Tag Archives: Horror

Horror on the Lens: Raiders of the Living Dead (dir by Samuel M. Sherman and Brett Piper)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

 

Hi there and welcome to October!  This is our favorite time of the year here at the Shattered Lens because October is horror month.  For the past three years, we have celebrated every October by reviewing and showing some of our favorite horror movies, shows, books, and music.  That’s a tradition that I’m looking forward to helping to continue this year.

Today, we’ve got the 1986 zombie/sci-fi/action epic, Raiders of the Living Dead!

It’s the story of a creepy boy, a laser gun, a reporter, and a bunch of zombies.  There’s a mad scientist involved, too.  There always is.  The movie opens with a truck being hijacked and then the action shifts to a power plant and, honestly, I have no idea what any of it means.  If nothing else, it’s a film that you watch and you can’t help but admire the fact that it somehow got made and went on to find a small but kind of appreciative cult audience.  It’s just a very strange film and one that simply most be watched in October.

Enjoy!

Horror Song of the Day: The Dead Are After Me by George Edward Lott

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The dead!  Are after me!

The 1986 film, Raiders of the Living Dead, features what may be the greatest song ever written about zombies.  For your listening pleasure, here is George Edward Lott’s The Dead Are After Me!

Horror Scenes That I Love: Dr. Loomis Inspects The Classroom In Halloween 2

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s scene that I love comes from the 1981 sequel, Halloween II.

In this creepy scene, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and the police take a look at a classroom that Michael Myers has turned into his own personal art studio.  On the front board, written in blood, is SAMHAIN.  Loomis’s inspection is interrupted by the arrival of Nurse Chambers, who has been sent to get Loomis out of Haddonfield.

(People need to remember what David Gordon Green and his stupid reboot took away from us.  Shame on you, David Gordon Green!)

As far as I’m concerned, Laurie and Michael will always be siblings and Dr. Loomis will always be the fractured heart of the series.

4 Shots From 4 Horror Films: October 6th

Posted on 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!

4 Shots From 4 Horror Films

Blood and Black Lace (1964, dir by Mario Bava, DP: Ubaldo Terzano)

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

Dellamorte Dellamore (1994, dir by Michele Soavi, DP: Mauro Marchetti)

Sleepless (2001, dir by Dario Argento, DP: Ronnie Taylor)

 

Horror On TV: Fear Itself 1.5 “Eater” (dir by Stuart Gordon)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

On tonight’s episode of Fear Itself, a young police officer (Elisabeth Moss) finds herself assigned to be a part of a detail that is guarding a serial killer cannibal named Duane Mellor (Stephen R. Hart).  As the night goes on, strange things start to happen and it becomes apparent that Mellor has powers and habits that go beyond just eating people.

You may have noticed that I skipped the fourth episode of Fear Itself.  That episode was In Sickness and In Health and it was about a bride-to-be who, on her wedding day, receives a note that reads, “The person you are marrying is a serial killer.”  It all leads to a pretty predictable twist.  The reason why I decided not to post that episode is because it was written by Victor Salva, a filmmaker who sexually abused the 12 year-old star of his first film and who, after serving 15 months in prison, somehow went on to continue making movies.  I’ve made a personal decision not to review anything involving Victor Salva.  That said, I do think everyone has to make their own decision as far as problematic filmmakers are concerned so I will say that the episode is on YouTube if you want to watch it.

As for Eater, it’s an intense and atmospheric episode that benefits from Stuart Gordon’s strong direction and which features good performances from both Moss and Hart.  You can watch it below!

 

October Hacks: Buried Alive (dir by Gerard Kikoine)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1990’s Buried Alive may be the worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ever filmed.

The film takes place at the Ravenscroft Institute, a former mental asylum founded by the fearsome Jacob Julian (John Carradine). Jacob’s son, Gary (Robert Vaughn), took over the Institute after his father’s death, treated his patients with kindness and compassion, and preached about the need for “freedom.” Now, Gary has transformed Ravenscroft into an all-girls school for juvenile delinquents. The students worship him because he tells them that nothing is their fault and that they deserve to live the life they want. His newest teacher, Janet (Karen Lorre), is a fan as well. In fact, she soon finds herself falling in love with Gary.

However, from the minute Janet shows up at Ravenscroft, she starts having strange visions. She sees thousands of ants crawling over her feet. She hears strange sounds in the walls. At one point, an arm reaches out of a toilet and tries to grab her. She thinks she sees a distinguished Shakespearean character actor sealed behind a wall. Is she losing her mind, or has she stumbled across something more sinister?

Now, when I say that Buried Alive is one of the worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptations I’ve ever seen, understand that it is not the fault of the cast. There are some truly talented people in this film. A young Nia Long plays a student named Fingers. Ginger Lynn Allen has fun playing a bully named Debbie. Robert Vaughn is appropriately intense as Gary, and John Carradine is… well, he’s John Carradine. This was one of Carradine’s final films, and he actually died before it was released. Obviously, Carradine doesn’t do much, but, as was often the case, his intimidating screen presence meant that he didn’t have to do much to make an impression. He just had to exist. Donald Pleasence plays Dr. Schaeffer, a German-accented member of the staff who wears round glasses and an ill-fitting toupee and who pops up occasionally to tell Janet not to wander around at night. Pleasence was obviously not in the best of health when he played Schaeffer, but, much like Carradine, his eccentric presence gives the film some much-needed atmosphere, and there is a fairly effective twist involving his character. Finally, there’s an absolutely adorable black cat that randomly appears throughout the film. It’s the film’s way of acknowledging Edgar Allan Poe, I imagine.

No, the failure of Buried Alive is not due to the cast. It’s really not even due to the script, which borrows the idea of someone being buried alive and not much else from the Poe story. Instead, the fault almost entirely rests with the film’s direction. The story unfolds with little momentum, some scenes meander while others are over far too quickly, and the director seems to think that filming anyone in an extreme close-up will automatically make them creepy. There are a few gross sequences involving a bunch of ants and the film has a few slasher moments, like the silencing of one annoying victim via a garden tool to the forehead , but otherwise there’s little horror and next to no suspense. I actually found myself getting angry over how poorly directed this film was.

The cast deserved better.

SOV Horror Review: Spine (dir by John Howard and Justin Simmonds)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1986 Shot-on-Video film Spine, a killer is stalking …. well, to be honest, I’m not sure which state this movie is supposed to be taking place in.  Some of the shots feature mountains in the background so it’s definitely not Texas.  I’m going to guess that the film was shot in California, despite the fact that some of performers had Southern accents.

Anyway, a killer is stalking California.  His victims are all nurses who stand 5’3.  He attacks them at home.  He ties them up in a way that causes them to strangle themselves when they struggle.  He cuts out their spinal cords.  Using his victim’s own bloody hands, he writes “LINDA” on the wall.  None of the victims are named Linda.

Who could this killer be?

Well, we know from the beginning.  This film is not a whodunit,  From the start, we see that the killer is Lawrence Ashton (R. Eric Huxley), a hulking man who has a Graham Platner-style beard and who apparently thinks that every nurse that he sees is his former girlfriend, Linda.  He holds Linda responsible for the death of his mother and he’s seeking revenge.

Who can stop Ashton?  How about a cop who does things his way!?  Sam Joffrey (Carl Elliott) doesn’t have time to go by the book!  He’s got nurses to save!

I spent most of this film thinking that Sam Joffrey was terrible at his job.  There was a lengthy and rather distasteful sequence in which Ashton menaced two nurses.  The whole thing seemed to go on forever and I found myself wondering just what exactly our “hero” was doing while all of this was going on.  However, the entire sequence turned out to be just a nightmare.  Really, movie?  I mean, again, I thought the whole sequence went on for way too long and that the film seemed to be celebrating the violence more than condemning it but, if you’re going film something like that, you should at least commit to it.  If you’re going to make a gory film about a sadistic murderer, there’s no excuse for hand-waving away the bloodiest part of the movie by making it “just a dream.”

Spine has all of the typical SOV flaws.  Even though it’s only 72 minutes long, I struggled to pay attention to it.  For the most part, the dialogue was either too muffled or too loud for me to really be able to follow any of the conversations.  (Even today, amateur filmmakers tend to underrate the importance of a clean soundtrack.)  The actors were pretty amateurish.  The dialogue had that “everyone told me this line was funny so we’re not cutting it from the script” feel that is such an integral part of the SOV experience.

That said, I have a weakness for these SOV films.  A part of it’s because I’m a history nerd and this film allowed me see just how tacky 1986 could be.  It’s one thing to shoot a scene on a soundstage that’s been designed to look like a living room.  It’s another thing to shoot a scene in an actual living room that has a really ugly couch as a centerpiece.  Finally, Spine actually did have an effective score.  In the usual SOV tradition, it was a synth score but it still did a good job of creating a slight feeling of unease.

There are better SOV films than Spine but there are worse ones as well.  Spine is right in the forgettable middle.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: American Rickshaw (dir by Sergio Martino)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1989’s American Rickshaw opens in Florida. Scott Edwards (played by Olympic gymnast Mitch Gaylord) is a college student who pays the bills by pulling a rickshaw through the streets of Miami. One day, he sees an elderly Asian woman (Michi Koba) sitting by herself at a bus stop. When it starts to rain, he offers her a free ride home. Though Scott was just being nice, it turns out that this is the most important thing he’s ever done. The woman is a witch, and when Scott is subsequently implicated in the murder of the son of televangelist Rev. Mortom (Donald Pleasence), she uses her powers to help him escape both the police and the hitman trying to track him down. The witch, aided by both a cat and a cobra, has a history of her own with the duplicitous Rev. Mortom.

American Rickshaw is an odd hybrid of a film. In many ways, it’s a standard action film. Gaylord plays Scott as a lovable loser who gets set up by a stripper named Joanna (Victoria Prouty) and Jason Mortom (Gregg Todd Davis). While Joanna seduces Scott on a boat, Jason hides behind a two-way mirror with a video camera. When Scott hears Jason behind the mirror, he breaks Jason’s camera and leaves the boat with a videotape he thinks features him and Joanna. Only later does he discover that he grabbed the wrong tape. When Scott returns for the correct tape, he discovers that Jason has been murdered. With the hitmen determined to get the tape Scott did take, he ends up getting chased all over Miami.

At the same time, it’s a horror film. The witch uses her powers to help Scott, which means there are scenes of hitmen suddenly seeing a snake approaching them. The witch’s cat also shows up and stares at the ocean until Scott finally realizes he’s meant to dive in so he can find a clue. It’s established that the witch has a magical past with the demonic Rev. Mortom and that Mortom himself is involved in his own son’s murder. “He’s the devil!” Mortom’s wife (Judy Clayton) yells at one point, and it turns out she’s pretty much right.

This, of course, is all a polite way of saying that the film doesn’t make much sense, but anyone familiar with the films of Sergio Martino will not be surprised to hear that. Like many of the great Italian horror and thriller directors, Martino was always more interested in a few strong set pieces than in a coherent plot. American Rickshaw is more about the chase than the destination, and there are enough weird moments to keep things entertaining. Mitch Gaylord is just as blandly engaging here as he was in American Anthem. (“Steve Tevere has thrown a tripus!”) What Gaylord may have lacked in range, he made up for with earnestness.

Of course, the main attraction here is Donald Pleasence, playing the televangelist with an appropriately predatory glint in his eyes. Pleasence doesn’t get a lot of scenes, but, as always, he’s a memorable presence and he commands the screen whenever he does show up. The reverend is such a strange character that it’s hard to think of any actor other than Donald Pleasence in the role.

American Rickshaw is one of those films that seems to get a lot of bad reviews, largely from people who aren’t familiar with the unique style of Italian exploitation films. Personally, I think it’s impossible not to enjoy something as weird as this film. Seriously, how can anyone resist Donald Pleasence and Mitch Gaylord in the same movie?

Dr. Strange (1978, directed by Philip DeGuere)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Dr. Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten) is a compassionate psychiatrist at a big-city hospital. He’s a man of science who lost his parents when he was eighteen and who has no idea that some of the items he inherited from his father have the ability to cast magic spells. Strange is treating a young woman named Clea Lake (Anne-Marie Martin). Clea has been having strange nightmares because she has been possessed by the sorceress Morgan Le Fay (Jessica Walter). Morgan Le Fay hopes to use Clea to kill Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme (John Mills) before he can appoint Dr. Strange as his successor.

Before there was Benedict Cumberbatch, there was Peter Hooten. A journeyman actor with a long list of TV credits, Hooten was cast to play Strange in this TV movie, which was obviously meant to serve as a pilot for a television series. Unfortunately, beyond having a mustache, this Dr. Strange doesn’t have much in common with his comic book counterpart. He’s not a former surgeon who injured his hands and is now looking for redemption for his former arrogance. Instead, he’s a mild-mannered psychiatrist who takes a “golly gee” approach to discovering that he has the power to travel between dimensions and cast spells.

CBS aired Doctor Strange opposite Roots, which was such a cultural landmark and a ratings phenomenon that a movie about a not widely known comic book hero didn’t stand much of a chance against it. It’s actually not that bad of a film. Jessica Walter is a sexy Morgan Le Fay, and Clyde Kusatsu is perfectly cast as Wong, who is more of a potential mentor here than he was in the later adaptations of Doctor Strange. The scenes where Strange travels from dimension to dimension are done well enough to suggest that, if the movie had led to a series, it could have captured the feel of the comic book. The only real problem is that Peter Hooten is a little bit bland in the title role. Hooten’s Strange would not have been a dynamic hero or an enigmatic figure. He would have just been a typical television lead.

Dr. Strange did not lead to a series, which means viewers were cheated out of a potential Nicholas Hammond/Bill Bixby/Reb Brown/Peter Hooten crossover event. After the failure of the film, it would be 38 years before Stephen Strange again showed up on screens across the world.