal with teenage girl, especially one who doesn’t eat meat. As for Dani, she’s initially miserable because she’s been separated from her former life and her former horse.
Fortunately, Sam owns a lot of animals. Dani notices an orphaned mule named Stormy and she takes it upon herself to train him. Taking care of Stormy helps Dani let go of her bitterness. Soon, she’s watching the blossoming romance between Sam and Jody Peterson (Kristy Swanson) and she’s got a romance of her own going with Kevin Winslow (Darien Willardson). Kevin’s father owns a horse that Dani starts to train in the hopes that she can enter a regional horse show with her.
However, when Sam, Jordan, and Kevin’s father get stranded in the mountains, it’s Stormy who helps Dani find them. When night falls and they find themselves surrounded by wolves, will they even make it back to civilization?
It would be a really depressing movie if they didn’t! Fortunately, Storm Rider is not a movie that was made to spread depression. Instead, it’s a rather heart-warming tale about a young woman who conquers her anger and discovers that a mule can be just as strong and brave as the biggest horse. This is very much a film that was designed to make viewers smile and feel good about life and, for the most part, it succeeds. Of course, I still cried constantly while watching the film because I kept thinking about my mom and my dad and how much I miss both of them. This film definitely made me emotional. Often, the best thing that a film can do is to make you cry. Sometimes, I think people forget just how important it is to cry when you’re feeling sad.
As I think I’ve said in the past, I’ve always has a weakness for films about angry or rebellious girls who find peace and grace through taking care of an animal. Whether it’s a cat or a dog or a horse or anything else, there’s something undeniably wonderful about winning the trust of another creature. “You can’t be a jerk and love animals,” someone once said and I imagine that’s true. This film, well-acted and featuring beautiful mountain scenery, made me smile even when I was crying,
I’m not always successful, but I spend a fairly large part of my life trying to make my wife happy. One of the ways I do that is I try to find movies for us to watch that she will enjoy, and that I will have at least some interest in. So anytime I can find a movie starring Alicia Witt, most notable in our household for her voluminous work with the Hallmark Channel, I’m definitely heading in the right direction. I was looking through her filmography on IMDB the other day and noticed she was in URBAN LEGEND. I remember the movie coming out in the late 90’s, but I had never seen it, and I had no idea she was the primary lead! It being the spooky season, I thought now was the perfect time for the two of us to cuddle up on the couch with some popcorn and enjoy the show!
Alicia Witt is Natalie Simon, a student with a dark, secretive past, who begins to suspect that a series of gruesome murders on the campus of Pendleton College are being committed by a killer obsessed with “urban legends.” Each murder seems to take a cue from those scary stories that pretty much all of us grew up hearing, and maybe even believing. As her friends are being picked off one by one, Natalie must do everything to find the killer before she becomes the next victim!
I must admit I had fun with this one. We watched it on a night where we just wanted to relax and see a bunch of obnoxious college students getting whacked in a variety of ways while we try to figure out who the killer is. I remember when SCREAM came out back in 1996 when I was 22 years old. Like so many others, I saw it in the theater and loved it. URBAN LEGEND is in that same tradition. It gives us some suspicious characters and some interesting murders inspired by stories I heard as a kid, and that late-90’s nostalgia kicked right in for me.
It was also fun looking back at the popular young cast whose careers have gone a variety of ways since the movie was made. Along with Witt, our cast of potential killers and victims include Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Joshua Jackson, and Tara Reid. I really enjoyed seeing veteran genre actors pop up as the movie goes along. The opening scene with Brad Dourif is very effective and lets us know immediately that we can’t trust our normal expectations. Robert Englund is also on hand to provide a creepy and suspicious professor. Heck, Danielle Harris is also in the cast, which was right at the beginning of her extensive career in horror movies.
Until I watched this movie, I didn’t realize just how universal some urban legends really are! A couple of freaky ones I remember as a kid include the story of the gang initiation where potential members drive around with their lights off just waiting for someone to flash their lights at them. Even more disturbing is the one where someone hides under your car ready to slice your Achilles tendon. Each of those stories are represented here. Building a scary movie around those legends, and many more, is a darn clever idea, and I enjoyed seeing what the filmmakers might come up with next.
URBAN LEGEND isn’t a horror masterpiece. It’s not very original, and it’s full of dumb characters making dumb decisions. But I still had a good time with it. For me, it’s a fun little slasher that takes an interesting premise and provides a few cheap scares. And most importantly, it made my wife happy, and that means a lot!
In the 1971 film Point of Terror, Peter Carpenter plays Tony Trelos. Tony is a hip, cool, swinging hep cat. He’s got a job singing at the Lobster House in Santa Monica, California. Everyone wants a piece of Tony because he has got the swagger of Sinatra and the voice of Tom Jones. When he meets Andrea (Dyanne Thorne), it’s lust at first sight. Andrea is married to Martin (Joel Hilliard), a wealthy and bitter record producer who is confined to a wheelchair. When Andrea murders Martin, it brings Martin’s daughter, Helayne (Lori Hansen), back to Santa Monica, and soon Tony is sleeping with her too. However, Tony has reason to be concerned because it appears that there might be another murderer stalking all of them. Or maybe there isn’t. The plot of this Crown International production is not always easy to follow.
Who was Peter Carpenter? I am honestly not sure, but this film appears to have been some sort of vanity production for him. He gets to sing several songs, and everyone he meets either wants to sleep with him or hang out with him. He gets a lot of big dramatic scenes, the majority of which he really didn’t have the acting ability to pull off. Tony is meant to be charismatic, mysterious, and a little bit dangerous, but as played by Peter Carpenter, he comes across as a second-rate lounge act who got lucky. Carpenter both co-produced the film and came up with the story. To be honest, you almost have to respect the amount of confidence in his own abilities that Carpenter apparently possessed. One can just imagine Carpenter turning to someone like Wayne Newton and telling him to scream, because there was only one actor/singer who was good enough to star in Point of Terror. Carpenter apparently died shortly after this film was released, and that is indeed a shame. Who knows how many ego-driven projects he could have given us?
Point of Terror is definitely a film of its time, which is to say that there’s a lot of polyester and a lot of nudity that was probably considered daring in 1971 but which is just kind of tame in 2026. The film does attempt to play around with the audience’s sense of perception and encourage them to wonder whether Tony is truly seeing what’s happening or if he’s just imagining things. For that reason, it sneaks across the line dividing psychological horror and neo-noir. It’s one of those films that’s probably more entertaining than it should be, just because it is such a film of its time. Someone could probably retitle this film 1971 and re-release it as a Paul Thomas Anderson-style satire.
Point of Terror was distributed by Crown International Pictures. Whenever I see the Crown International logo on an old movie, I know I’m in for a good time. Dyanne Thorne, it should be said, does a pretty good job as the femme fatale. That said, the true star of this film is definitely 1971.
In 2021’s A Deadly Grudge, Lindsey (Annika Foster) owns a restaurant with her fiancé Gavin (Jonathan Stoddard). (It’s a Lifetime film and, in the world of Lifetime, there’s nothing easier than owning your own restaurant or opening your own art gallery.) Her father, Jim (Patrick M.J. Finerty), is internet-famous for his cooking videos. And her mother… well, she’s dead. She dies while she’s out jogging and a car runs her over. What’s odd is that she doesn’t bother to get out of the way of the car despite having several minutes in which to do so. It’s always strange to me how people in Lifetime films always seem to end up jogging in the middle of the road. I start nearly every morning with a jog and I usually manage to stay on the sidewalk. It’s just safer that way.
At her mother’s funeral, Lindsey is shocked to see Jim hugging a younger woman. Lindsey immediately assumes that Jim is having an affair, because why else would you hug someone at a funeral? Jim explains that the younger woman is actually Sarah (Aubrey Reynolds). Sarah is not his mistress. Sarah is his daughter. It turns out that Lindsey never learned that she had a half-sister. Lindsey also didn’t know that her parents never actually got married. Instead, Jim was legally married to Sarah’s mother because Sarah’s family would have disowned her if she had a child out of wedlock. To be honest, not a single part of Jim’s story makes any sense, but somehow Lindsey accepts it.
To continue being honest, it’s pretty obvious that Sarah was the one who ran over Lindsey’s mother. If you’ve ever seen a Lifetime film, you know that Sarah’s guilty, because long-lost siblings are always guilty. In typical Lifetime fashion, Lindsey is immediately suspicious of Sarah, but everyone else loves her. Jim is especially happy when he discovers that Sarah knows how to bake. Whoops — Sarah put some cinnamon in one of her recipes! Lindsey is deathly allergic to cinnamon! It never ceases to amaze me how every Lifetime film seems to feature at least one person with a deadly food allergy. I always get the feeling that Lifetime studios must be full of discarded EpiPens.
The title refers to Sarah, who definitely does have a grudge against Lindsey. However, it could also refer to Lindsey, who takes an immediate dislike to her half-sister and who spends the entire movie getting mad about the fact that not everyone else seems to hate her as much as she does. More like Two Sisters’ Grudges, to be honest. (The film was also released as A Sister’s Grudge, which is closer, but still only counts one of them.) It actually gets kind of amusing after a little while. Every time someone says anything nice about Sarah, Lindsey scowls and dramatically rolls her eyes. Occasionally, she gasps in disbelief. She’s so vocal about her dislike of Sarah that you actually end up feeling a little bit sorry for Sarah. I mean, Sarah is the one who grew up with an unstable mom and the knowledge that her father had another family that he loved more than her.
Anyway, this is pretty much a standard Lifetime melodrama. Unfortunately, no one in the film is particularly sympathetic. Lindsey comes across like someone who would talk about you behind your back. Sarah comes across like she would try to poison you with cinnamon. I’ll let you decide which is worse.
In Brookfield, Connecticut, a 20-something man named Kenny Miller (played by a young Kevin Bacon) is on trial for murder. He stands accused of killing his landlord for no clear reason. While the media (represented by Cloris Leachman and Ken Kercheval) watch, Kenny’s attorney (Richard Masur) announces that Kenny did not actually commit the murder of his own free will. Instead, Kenny was possessed by a demon. The judge (Jack Davidson) is not impressed by the argument.
The film flashes back to the previous year. The family of Kenny’s girlfriend, Nancy Frazier (Liane Langland), has moved into a new house. Kenny notices that Nancy’s younger brother, Brian (Charles Fields), seems to spend a lot of time talking to himself. This concerns Kenny. What if Brian is talking to a demon that’s trying to possess him? It turns out that the Fraziers should have listened to Kenny because soon the house is shaking, the lights are blinking, and Brian is speaking in the voice of Harvey Fierstein.
The family gets in contact with occult investigators Guy (Andy Griffith) and Charlotte Harris (Beverlee McKinsey). Guy and Charlotte arrange for an exorcism. Actually, they arrange for several exorcisms. A total of six priests (one of whom is played by Eddie Albert) attempt to get the demon out of Brian. At one point, Kenny dares the demon to take him on personally. “Never do that!” Guy says before explaining that daring a demon to fight you is a great way to get possessed yourself. Kenny doesn’t seem to believe Guy, and I can kind of understand why. Watching this film, it was obvious that Andy Griffith was not actually Catholic, even if he did play a priest in Go Ask Alice. You can always tell these fake Catholics because they never make the sign of the cross correctly. They either use the wrong hand, or they start at the chest, or they confuse which shoulder to go to.
The Demon Murder Case was made for television in 1983 and, if the plot sounds familiar, that’s because it’s based on the same case that was dramatized in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Only the names have been changed. Ed and Lorraine Warren become Guy and Charlotte Harris and, needless to say, they’re a bit less glamorous in the made-for-television version. Surprisingly enough, the television version actually works pretty well. The low budget forces director William Hale to concentrate on atmosphere as opposed to special effects, and the cast is full of talented actors. Even though Griffith is not a convincing Catholic, he’s still likable in the role of the no-nonsense Guy, and Kevin Bacon does a pretty good job as the well-meaning but ultimately confused Kenny Miller. Earlier today, I complained that Bacon seemed miscast in Hollow Man. This film, however, makes good use of his down-to-earth persona. You watch this film and you think that, if Kevin Bacon could get possessed, it could happen to anyone.
As for the actual case, Arne Cheyenne Johnson (who was renamed Kenny Miller in this film) was convicted of manslaughter despite his defense that he had no control over his actions. He served five months in prison and married his girlfriend after he was released. He continues to insist that he was possessed.
“If you look for me, you will find me,” announces a billboard outside the apartment inhabited by a young man named Santos (Miguel Ortiz). The billboard also features a picture of a woman who appears to be beckoning whoever is viewing her. When Santos steps out of his apartment, he stares at the billboard. Later, under far different circumstances, he asks, “What was I supposed to find?”
Santos is an aspiring musician who lives in post-Franco Spain. At a performance, he sees another man flirting with his girlfriend. Suddenly, Santos finds himself standing in front of the man with blood on his hands. The man has been stabbed. There’s never any doubt that Santos killed the man, but the film leaves it ambiguous as to whether the murder was an act of impulse or calculation.
Santos spends two years in prison before he’s paroled. On his first night out, he meets a prostitute named Lola (Giannina Facio) and goes to a mansion with her. The next morning, he has breakfast with four old, rich men who tell Santos that they want to hunt him. If he can escape the grounds of the mansion, he will have a million dollars’ worth of gems to start a new life with. When Santos says that he’s not interested in being hunted, the men reply that he doesn’t really have a choice.
The thing that one notices is that Santos rarely shows any emotion. Whether he’s just killed a man or been informed that he’s going to be hunted, Santos is pretty much a blank. Even when he learns that one of the men who will be hunting him is also the father of the person he killed, Santos seems to shrug it off. Some of that was undoubtedly due to the acting limitations of Miguel Ortiz. But as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Santos is as much of a hollow shell as the decadent men who are hunting him. If Santos seems empty, that’s because he is empty. The hunters, who obviously expected him to be easy prey, instead find themselves up against a sociopath who is just as determined as they are to get revenge. What began as just another rip-off of The Most Dangerous Game instead becomes a look into the world of absolute zero. There is no empathy, guilt, warmth, or mercy. The billboard invites the viewer to “find me,” but there is nothing to find.
Released in 1984, Poppers is a Spanish film and, to understand it, it helps to know a little about Spanish history. General Francisco Franco was the head of the Spanish government from 1936 to 1975. (My grandmother was born in Spain and came to the United States shortly after World War II. Growing up, I was usually the only kid in class to have encyclopedic knowledge of General Franco.) Franco died in 1975, nine years before Poppers was released. After being ruled for nearly forty years by one man, Spain’s transition from Franco’s regime to a more democratic system was not always an easy or smooth one, especially with Franco himself having been such a controversial figure. In Poppers, the hunters are the type of older rich men who presumably did what they had to do to thrive under Franco’s regime. (At least two of the hunters are gay, which was illegal in Francoist Spain, leaving one to wonder what they did to remain free and rich while so many others were being imprisoned or exiled.) Santos and Lola represent the next generation, the one that grew up largely without Franco. When they go after the hunters, they can be seen to represent the youth sweeping away the remains of Franco’s Spain. However, since neither Santos nor Lola are motivated by any ideology beyond their own self-preservation, the message seems to be that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Santos and Lola are not class warriors and they’re not political dissidents. They’re two people who are as empty as the people they’re replacing.
Poppers is an interesting and always watchable film. At times, the film’s imagery borders on the surreal. Director José María Castellví had a good eye for decadence. Ultimately, though, it’s a film that leaves you feeling uneasy. The closest thing the film has to a hero is a sociopath who takes a bit too much joy in killing. (The fact that all of the people he kills are bad does not make his demented smile any less unsettling.) The billboard asks us to look, but all we see is a world defined by absolute zero.
