October Hacks: Party Night (dir by Troy Escamilla)

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s prom night!

Except these students aren’t going to prom. Instead, they’re going to have a party all their own. They’re heading out to a house with quite a history, the perfect place to have a night that they’ll never forget. And a night that they’ll be lucky to …. SURVIVE!

There. Was that cheesy enough?

If my introduction was a bit over-the-top, it fits the general mood of 2017’s Party Night. Party Night is a deliberate throwback to the slasher films of the 80s and the early 90s, before the genre started to take itself a bit too seriously. (The worse thing that ever happened to the slasher genre is that a few of the films started to get positive reviews from critics who praised them for being subversive. The end result of all that was David Gordon Green changing Michael Myers from a nightmarish boogeyman to just another buffoon living in a sewer.) As such, Party Night is a film where a bunch of attractive young people go to a place that common sense say they shouldn’t go to. And then they proceed to the dumbest things possible, like wander off by themselves. The joy of the film comes from yelling at the screen, “Don’t do that, you idiot!” and then discovering that you were right to warn them not to do what they did.

I’ve made this point before but it is worth repeating. The common complaint with most old school slasher films is that they feature characters who do stupid things. That’s a valid comment but, to be honest, most people are pretty stupid. And when you’re a teenager and it’s prom night and you’re hanging out with your best friends, you’re going to be even more stupid than usual. In my case, when I sit there and roll my eyes at the girl in a slasher movie who wanders around outside in her underwear in the middle of the night, it’s because I’m trying to forget about all the times that I’ve walked up and down the alley in my sleepshirt, socks, and bathrobe while looking for the cat at two in the morning. The fact of the matter is that we all do stupid things. Some people do stupid things because they’re stupid. Some people do stupid things because it’s just easier and takes less effort. (In my case, it was more convenient to just throw on a bathrobe before I went out to look for the cat as opposed to actually taking the time to put on …. well, clothes.) We recognize our stupidity in the characters who populate the slasher films of the 70s and 80s. And the reason why so many people instinctively make fun of those films is because they know they would not survive an old school slasher film. Myself, I’d probably be dead within the first fifteen minutes.

As for Party Night, it’s a low-budget film with a simple plot and an enthusiastic cast and an obvious love for the genre. Fans of old school slasher films will appreciate the way the story pays homage to the films of the past. It’s a film that understands that, at a certain age, everyone’s too stupid to survive a horror movie.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The New Kids (dir by Sean Cunningham)

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh my God, this movie is awesome!

Within the first five minutes, the film features not only a training montage but also a scene where a family cheering good news immediately gets a phone call delivering bad news. (“SHUT UP!” our hero yells at his friends and family.) By the time the film hits the five minute mark, it has managed to denounce communism, terrorism, laziness, and drunk driving! And that’s even before James Spader shows up as a cocaine-sniffing teenage crime lord!

First released in 1986 and directed by the same guy who did the first Friday the 13th, The New Kids tells the story of Loren (Shannon Presby) and his sister, Abby (Lori Loughlin). Their father (Tom Atkins) was a badass army colonel who fought communists, received commendations from the President (and that President was Ronald Reagan so you know those commendations were for doing something cool and not just for posting memes on twitter), and who taught his children self-defense. Every morning, he exercised with them and drilled into their heads the importance of being disciplined and willing to stand up for themselves. Sadly, their father and mother were both killed in a car accident after meeting with President Reagan at the White House.

Though they’ve been taught how to survive in the world by an expert, Loren and Abby are both teenagers and the law says that they need adult supervision. They move down to Florida and stay with their Uncle Charlie (Eddie Jones), Charlie owns a run-down amusement park that he’s decided to call Santa Land. He figures that tourists who are driving to “Walt Disney World and Epcot” will want to stop off at Santa Land. Personally, I think the tourists will probably want to keep driving to where they actually want to go but who knows? Uncle Charlie does have a petting zoo and there is something oddly charming about the idea of Santa hanging out in the bayous of Florida. I mean, there’s a reason why Santa Claus And The Ice Cream Bunny is beloved by viewers all over the world.

At the high school, everyone notices Loren and Abby. Abby gets a dorky boyfriend named Mark (Eric Stoltz …. no, really!) and Loren starts dating the sheriff’s daughter, Karen (Paige Lynn Price). Unfortunately, the new kids have been noticed by Eddie Dutra (James Spader) and his gang of inbred rednecks. Dutra and his gang deal drugs and have a pit bull who they’re hoping to enter into dog fights. (“Went straight for the jugular,” one gang member says at one point.) Dutra decides that he likes Abby, which leads to Loren getting protective, which leads to Dutra and the boys waging their own war on Abby and Loren and everything eventually comes to a deeply satisfying Straw Dogs-style conclusion at Santa Land.

The New Kids is one of those films that succeeds by being thoroughly absurd and over-the-top. Dutra and his gang aren’t just evil. Instead, they’re downright Satanic in their determination to destroy the new kids. The gang is fearsome enough, especially Gordo (Theron Montgomery), who is the fat future forklift operator from Hell. But what really makes this gang memorable is the fact that their leader is James Spader, with bright blonde hair, a smooth Southern accent, and moves that are so assured that he sometimes seem to be dancing across the screen. Dutra’s evil and the cocaine that he snorts leads to him making some bad decisions but he’s got style. As for the New Kids, Shannon Presby is a bit bland as Loren but that blandness actually provides a nice contrast to Spader’s more flamboyant performance. Lori Loughlin is likable and kicks Gordo in the balls, which is pretty cool. (Gordo more than deserved it.)

Cheerfully sleazy and unapologetically ridiculous, The New Kids is 80s exploitation cinema at its best.

Party Line (1988, directed by William Webb)

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Jedadiah Leland

“Hot singles are waiting to speak to you!”

Remember those party line commercials that used to air late at night in the 90s? For just a few dollars a minute, you could call and talk to someone claiming to be a hot woman in your area of town. (The commercials always featured women because everyone understood that only men would be dumb enough to call the number.) Even when I was a teenager, I knew that there was no way that a young, hot woman was sitting at home alone and waiting for a stranger to call her. But obviously, some people thought they were true because those party lines commercials aired for a long time and really only went away once everything moved online.

In Party Line, Greta Blackburn and Leif Garrett plays homicidal siblings who have money to burn so they spend all of their time on the party line, enticing men to sneak away from their wives and come to their mansion so that they can be murdered. Detectives Richard Hatch and Shawn Weatherly are assigned to find out why so many married men are turning up dead. The chief of police is played by Richard Roundtree, who is so smooth that his main purpose in the movie is to remind us that not everyone has to use a party line to pick up women. It’s a standard 80s thriller that has some moments of unexpected humor, largely due to the contrast between the beautiful and rich killers and the people that they target. Richard Hatch is wooden in the role of the detective but Shawn Weatherly is attractive and likable as his partner, Greta Blackburn makes for an excellent femme fatale while Leif Garrett is twitchy but convincing as a killer who likes to wear a bridal gown.

Party Line was made when the idea of adult phone lines was still a new one. Apparently, when those lines first started to advertise, the part about it costing money wasn’t actually mentioned and could only be discovered by reading the small print at the bottom of a television screen. Since the small print was not only very small but also usually accompanied by a picture of a blonde in lingerie, no one ever bothered to read it. I was not one of them but I do know more than a few 90s kids who came home from school to discover a parent waiting to talk to them about the phone bill. The world was a different place back then. Today, everyone should know that most hot singles have something better to do than to talk to you and if they don’t, they’re probably killers like people in Party Line. It’s not worth a dollar for each additional minute.

Horror Scene That I Love: The Wishmaster grants a wish in Wishmaster 2

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I can’t let this Horrorthon pass without sharing a scene featuring one of my favorite horror movie characters, the Whishmater (Andrew Divoff)!

In the scene, from 1999’s Wishmaster 2, our favorite literal-minded Djinn grants another wish to someone who did not choose his words carefully. Andrew Divoff really makes this scene work. That smile is a thing of terrifying wonders.

Book Review: The Mall by Steve Kahn

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Just from the cover, you would think that The Mall, which was first published in 1983, was a horror novel about a bunch of shoppers getting trapped by a collection of angry spirits whose slumber was disturbed by the titular building being constructed on an ancient burial ground.

Or you might think that The Mall was a sci-fi story in the style of Jim Wynorski’s Chopping Mall, in which The Mall of the Future turned on shoppers and refused to let them escape while a bunch of robots struck a blow for machine rights everywhere.

That’s certainly what I thought when I came across this book and spent a few minutes starting at the cover at Half-Price Books a few months ago. The cover seemed to show a man melting as he tried to open the doors of the mall! I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t be intrigued by such a horrific image? (If I did die at a mall, I would hope that I would at least die in an expensive store so people would be impressed when they heard.) I bought the book because of the cover and the cover is why I waited until horrorthon to read it.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the cover is the best thing about the book. It’s not really a horror novel, either. Sure, it’s listed as being a part of the horror genre on every online listing that I’ve found for it but the book itself is more of a Die Hard rip-off. (Yes, the book was published before Die Hard even went into production but that’s the power of Die Hard! It was being ripped off before it even existed.) The plot is that The Mall is a state-of-the-art playground for the upper and middle-classes. It was built by Mel Goodman, an industrialist who built himself up from nothing. On the same day that Mel is having his birthday party in the mall’s offices, his former employee, Jeffrey Prince, leads a group of criminals in an armed but surprisingly dull takeover of the mall. Prince threatens to kill everyone unless his financial demands are met. Unfortunately, no one can escape or enter the mall because the doors, I kid you not, have been superglued shut!

The frustrating thing about The Mall is that we are told that there are 40,000 people in the mall. And yet none of them really try to do anything to thwart Prince’s plans. Instead, they just wait patiently and some even continue to shop. That might seem like a satirical commentary on American consumerism but this isn’t half as clever (or emotionally resonant) as Dawn of the Dead. If anything, it’s the literary equivalent of one of those disaster films where a bunch of different people find themselves trapped in one location and they deal with their personal issues while waiting for the crisis to end. I’m a little bit surprised this was never turned into a made-for-TV movie.

In the end, it’s not a very good book but the cover continues to haunt me. Seriously, let that man out of the mall before he dissolves!

October True Crime: The Grim Sleeper (dir by Stanley M. Brooks)

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s not known, for sure, how many people Lonnie David Franklin killed.

A residenct of Los Angeles and a former enlistee of the U.S. Army who was given a dishonorable discharge after doing time in prison for taking part in the gang-rape of a 17 year-old girl in Germany, Franklin was convicted of 10 murders but he was suspected of much more. His earliest known murder was committed in 1984 and he was apparently very active up until 1988. Then, much like the BTK Killer, Franklin appears to have taken a break for nearly two decades before returning to his murderous ways in 2002. (It could be just as likely that Franklin was still killing but his victims were either not discovered or he was never linked to the crimes.) Franklin’s murders didn’t get much attention, with the police not acknowledging that they were dealing with a serial killer until 2007. Some of that can be blamed on the fact that many of Franklin’s murders were committed before DNA testing became a commonplace thing. However, it has also been acknowledged that Franklin escaped detection because he targeted black women and tended to prey on sex workers, neither one of whom were a priority for the LAPD in the 80s.

2014’s The Grim Sleeper stars Dreama Walker as Christine Pelisek, the journalist who first reported on the existence of the Grim Sleeper and Ernie Hudson and Michael O’Neill as the detectives who investigated the murders and ultimately arrested Lonnie Franklin. Franklin (played by James R. Baylis) only appears briefly in the film. As The Grim Sleeper was made before Franklin had actually been convicted and sentenced to death for his crimes, the film does not actually state that the police arrested the right man. Indeed, the film discusses very little about the man who was arrested for the crimes.

Instead, the film focuses on Pelisek and her attempts to get someone to take her seriously when she argues that there’s a serial killer on the loose and that the public has a right to know. At first, everyone is skeptical of her claims. Her editor tells her that she doesn’t have enough for a story. The police tell her to mind her own business. Her fellow reporters order her to get coffee. The only people who really support Pelisek’s attempts to uncover the truth are the families of the victims, some of whom have spent over twenty years waiting for someone to tell them what happened to their loved ones.

The film is at its best when it focuses on the pain of the families, all of whom feel that they have been ignored and forgotten by the people who are supposed to be protecting them. It’s at its least interesting when it focuses on Pelisek and her efforts to be taken seriously. (Deama Walker has given good performances in films like Compliance and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood but she’s miscast here.) Though flawed, the film honors the memories of those victimized by the Grim Sleeper and it reminds viewers that no one should be forgotten.

As for the real Grim Sleeper, he died suddenly while on Death Row. The cause of death has never been released but he died in March of 2020, around the same time that COVID was spreading throughout the nation’s prisons and I’ve always assumed that he was an early fatality. Regardless of the cause, the Sleeper met the Reaper and will never awaken again.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Tod Browning Edition

Posted on October 7, 2024 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.

Today’s director is Tod Browning, who started his career during the silent era, ended it in the sound era, and was responsible for some of the most important horror and suspense films of both eras!

4 Shots From 4 Tod Browning Films

West of Zanzibar (1928, dir by Tod Browning, DP: Percy Hilburn)

Dracula (1931, Dir by Tod Browning, DP: Karl Freund)

Freaks (1932, dir by Tod Browning, DP: Merritt Gerstad)

Mark of the Vampire (1935, Dir by Tod Browning, DP: James Wong Howe)

Horror Film Review: Godzilla vs Biollante (dir by Kazuki Omori)

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1989’s Godzilla vs Biollante, Godzilla returns and gets into a fight with a giant plant named Biollante. Created by mixing plant cells with Godzilla cells and the cells of one human who was killed in a terrorist attack, Biollante has the body of a monster, the head of a giant rose, and the soul of a human. In fact, because her cells were used to help create Biollante, the late Erika Shiragami (Yusko Sawaguchi) can telepathically communicate from inside of Billante.

Now, you might be tempted to laugh at all of that but, silly origin story aside, Biollante is actually a wonderful creation and a fierce competitor to Godzilla. As Biollante was created using DNA that Godzilla left behind during his previous rampage of Tokyo, Godzilla and Biollante have a bit of a mental connection. One could even argue that this film features Godzilla fighting a mutated version of himself. (This was a theme to which many of the future Godzilla films would return.) Biollante is not only capable of wrapping monsters, things, and people in its tendrils but it’s also implied to literally be immortal. Damaging Biollante just causes it to release spores that presumably will lead to the creation of a new Biollante.

How did Biollante come into existence? As usual, it’s all the fault of the government and the corporations. Following Godzilla’s previous rampage in Japan, the government of the Middle Eastern nation of Saradia demanded some of Godzilla’s cells so that they could experiment with creating plant life that could survive in the desert. Meanwhile, an American company called Bio-Major decided that it wanted the cells for itself and they even sent over terrorists to blow up a Saradian lab, leading to the death of Erika and the apparent madness of her father, Dr. Genichiro Shiragami (Koji Takahashi). Dr. Shiragami fused Erika’s cells with the cells of one of the Godzilla plants and Biollatne was created….

Yeah, it doesn’t always make a lot of sense. That’s to be expected of a Godzilla film, though. The important thing is that, no matter how ludicrous the plot, the cast delivers their lines with enough skill and conviction that the viewer is willing to accept what’s being said without worrying too much about the logic behind it. There’s definitely a political subtext here for those who want to find it. Japan once again finds itself saving the world from the mistakes made by America and, this time, the Middle East. For Japan, every Godzilla rampage is a tragedy. For America and the rest of the world, it’s an economic opportunity. Just as the rest of the world reacted to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by saying, “Cool, we’ve got to figure out how to do that!,” the world reacts to over 30 years of Godzilla-led death and destruction by trying to figure out how to create their own Godzilla.

There’s a lot going on in Godzilla vs Biollante. Psychic Miki Saegusa (Megumi Odaka) makes her first appearance in the Godzilla franchise. There’s a fear assassin named SSS9 (Majot Bedi) who pops up throughout the movie so that he can shoot people. There are scenes of corporate espionage and car chases and action sequences featuring a lot of gunfire. This is one of the more violent and fast-paced Godzilla films that I’ve watched. In the end, though, the main attraction is watching Godzilla battle a giant plant and both Godzilla and Biollante acquit themselves well. It makes for an exciting film, one that feels worthy of starring the King of the Monsters.

Previous Godzilla Reviews:

Horror Film Review: The Bride and the Beast (dir by Adrian Weiss)

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1958 film, The Bride and the Beast, tells the story of newlyweds Dan (Lance Fuller) and Laura Fuller (Charlotte Austin). Dan is an overly macho and chauvinistic big game hunter who is so into hunting and capturing animals that he even keeps a gorilla named Sparky in the basement of his home. I’m not really sure that’s legal and, even if it is, the logistics of keeping a gorilla in your home seem like they would be beyond the capabilities of moron like Dan. Then again, when Sparky gets loose and tries to attack Laura, Dan is forced to shoot him. So, I guess the movie was kind enough to prove my point.

Laura, though grateful to be alive, cannot stop thinking about Sparky and soon, she’s having dreams about her past life as a gorilla. Because Dan doesn’t believe that his wife was once a gorilla, he takes her to the jungles of Africa for their honeymoon. While Dan proves himself to be not quite the ideal romantic husband by keeping himself busy by hunting a killer tiger, Laura finds herself being drawn back to her former existence as the Queen of the Gorillas. Dan may be able to save his camp from the tiger but will he be able to save his wife from the primates that want her for their bride? And will Laura maybe be smart enough to realize that a normal husband would not react to his new bride hatred of hunting for forcing her to go on a safari for her honeymoon? I mean, really, everything that happens in this film is pretty much Dan’s fault. Here’s hoping that Laura divorced him and married a smarter 50s hero. Like maybe Jeff the pilot from Plan 9 From Outer Space. Now that was a man!

This very low-budget film, which is full of stock footage and sets that wobble whenever any of the actors bump into them, has gained some attention in recent years because the script was written by Edward D. Wood, Jr. As such, there’s a scene in which Laura undergoes hypnosis and delivers a monologue about how much she loves her angora sweater. (“It felt like the fur of a small kitten.”) The nonsensical plot and dialogue could only have come from Ed Wood. Unfortunately, Wood himself didn’t direct the film. That job falls to Adrian Weiss and, as a result, the film’s direction doesn’t feature any of the quirky weirdness that one typically associates with a Wood production. The film gets off to a good start, with Dan revealing that he keeps a gorilla in his basement and coming across like some sort of mad scientist but, once the action moves to the jungle, things start to drag as Weiss takes a bland and workmanlike approach to a story that demanded a more imaginative approach.

The film does conclude on an enjoyably odd note, one in which overly macho Dan discovers that it takes more than a rifle and a hunting hat to be king of the jungle. In the end, though, this film is mostly just for Ed Wood completists.

Horror on the Lens: Baffled! (dir by Philip Leacock)

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Leonard Nimoy is a race car driver who can see into the future and who uses his powers to solve crimes!

Seriously, if that’s not enough to get you to watch the 1973 made-for-TV movie Baffled!, then I don’t know what is. In the film, Nimoy takes a break from racing so that he and a parapsychologist (played by Susan Hampshire) can solve the mystery of the visions that Nimoy is having of a woman in a mansion. This movie was meant to serve as a pilot and I guess if the series had been picked up, Nimoy would have had weekly visions. Of course, the movie didn’t lead to a series but Baffled! is still fun in a 70s television sort of way. Thanks to use of what I like to call “slow mo of doom,” a few of Nimoy’s visions are creepy and the whole thing ends with the promise of future adventures that were sadly never to be. And it’s a shame because I’ve always wondered what was going on with that couple at the airport!

(I should mention that this is a personal favorite of mine and, as our longtime readers have probably noticed, I share it every Horrorthon. I’m sharing it earlier than usual this month because, today, I’m having to take my car in to get the driver’s side window repaired. I have no idea how long I’ll be at the shop but I look forward to watching Baffled when I get back!)

Enjoy Baffled! Can you solve the mystery before Leonard?