October Hacks: Don’t Go In The Woods …. Alone (dir by James Byran)

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Don’t watch this movie …. alone.

Or with a group.

Don’t do it!

Seriously, this is probably going to be the worst and most rushed review that I’ve ever written because I spent 80 minutes watching this film and I really don’t want to spend another 80 writing about it. First released in 1981, Don’t Go In The Woods …. Alone is the story of a maniac (Tom Drury) who looks like some sort of crazed Barbarian cosplayer and who spends his time hunting people in the Rocky Mountains. He’ll kill just about anyone that he comes across and he’ll laugh while he does it. We don’t even find out much about why he’s killing but he certainly seems to enjoy it. Ten minutes into the film, he’s already killed a woman running in a creek and a bird watcher wearing a bow-tie.

The Rockies are full of campers. The Maniac takes out a painter. The Maniac takes out a honeymooning couple who thought it would be a good idea to stop their van in the middle of the woods. He follows a group of campers. Craig (James Haydn) is an experienced camper and he gets to utter the film’s title. His girlfriend (Angie Brown) likes to play surprisingly mean-spirited pranks. Of course, Craig’s idea of a good time is trap his girlfriend in a sleeping bag and hang her from a tree until she cries uncle.

And then there’s Peter (Jack McClelland), who is not an experienced camper. Peter is about as close as this film has to a hero but he’s a remarkably unlikable hero. He spends way too much time screaming and whining and crying. Peter’s girlfriend is Ingrid (Mary Gail Artz) and she’s the type of girlfriend who screams, “Peter!” while Peter tries to hide from the maniac.

It’s an oddly paced film. The film really ends around the 50 minute mark but there’s about 30 minutes of filler afterwards which pads out of the film’s running time. The final third of the film is basically footage of the sheriff and his idiot deputies wandering around the Rockies and talking about how they haven’t been able to find anything. How have they not been able to find anything? The Maniac makes absolutely no effort to hide his existence.

It’s poorly acted and terribly written and the cinematography is so dark and grainy that it’s sometimes hard to see what’s happening on the screen. That said, the film features a lot of blood and I imagine that’s why it has something of a cult following. This is one of those slasher films where it’s obvious that the majority of the budget went to purchasing fake blood and entrails. Limbs are cut off. Blood splatters all across the countryside. The Maniac is truly savage when he attacks and, if the film itself wasn’t so inept, he would be a truly terrifying character.

Don’t Go In The Woods …. Alone was amongst the film that were banned in the UK for being too violent. I’ve never understood why the censors felt it would be a good idea to refer to these films as being on the “video nasty list.” Who wouldn’t want to watch a movie called a video nasty? In the end, the attempts to ban this film are probably the main reason why the film is still remembered today. It’s certainly not for the film’s quality.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: My Friends Need Killing (dir by Paul Leder)

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

At the start of 1976’s My Friends Need Killing, Gene Kline (Greg Mullavey) and his wife, Laura (Meredith MacRae) lie in bed together. Gene can’t sleep. He’s haunted by the sounds of gunfire and explosions and people barking out orders at him. A Vietnam vet, Gene has been seeing a Dr. MacLaine (Eric Morris) for help with dealing with his wartime PTSD but it hasn’t done him much good. Without telling Laura, Gene has been sending letters to the former members of his platoon, letting them know that he will soon be visiting them in each of their home cities. Gene says that he’s just dropping by for a visit but the reality is that Gene has decided that his friends need killing.

Without telling his wife, Gene leaves home in the morning and heads to San Francisco. While Laura is looking at old pictures of Gene and having flashbacks to their perfect wedding day, Gene is stalking the people with whom he committed an atrocity in Vietnam. Like Gene, the former members of his platoon have struggled to adjust to returning home. One lives in Texas, loves to hunt, and brags about how he never thinks about the war. Another has found work as a trucker. Another has a nice big house and a pregnant wife and still suffers from flashbacks of his own. Perhaps the most tragic of Gene’s friends is Les Drago (Roger Cruz), who is now a performance artist and an anti-war activist and who recites Lady MacBeth’s “out damn spot” speech while discussing his activities during the war.

My Friends Need Killing is a short but intense movie. It may only have a 73-minute running time and a portion of that running time may be taken up with filler but Gene pursues his mission with a relentless and ruthless determination that is ultimately very unsettling to watch. As played by Greg Mullavey, Gene wanders through the film with the thousand-yard stare of a man who has truly snapped. Years after the war, he can’t forgive anyone, including himself. To him, it doesn’t matter that someone like Les returned from Vietnam and decided to dedicate his life to preventing another pointless war. What matters to Gene is getting vengeance on those who he blames for his sins. Even though the film makes clear that Gene’s actions are due to his experiences during the war, Gene himself never becomes a sympathetic figure. He’s too vicious in his murders, even targeting the wife of one of his platoonmates.

Adding to the film’s unsettling and grim atmosphere is the film’s rather ragged editing. Scenes begin and end abruptly, sometimes in mid-conversation. Each murder is followed by a shot of an airplane landing in another city as Gene continues his mission. Scenes of Gene having flashbacks are haphazardly mixed with scenes of Laura and Dr. MacLaine trying to figure out where Gene has disappeared to. One is tempted to smile at the film’s score, which sounds more appropriate for a 70s cop show than a movie about a murderous vet, but even the score ultimately adds to the film’s off-center feel. The score feels as out-of-place as the happiness of his friends does to Gene. My Friends Need Killing ultimately feels like a film about a world that is spiraling out of control. The film ends on a truly odd note, one that suggests that there is hope for the future, even if there’s no place for Gene in it.

Much like Bob Clark’s Deathdream, My Friends Need Killing suggested that mainstream America would never be ready to fully accept what happened in Vietnam.

Horror Scenes That I Love: Doug Bradley Makes His Debut As Pinhead in Hellraiser

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Born in Liverpool, actor Doug Bradley is a longtime personal friend to author Clive Barker and appeared in Barker’s short film Salome, playing the role of King Herod. When Barker was making his feature directorial debut with 1987’s Hellraiser and he needed someone to play the head Cenobite, he turned once again to Bradley and the result was one of the most iconic horror characters of all time.

While the Cenobites may have all had disturbing physical features, what truly made them frightening was their arrogant disdain for anyone who was foolish enough to summon them. Bradley perfectly portrayed Pinhead’s haughty arrogance, starting with his very first appearance in Hellraiser.

When Bradley as Pinhead says, “We’ll tear your soul apart,” the viewer has no doubt that he means every word of it.

October True Crime: Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story (dir by Peter Levin)

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Made for television in 1992, Overkill: The Aileen Wuronos Story opens with Aileen (Jean Smart) and her friend, Tyria Moore (Park Overall), hitchhiking their way through Florida. Aileen is outspoken and unpredictable, quick to lose her temper with anyone who doesn’t give her a ride or money and also very possessive of Tyria. Tyria is naïve and a bit spacey, though she is smart enough to have figured out that Aileen is financing their trip through sex work.

Of course, if you’ve seen Monster, you already know the story of Aileen and Tyria and you also know that Aileen is eventually going to end up in a lot of trouble and Tyria is going to be pressured to betray her. Monster made it clear that Aileen and Tyria were a romantic couple and it even suggests that, for all of her crimes, Aileen sincerely loved Tyria. Overkill, probably due to being a made-for-television movie from the 90s, treats Aileen and Tyria’s relationship a bit more ambiguously. While Aileen is portrayed as being very possessive and very protective of Tyria, their relationship is portrayed as being more of a roommate situation than a romantic one. Indeed, Aileen is often portrayed as being almost stalkerish in her behavior towards Tyria. Aileen comes across as being much more interested in Tyria than Tyria is in Aileen.

While Aileen and Tyria travel across Florida, men are turning up dead up and down the interstates. The victims were all shot and they were all middle-class, white professionals. Most of them are found in circumstances that suggested that they had picked someone up and that person subsequently shot and then robbed them. When Detective Brian Munster (Brion James) suggests that all of the men could have fallen victim to a female serial killer, his colleagues are skeptical. Everyone knows that serial killers are always men. But Munster continues to insist that the murderer must be a woman and soon, he comes to suspect that the killer could be Aileen. However, all of the evidence that Brian has is circumstantial and it won’t be enough to get a conviction. He and the member of his investigative team start to watch Aileen, waiting for her to make a mistake that will give them what they need to make an arrest….

After she was convicted of murdering seven men, Aileen Wournos claimed that the police always knew that she was the one committing the murders but that they didn’t arrest her because they wanted to reap the publicity from pursuing America’s first female serial killer. As evidence, she cited this movie and it must be admitted that this movie does feature a lot of scenes of Munster and his detectives waiting for Aileen to make her next move. That said, one would think that Overkill would be the last movie that Aileen would want to bring attention to because the film essentially presents Aileen Wournos as being a petulant and trashy psychopath who turned to crime because she was too stupid to do anything else with her life. If Monster portrayed Aileen as being someone who had been so damaged by society that she could no longer function, Overkill portrays Aileen as being someone who uses her childhood trauma as a convenient excuse for her own antisocial tendencies.

Overkill is a considerably more simplistic portrayal of Aileen’s crimes than Monster. That said, Jean Smart does a good job in the role and is convincingly angry at the world. Overkill is more about the effort to catch Aileen than Aileen herself and character actor Brion James, who usually played villains over the course of his career (like Leon in Blade Runner and the killer in The Horror Show), makes for a convincingly no-nonsense cop. Overkill is a well-made and well-acted film, even if it does ultimately feel a bit shallow in its storytelling.

Horror Film Review: Lake of Dracula (dir by Michio Yamamoto)

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

All of her life, Akiko (Midori Fujita) has been haunted by a dream in which, as a little girl, she followed her dog into an abandoned house and ran into a pale man (Mori Kishida) who had golden eyes and fangs for teeth. Even living a somewhat idyllic life on the shores of a lovely lake and dating a handsome young doctor (Osahide Takahashi), Akiko cannot shake the feeling that what she has been telling herself was a dream may have actually happened to her.

One day, a large crate is sent to a nearby boat operator. When the man opens the crate, he discovers that it contains a coffin. Can you guess what’s in that coffin? Soon strange things are happening all around town. Bodies start to show up at the hospital with bite marks on their necks. Akiko’s dog disappears and the formerly friendly boat operator suddenly starts to act in an aggressive manner. Even worse, Akiko’s sister, Natsuko (Sanae Emi), vanishes. Akiko comes to believe that it is somehow all linked to her dream, which might not have been a dream at all. She and her boyfriend head back to her hometown, searching for the house from her dreams so that they may finally find out the truth about the pale man with the golden eyes and fangs and…. well, I don’t know why exactly they think they have to find out the truth. It’s pretty obvious that he’s a vampire, right? I mean, the fangs were kind of a dead giveaway.

When I came across the 1971 film, Lake of Dracula, on Tubi, my initial response was to say, “Oh, cool! A Japanese Dracula film! I wonder what that’s going to be like!” Having watched the film, I can say that, along with being a Japanese Dracula film, Lake of Dracula is also an extremely conventional vampire film. This is one of those films where it’s so obvious from the start that the villain is a vampire that you can’t help but get a bit annoyed at the other characters for not figuring it out as quickly as you did. While I’m not really sure if the vampire in the film is meant to be the Dracula (and, despite the title, I’m actually pretty sure that he’s not), the character is obviously a vampire and, beyond the golden eyes, this film doesn’t really bring anything new to the vampire mythos. If you’re hoping that this film will feature the hopping vampires that made films like Kung Fu Zombie so memorable, you’re destined to be disappointed.

That said, it’s a lovely film to look at, full of vibrant colors and properly ominous shadows and the golden eyes are definitely a memorable effect. The film is full of nicely creepy locations, with the house from Akiko’s dream being exactly the type of place that would inspire a lifetime full of nightmares. It’s a conventional film but it’s full of genuine melancholy and a good deal of ominous atmosphere, all of which keeps the film watchable even if it never quite takes the viewer by surprise.

4 Shots From 4 Horror Films: Special Roy Ward Baker Edition

Posted on October 3, 2023 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.

This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order! That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!

Today’s director is Roy Ward Baker, one of the masters of Hammer and Amicus horror!

4 Shots From 4 Roy Ward Baker Films

Quatermass and the Pitt (1967, dir by Roy Ward Baker, DP: Arthur Grant)

The Vampire Lovers (1970, dir by Roy Ward Baker, DP: Moray Grant)

Scars of Dracula (1970, dir by Roy Ward Baker, DP: Moray Grant)

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974, dir by Roy Ward Baker, DP; John Wilcox and Roy Ford)

Horror Film Review: Waxwork (dir by Anthony Hickox)

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1988, Waxwork asks the audience with a very important question.

Let’s say that you and your best friend were walking to school one day when you suddenly noticed a gigantic mansion that you had never seen before, sitting in the middle of your neighborhood. And what if a tall, somewhat sinister Englishman (played by David Warner, none the less) suddenly appeared out of nowhere and told you that the mansion was actually a waxwork. And what if that Englishman than invited you to come to the waxwork at midnight and specifically asked you to come in a group of 6. Would you do it?

Now, I know that your first instinct is to say, “Of course, I wouldn’t!” That’s the type of answer that we’ve been conditioned to give because no one wants to admit that they can be as dumb as a character in a horror movie. But really, I would go. Especially if, like the characters in Waxwork, I was a teenager. (Actually, most of the characters in Waxwork are described as being college students but they all act like high school students and their college appears to be a high school so draw your own conclusions.) When you’re a certain age, you feel like you’re immortal and an invitation to hang out in a creepy building with a bunch of strangers at midnight feels totally reasonable.

Anyway, four rich kids — Mark (Zach Galligan), China (Michelle Johnson), Sarah (Deborah Foreman), and Tony (Dana Ashbrook, a year before he was cast as Laura Palmer’s boyfriend in Twin Peaks) — visit the waxwork at midnight. What they discover is that the building is full of macabre exhibits that recreate various moments from horror history. There’s werewolves, vampires, and Jack the Ripper. There’s also the Marquis de Sade, a figure that the seemingly innocent Sarah becomes fascinated with. And, as two of the visitors discover, stepping past the red rope and entering an exhibit transports them into an alternate world where they become the victim of the star of each display.

Not surprisingly, the film is at its best when imagining the world inside each exhibit. Each exhibit has its own backstory and its own set of guest stars. John Rhys-Davies shows up as a werewolf. Miles O’Keeffe is a properly urbane Count Dracula. J. Kenneth Campbell plays the Marquis de Sade, who the film imagines as a swashbuckling sadist. That said, I think the most effectively frightening exhibit was one that featured no special guest stars but a very determined and very strong mummy.

What’s going on at the waxwork!? As explained by Sir Wilfred (Patrick Macnee, bringing some welcome wit and style to the film), it’s all a part of a scheme to bring the most evil beings ever back into existence so that they can conquer the world. It’s important that none of the waxworks be allowed to enter the real world and soon, Sir Wilfred and his ragtag army are laying siege to the waxwork and bringing things to an apocalyptic conclusion. The final battle is a bit haphazardly edited and it’s impossible to really keep track of who is fighting on which side. (Indeed, I’m still not sure where Sir Wilfred even found his army.) But it does feature plenty of in-jokes for horror fans, including a cameo appearance by the carnivorous plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

Waxwork is entertaining film. It doesn’t take itself particularly seriously and, indeed, Mark, China, Sarah, Tony, and all of their friends feel as if they could just as easily have been found in the pages of a Bret Easton Ellis novel about pretty but vapid alcoholics. Mark is the type who gets his maid to write his term papers. Tony just wants to drink (but, because he’s played by the adorable Dana Ashbrook, he’s still the most likable character in the film). China says, “I do what I want, when I want,” when confronted about cheating on her boyfriend. Sarah is the “innocent” one but just seeing the words “Marquis de Sade” causes her to swoon. Dropping these four idiots into a situation where the fate of the world is at stake feels like a wonderfully sardonic cosmic joke.

In the end, the true pleasure of Waxwork is watching old pros like David Warner, Patrick Macnee, and the exhibit guest stars hamming it up. Macnee, in particular, seems to enjoy leading the final charge against the forces of evil and, indeed, it’s hard not to wish that he had even more screen time than he did. David Warner, meanwhile, rolls his eyes at just how difficult it can be to bring the 18 most evil figure in history back to life. It’s hard work but I guess someone has to do it!

Horror Film Review: The Invisible Man Returns (dir by Joe May)

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1940’s The Invisible Man Returns opens with Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe (Vincent Price) sitting on Death Row. Convicted of the murder of his brother, Radcliffe is due to soon be executed. Radcliffe claims that he was framed and his girlfriend, Helen Manson (Nan Grey), has spent the past week of her life begging for someone to order a stay on the execution. However, with the home secretary out of the country, there is no hope of a reprieve.

Dr. Frank Griffin (John Sutton), brother of the original Invisible Man, visits Radcliffe in prison and gives him the same serum that his brother previously developed. Now invisible, Radcliffe is able to escape from the prison. Radcliffe is determined to prove his innocence but Dr. Griffin is more concerned with developing a way to reverse the serum’s effects before Radcliffe is driven insane, just as the original Invisible Man was. Radcliffe becomes convinced that his brother was murdered by their cousin, Ricard Cobb (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) but is Radcliffe correct or is the serum just making him paranoid? With Inspector Sampson (Cecil Kellaway) searching for Radcliffe and fully aware of what effects the serum are going to have on his mind, can Radcliffe clear his name before he loses his sanity?

The Invisible Man Returns went into production after the success of Son of Frankenstein proved that there was a market for sequels to previously successful horror films. (Yes, there was a time when sequels were not an automatic thing.) This was also one of the first horror films in which Vincent Price made an appearance. (Today, we’re so used to the image of Vincent Price as a somewhat campy horror icon that it’s easy to forget that he originally started his career as a romantic leading man and was even seriously considered for the role of Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind.) As he spends the majority of the film wearing the same tight bandages that hid Claude Rain in the first film, Price’s actual face is only visible for slightly less than a minute and, without his famous mustache, it’s actually rather difficult to recognize him. That said, there’s no mistaking Price’s voice, heard as the invisible Radcliffe bitterly complains about everything from a barking dog to other people’s doubts about Cobb being the murderer. While this film does find Price in a slightly more subtle mood than many of us horror fans are used to, it still features plenty of hints of what the future would hold.

I enjoyed The Invisible Man Returns, which featured some witty invisibility sequences (watch invisible Vincent Price toss off those clothes!) and also managed to take the story’s violence about as far as it could without violating the production code. While it’s always a pleasure to watch any film featuring Vincent Price, I also liked the performance of Cecil Kellaway, who played the inspector as being the epitome of the the upstanding but dryly humorous British policeman. One gets the feeling that absolutely nothing could ever take the Inspector by surprise …. not even an Invisible Man!

Previous Universal Horror Reviews:

Horror on the Lens: The Unknown (dir by Tod Browning)

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1927, The Unknown tells the story of circus performer Alonzo the Armless (Lon Chaney, Sr.). As you might guess from his name, everyone thinks that Alonzo is armless. Of course, he’s not. He’s just a contortionist who pretends to have no arms. People thinking that he has no arms gives him the perfect alibi whenever he has to strangle someone.

However, Alonzo has fallen in love with Nanon (Joan Crawford), his beautiful circus assistant. Unfortunately, Malabar the Mighty (Norman Kerry) is also in love with her and there’s no way that Alonzo could allow her to get too close because then she might discover that he not only has arms but that his hand has an unusual deformity that would identify Alonzo as the man who strangled Nanon’s father.

Alonzo’s solution? Maybe he could just get someone to amputate his arms for real! But will that be enough for him to win Nanon away from Malbar? Or will he pursue an even more macabre plan to get Malabar out of the picture?

The Unknown was, for years, considered to be a lost film. In 1968, a 49-minute print of the film was found in France. That’s the version that I’m sharing here. Reportedly, several early scenes were missing but those scenes were not important to the overall story. Even in truncucated form, The Unknown is a wonderfully surreal and atmospheric film and it’s widely considered to be the best of Tod Browning and Lon Chaney’s collaborations. Since this film was made in the age before CGI, whenever Alonzo hides his arms, Chaney was having to do the same thing. This is one of Chaney’s best performances. Alonzo is both frightening and rather sad in his way. Having won the role over Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford was 18 when she played Nanon.

Enjoy!

October Positivity: Heaven’s Heroes (dir by Donald W. Thompson)

Posted on October 2, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1980 film, Heaven’s Heroes, is a cop film that takes place in Des Moines, Iowa!

Now, it’s tempting to make a joke about a film taking place on the “mean streets of Des Moines” and I know that I did when the film started and I saw that it was another Russell S. Doughten production. In the late 70s and early 80s, Doughten directed several low-budget faith-based films, most of them shot on location in Iowa. (I previously reviewed Doughten’s Nite Song, among others.) Though Doughten is only credited as executive producer on Heaven’s Heroes, it features all the hallmarks of Doughten’s other films. The budget is low, some of the actors are a bit amateurish, and the ultimate message is undeniably heartfelt. What Doughten’s film may have lacked in technical polish, they made up for sincerity.

To its credit, Heaven’s Heroes doesn’t try to present Des Moines as being any more edgy that it actually is. But the film makes the point that a cop’s life can be dangerous, even in a relatively quiet town like Des Moines. In fact, the film opens with police responding to the shooting of Officer David Hill (played by David Ralphe). His wife, Cindy (Heidi Vaughn), is taken to the hospital where she talks to the comatose David until he dies. The doctor explains that if the bullet had entered David’s head just a few inches higher, his life probably could have been saved.

The rest of the film is taken up with flashbacks to David’s life before he was shot. We watch as he and Cindy meet each other in college. A helicopter hovering over a Des Moines mall leads to a flash to David’s service in Vietnam. His partner (James O’Hagen) remembers the training that he went through with David. Through it all, David comes across as the ideal cop, the type who treats everyone fairly and who doesn’t draw his gun unless it’s absolutely necessary. (At one point, David does fire at a man who is holding a shotgun, just to miss. Later, he discovers that the man was only holding the shotgun for self-defense.) David saves the life of a child who has swallowed a button but later finds himself unable to help another child who has been hit by a drunk driver. Some people thank David and some people call him a pig. A lot of the film deals with David and his partner trying to deal with the stress of their job. There’s an interesting scene, early on, in which a lecturer at the Academy explains that a good cop has to be able to deal with the frustrations of the job without taking those frustrations out on the public. He warns about giving into paranoia and assuming that everyone is looking to commit a crime. David struggles with stress but never gives in. Of course, it’s a religious film so David gives all the credit for his success to God and, when he’s later shot, his wife takes solace in the idea that David has gone to Heaven. Your mileage may vary on that but no one can deny the sincerity of the film’s simple message. The film, which was based on a true story, was shot on location in Des Moines and featured a lot of actual Des Moines police officers. The acting is sometimes amateurish but they all bring an authenticity to their roles.

It’s interesting to compare the cops in this 1980 film to the cops of today. None of the cops in Heaven’s Heroes wear body armor. None of them patrol the streets in modified tanks. They don’t shout at suspects or bark orders at bystanders. They’re not bulked-up gym rats with shaved heads. Though both David and his partner did serve in the military, both of them understand that they’re not fighting a war on the streets of Des Moines. Instead, they are there to protect the citizens. They’re the ideal cops and sadly, they’re almost unrecognizable when compared to much of what we see today.