Horror on the Lens: The Pumaman (dir by Alberto De Martino)

Posted on October 5, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Okay, so technically, the Italian 1980 film The Pumaman isn’t really a horror film. However, it does fit in with Halloween because it’s about a super hero and who hasn’t dressed up as a super hero for Halloween? (Well, I never have but I’m sure a lot of other people have!)

The Pumaman is actually a paleontologist named Tony (Walter George Alton) who, though he doesn’t realize it, is the last in a long line of Pumamen. Fortunately, an Aztec mystic shows up and lets him know. When Tony expresses some doubt, the mystic responds by tossing him out a window.

And you know what?

It’s a good thing that Tony has learned the truth about his heritage because the evil Dr. Kobras (Donald Pleasence) has an evil scheme to do something evil. To be honest, I’m not sure what Dr. Kobras is trying to do, though it has something to do with an ancient mask and mind control. The important thing is that Dr. Kobras is played by Donald Pleasence and it’s always a good time to watch Donald Pleasence in October.

Join #MondayMania For A Sister’s Obsession!

Posted on October 5, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi, everyone! Tonight, on twitter, I will be hosting one of my favorite films for #MondayMania! Join us for 2018’s A Sister’s Obsession!

You can find the movie on Prime and then you can join us on twitter at 9 pm central time! (That’s 10 pm for you folks on the East Coast.) See you then!

Horror Song Of The Day: Gangster Rock by Felony

Posted on October 5, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

There are several reasons why I love 1981’s Graduation Day. The lengthy roller rink scene in which Linnea Quigley is chased by the killer and a band named Felony enthusiastically performs Gangster Rock is a huge one.

Scenes that I Love: John Grant Meet Doc Tydon in Wake In Fright

Posted on October 5, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

107 years ago today, the great actor Donald Pleasence was born.

Pleasence is, of course, best-known for playing Dr. Loomis in Halloween. He’s so identified with that franchise that it’s always seemed appropriate that he celebrated his birthday in October. And usually, to celebrate his birthday, we would share a scene of Dr. Loomis yelling at or shooting Michael Myers.

This year, though, I’m going to do something a little different and share a scene from a different type of horror movie, 1971’s Wake in Fright. In this Australian film, Donald Pleasence plays Doc Tydon, an alcoholic doctor who lives in the Australian outback and who befriends John Grant (Gary Bond), a naïve school teacher who has become stranded in a town full of people who don’t have much respect for Grant’s intellectual pursuits. Actually, befriends is perhaps the wrong word. Tydon allows Grant to stay with him but it soon become apparent that Tydon, like almost everyone else in this movie, might have a less-than-friendly agenda of his own.

Wake In Fright features what may be Pleasence’s best performance. In the scene below, Tydon and Grant meet for the first time and Pleasence shows that he was capable of far more than just playing Blofeld and Dr. Loomis.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Ti West Edition

Posted on October 5, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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!

Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to director Ti West!

It’s time for….

4 Shots From 4 Ti West Films

The House of the Devil (2009, dir by Ti West)

X (2022, dir by Ti West)

Pearl (2022, dir by Ti West)

MaXXXine (2024, dir by Ti West)

October Positivity: Operation Unite (dir by Donald James Parker)

Posted on October 4, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2024’s Operation Unite opens with a man standing at the front of a church and announcing that God has told him that one of the members, a blank-faced young man named Brent (Greg Carnes), is going to be a very important person in the future. Everyone in the church is really excited, despite the fact that Brent comes across as being a little goony.

Meanwhile, at another church, Pastor Friar (Brian Scott Gilmore), peaches against “charismatic” churches. His daughter, Kaitlyn (Kaylee Keller), feels somewhat dissatisfied with her father’s sermon but she can’t really put it into words. Kaitlyn is 20 and she knows that she should be free to pick her own church to attend but, since she’s living at home, she has to do what her father wants. Her father wants her to attend his mainstream Protestant church. So be it.

When Brent sees Kaitlyn in a coffeeshop, he tells his friend that God has just told him that he’s meant to be with Kaitlyn. Normally, I’d say “Yikes!” but this film presents this as being a positive development. Kaitlyn leaves without talking to Brent but Brent says it doesn’t matter. If God wants them to be together, he’ll run into Kaitlyn again. Double yikes!

And Brent does run into Kaitlyn again. Soon, they’re dating! But how will Pastor Friar react when he discovers that his daughter is dating the newly-appointed youth minister of a charismatic church?

This film is about the conflict between different branches of Protestantism. That’s actually kind of an interesting idea and that’s certainly something you would never expect to see a mainstream film attempt to tackle. Most movies just tend to assume that all protestants are a part of the same generic church. In this film, Friar views the charismatics as being heretics and the charismatics view Pastor Friar and his congregation as being not in touch with God. Myself, I’m a Catholic so, as far as I’m concerned, they’re all heretics.

Interesting premise aside, this has all of the problems that one usually finds with low-budget religious films. The pace is deadly slow, the acting is amateurish, and the script is full of little character moments that ring as being either forced or hollow. I’ve seen a few Donald James Parker films and this definitely is one. Conversations tend to go on forever. It’s obvious that the filmmakers had no idea how to use something editing to create narrative momentum. Nearly every shot is static and uninteresting. It’s honestly difficult to watch.

Like a lot of Parker’s film, there are moments in the film when a surprising and rather disagreeable hostility bubbles up. When Brent’s youth group singing a hymn, Brent responds by scolding them for not sounding properly enthusiastic and it really does seem to go on forever. When Brent and Pastor Friar debate their beliefs, Brent comes across as if he’s about to take a swing at the man who he wants to be his future father-in-law. Self-righteous, perpetually angry, and kind of dull to look at, Brent is simply not a likable character. Not even taking into account their religious differences, I felt like Kaitlyn needed to get as far away from Brent as possible.

This movie is all about building a bridge across denominations. I just hope they eventually found a more reliable engineer than Brent.

October Hacks: Sorority House Guillotine (dir by Gregory Hatanaka)

Posted on October 4, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2026’s Sorority House Guillotine does not feature a guillotine or a sorority house. It does, however, feature a lot of footage from Bikini Guillotine and a monologue about John Cassavetes.

The majority of the film features a group of young women in bikinis hanging out at the pool. One of the women announces that she owns the house and that she’ll be having a party every weekend. Everyone says, “Whooo!” and raises their red Solo cups. Most of the footage is lifted directly from Bikini Guillotine, but it’s also obvious that a lot of it was taken from outtakes that weren’t included in that film. There are a lot of scenes where the women clearly aren’t acting, but are instead just sitting around waiting for the next shot to be set up. Members of the crew appear in the background. The shadow of the director is visible more than a few times. The camera rig is sometimes visible. There are also quite a few scenes where the women aren’t filmed from the best possible angle, and that feels rather unfair to them.

(Everyone, regardless of how attractive, has at least one unflattering angle. I’m usually pretty happy with how I photograph, but I know that if someone snaps a picture while my head is turned a certain way, all anyone is going to notice is my nose. A good director — especially one who is directing a movie in which the entire cast is half-naked for the entire running time — doesn’t include unflattering angles in the finished film.)

Because Bikini Guillotine had a nearly incoherent soundtrack, this film handles things by just featuring voice-overs over the scenes of the girls hanging out by the pool. We hear about how, when you’re young, you don’t worry about anything. “Someone says fried chicken and everyone laughs.” We’re also told that, “Gina asks Tina, ‘Why is everything so blue?’ Tina says, ‘Because you’re looking at it too long.’ ‘No, why is everyone blue?’” Wow, that’s deep. It’s the type of weed-fueled nonsense that I thought was profound during my senior year of high school.

When the voice-over isn’t talking about life, it’s talking about the movies. We’re told that the girls are talking about Charlie Chaplin and Josef von Sternberg. Eventually, they start to talk about how much they love Deep Red and the scene where David Hemmings sees his reflection in a pool of blood. Then we’re told that one of the girls is talking about how much she loves the work of John Cassavetes because Cassavetes just captured life without any studio-imposed drama. These are not the type of things that a bunch of 20-year-old girls are going to be talking about while hanging out at the pool. When I was 20, I loved movies, but I still didn’t talk about them while I was rocking a bikini next to a swimming pool. I was usually too busy trying to make sure I was giving everyone my most flattering angle.

The killer eventually shows up about 55 minutes into this 77-minute film. As opposed to the killer in Bikini Guillotine, he just wears a medical mask and carries a knife in this one. At first, I wondered if maybe the girls had been called back to shoot all-new death scenes, but as I watched, it became obvious that the scenes were actually either filmed auditions or rehearsals for the first film. The kills are once again bloodless.

What an odd movie! For all of its flaws, I do have to admit that the out-of-place voice-overs did add a bit of a surreal edge to the action. With the frequent appearances from the film crew and the cameras, one gets the feeling that Hatanaka was either trying to say something about the filmmaking process or, even more likely, he was trying to fool people into thinking he was saying something about the filmmaking process.

This film mostly just made me want to go hang out by the pool on a nice sunny day. Maybe I’ll even talk about Argento.

SOV Horror Review: City of the Vampires (dir by Ron Bonk)

Posted on October 4, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The city of Braddock has a problem.

1993’s City of the Vampires opens with a news report about Braddock. The city appears to be dying, and no one is sure why. The population numbers have plunged. People are scared to go out at night. Most of the people interviewed for the news story talk about how they can’t wait to get out of Braddock. As I watched, I found myself wondering if this was the same Braddock that would later elect John Fetterman as mayor and appear in those Levi’s commercials. The commercials aired around 2009–2010 and were all about how important it was to save the city of Braddock. I remember watching them and thinking, “Why is some Yankee city more worthy of a commercial than the cities that are struggling in the South?”

(Fetterman, at the time, was branded “America’s coolest mayor” by The Guardian. People forget just how much the media loved Fetterman when he was just another predictable liberal.)

As for the movie, it follows Sam Helling (Matthew Jason Walsh) as he explores the city of Braddock at night. He’s looking for his girlfriend Christine (Anne-Marie O’Keefe), but instead he finds himself in a city that has been taken over by vampires. I should mention that some online sites insist the character is named Sam Helsing, which would seem to be a callback to Dracula’s Dr. Van Helsing. Watching the movie, though, it’s made clear that Sam’s last name is indeed Helling. Leave the Van Helsings out of this.

City of the Vampires is a shot-on-video horror film, and it definitely deserves some credit for its ambition. Whereas most SOV horror films were content to just rip off the latest slasher and zombie pictures, City of the Vampires was obviously meant to be a low-budget action epic. There are a few interesting camera angles. There’s a deliberate echo effect on some of the dialogue, the better to give it a supernatural, dreamlike feel. There are several fairly convincing shots of melting faces. Despite the low budget, the filmmakers were obviously trying to make something memorable. One could easily imagine an alternate universe where City of the Vampires launched a whole franchise about vampires taking over American cities in decline. Look out, Gary, Indiana. The bloodsuckers are coming.

That said, it’s still a shot-on-video horror film, and the low budget really does show in more than a few scenes. The film takes place largely at night, it appears to have been shot at night, and there are several scenes so darkly lit that it’s a struggle to make out what’s happening. As cool as the echo effects were, the soundtrack is generally not that clear, and I sometimes found myself straining to hear what people were talking about. Proper lighting and sound recording have been the downfall of many SOV films. They’re the kind of thing people take for granted until they’re gone.

Still, I’ll give this film credit for its ambition. I always appreciate the effort, even if it’s not fully successful.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Amityville La Llorna (dir by Jamie Grefe)

Posted on October 4, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2025’s Amityville La Llorona, a couple (played by director Jamie Grefe and Sloane Tower) move into a house and spend the entire time arguing about every little thing. Eventually, the husband has visions of a mysterious woman (Skya Theobold) and a strange figure who keeps shouting, “Mama! Mama!” The film is only 63 minutes. Unfortunately, the dialogue is largely improvised and it takes forever for anything to actually happen in the movie. I felt every one of those 63 minutes.

Since there’s really not a helluva lot to say about the film, let’s talk about La Llorona.

The legend of La Llorona is a well-known one in Mexico and the southwestern half of the United States. It’s a story that I was told by both my mom and my aunts and, as a result, I never went off with a stranger while I was growing up. Of course, I also had some pretty intense nightmares but that’s kind of the point. If someone tells you the story of La Llorona and you don’t end up having a nightmare about being drowned by a weeping woman, they didn’t tell the story correctly.

La Llorona was originally named Maria. She lived, in a rural village, with her family and she was famous for both her beauty and her virtue. When a wealthy nobleman saw her and immediately proposed to her, Maria accepted. However, the nobleman’s father was upset that his son was marrying into a poor family and he refused to accept Maria as his daughter-in-law. Maria and her husband ended up having two sons and living in a house by the river. Maria’s husband doted on their sons but he ignored her and eventually, Maria learned that he was having an affair.

In a fit of blind rage, Maria drowned her children in the river. After realizing what she had done, Maria died of grief. However, when she arrived at the gates of Heaven, she was asked why her children were not with her. When Maria explained that she had lost them, she was told that she would not be allowed to enter Heaven until she found them. Now, known as La Llorona (or “the weeping woman”), she wanders the Earth, crying and looking for her children.

Where does one find La Llorona? It depends on who is telling the story. Some stories say that you’ll only see her near a body of water. My mom used to tell me that La Llorona could be anywhere, including under my bed or in the bedroom closet. Regardless of where you might find her, La Llorona is always wearing her wedding dress and she’s always sobbing. Approach her and she’ll grab you and either kidnap you or drown you, all the while begging for forgiveness. Many have seen La Llorona but few have survived to tell the story.

“And that is why we do not talk to strangers,” my mother would say while I looked out the bedroom window, searching for the sight of La Llorona walking through the Texas night.

Though Skya Theobold’s character is credited as being La Llorona in Amityville La Llorana, she doesn’t have much in common with the true La Llorona. Then again, this film also has nothing to do with any of the previous Amityville films. Amityville, as either a town or franchise, is never mentioned in this film. Normally, I’m willing to cut an exploitation film a little bit of slack when it comes to having a misleading title. Usually, that’s just a part of the game. In this case, though, it just serves to remind me of how cool a film about the real La Llorona visiting the real Amityville house would have been.

As I mentioned earlier, the dialogue in this film appears to have been improvised. One of the unfortunate things about improv is that everyone thinks that can they do it. They think that as long as they’re given a scene to play, they’ll be able to come up with appropriately compelling dialogue. This film proves that is not always the case. As I watched Amityville La Llorona, I found myself hoping that Michael Scott would kick open a door and shout, “MICHAEL SCARN, FBI!”

Michael Scarn in Amityville. Now that would be a movie!

Previous TSL Amityville Reviews:

Lifetime For October: Surviving The Sleepover (dir by Patricia Fontain)

Posted on October 4, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When I was 11 years old, I spent about a month and a half living in a motel with my mom and my sisters. We were between homes, and since my mom didn’t really have the money to pay for our rooms, she and my two oldest sisters would work as maids during the day while my sister Erin and I stayed in our own room and watched stuff on the television that we probably shouldn’t have been watching. (“What are you watching!?” Mom would say as either Erin or I grabbed the remote and tried to get the TV off of HBO as quickly as possible.)

In retrospect, I know that all probably sounds very dramatic and traumatic, but I have to admit that, at the time, it just felt like an adventure. I was jealous of my mom and my sisters getting to wear uniforms every day and basically go anywhere they wanted in the motel. I would ask my mom and sisters about what they found in the rooms they had to clean, and I would beg for a chance to go with them because I figured it had to be fun to see how other people lived. They always refused. Years later, my sister Megan would tell me that they usually just found discarded underwear, used condoms, and half-eaten fast food.

Sometimes I would sit in the front lobby, bothering whoever was working behind the desk and trying to overhear conversations. I loved watching the various people who checked in and out of the motel, and I would imagine amazing identities and life stories for them. At night, I would listen for sounds coming from other rooms. One time, the police were called because the people below us were fighting, and I remember watching the reflection of the red lights flashing across the walls of my room.

That said, I think my main memory of living at that motel was that there was a creek right next to the hotel (though I always envision it as a raging river whenever I think back to those days), and on the other side of that creek there was a drive-in movie theater. Every night, I would go out on the balcony and look into the distance, at the silent images flickering across the giant screens. The fact that I couldn’t actually hear what Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were saying only made the experience more enjoyable. I could make up my own stories to go along with the images. Watching those movies became a ritual for me. I had to watch every night, at the same time, and if anyone tried to keep me from doing so, I would throw a fit. Though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, for me that drive-in came to represent stability.

I found myself thinking back to those days as I watched Surviving the Sleepover, a Lifetime film from 2024. Hannah (Sloan Mannino) is a teenage girl who has been living in a motel with her mother (Dawn Marie) ever since they moved to a new town. Hannah, whose father was killed in a fire, does not have any sisters or a drive-in to keep her company. Instead, she uploads videos and spends her time missing all of her friends. However, when popular girl Melissa (Jenna Hogan) invites Hannah to a sleepover, it seems like things might be looking up.

Of course, they’re not.

Melissa is mean as well as popular. Melissa is also obsessed with her stepbrother (Joshua Bertell), and when it becomes apparent that he likes Hannah, Melissa goes off the deep end. Soon Melissa is threatening her guests with a knife, tying people up in the attic, and basically being a very bad host.

This is an enjoyably berserk little Lifetime film, one that understands the importance of embracing the melodrama. Jenna Hogan gives an entertaining performance as the unhinged Melissa. From the moment she complained that Hannah was still “salty” just because Melissa had attempted to drown her earlier, I knew this film was going to be a Lifetime classic.

And yet, as I watched the film, my main thought was that this all could have been avoided if the nation’s drive-ins hadn’t closed. When you don’t have a drive-in theater to visit, you end up threatening people at sleepovers. That’s just the truth of the matter.

There aren’t many drive-ins left.

Protect them at all costs.