Tag Archives: Horrorthon

Horror Movie Review: The Fall of the House of Usher (dir by Roger Corman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1960 film, The Fall Of The House of Usher, opens with Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon) riding his horse across a desolate landscape.

There’s a foreboding mansion in the distance but what the viewer immediately notices is that the land around the mansion looks almost post-apocalyptic.  Even though the film is set in the 1800s, the misshapen trees and the high winds all bring to mind a film set in a nuclear-scarred world, the type where you expect to find radioactive mutants hiding behind every tree and rock.

Phillip is a young aristocrat who is traveling to the home of the Usher family.  He is engaged to marry Madeleine Usher (Myrna Fahey) but, as soon as he arrives at the mansion, her older brother, Roderick (Vincent Price, with no mustache and blonde hair), informs Phillip that he will never be allowed to marry Madeleine.  Roderick explains that the Usher family is cursed and he even takes Phillip on a tour of Usher family history, showing him a series of truly hideous paintings of past Ushers.  One Usher was a murderer.  Another Usher was blackmailer.  An Usher wearing a pirate’s cap is identified as being a slave trader.  The Ushers are cursed, with each family member destined to become insane.  Roderick’s mission is to bring the Usher bloodline to a close and that means that Madeleine cannot marry.

Phillip disagrees, especially when the sickly Madeleine herself says that she wants to escape from her seemingly mad brother.  With the house itself continually shaking as if it’s on the verge of collapsing, Phillip becomes determined to take Madeleine away.  Roderick tries to warn him not to.  Even the friendly butler, Bristol (Harry Ellerbe), encourages Phillip to give up.  But Phillip remains stubborn and determined.  However, when Madeleine suddenly collapses and dies, it appears that Phillip’s plans to marry her are at an end.  But is Madeleine truly dead?

Based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, this was, at the time, the most expensive film that Roger Corman and American International Pictures had ever made.  (It was also their first color film.)  Of course, the budget was still just $300,000 and the Usher mansion was largely constructed out of props that were borrowed from other films.  That said, the film had a name star and, with its vivid colors and its fiery finale, it certainly looked like a big-budget film.  This film marked the first collaboration between Vincent Price and Roger Corman and it was a box office success, making  a million dollars at a time when a million dollars really meant something..  Corman and Price would go on to do several other Poe adaptations together, all of which were distinguished by Price’s villainous performances and Corman’s pop art visuals.

Seen today, The Fall of the House of Usher can seem to be a bit slow.  With only one location and a cast of only four actors, it often feels a bit stagey.  Mark Damon is rather stiff as Phillip.  (One can see why he abandoned acting to become a producer.)  But Vincent Price’s performance as Roderick Usher continue to entertain, with Price delivering every line of dialogue with his trademark aristocratic archness.  There’s nothing subtle about Price’s performance but Price’s tendency to overact perfectly matched Corman’s vivid visuals and it’s interesting to watch a hyperactive Price performance paired with the type of dull performance that Mark Damon offers up.

The fiery finale still packs a certain punch and, watching it, one can see why Corman and Price said, “Let’s do this again!”  The Fall of the House of Usher (which is also available on some streaming sites as simply House of Usher) remains an enjoyable macabre Halloween treat.

House of Usher (1960, dir by Roger Corman, DP: Floyd Crosby)

 

 

Horror on the Lens: Dementia 13 (dir by Francis Ford Coppola)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(I originally shared this film back in 2011, 2019, 2022, and 2023 — can you believe we’ve been doing this for that long? — but the YouTube upload keeps getting taken down!  So, I’m resharing it today!)

For today’s excursion into the world of public domain horror, I offer up the film debut of Francis Ford Coppola.  Before Coppola directed the Godfather and Apocalypse Now, he directed a low-budget, black-and-white thriller that was called Dementia 13.  In a possible sign of things to come, producer Roger Corman and Coppola ended up disagreeing on the film’s final cut and Corman reportedly brought in director Jack Hill to film and, in some cases, re-film additional scenes.

Regardless of whether the credit should go to Coppola, Corman, or Hill, Dementia 13 is a brutally effective little film that is full of moody photography and which clearly served as an influence on the slasher films that would follow it in the future.  Speaking of influence, Dementia 13 itself is obviously influenced by the Italian giallo films that, in 1963, were just now starting to make their way into the drive-ins and grindhouses of America.

Speaking of giallo films, keep an eye out for Patrick Magee, who gave a memorable performance in Lucio Fulci’s The Black Cat.  Luana Anders, who plays the duplicitous wife in this film, showed up in just about every other exploitation film made in the 60s and yes, the scene where she’s swimming freaks me out to no end.  Other films featuring Luana Anders include Night Tide and Easy Rider, in which she played one of the hippies who unsuccessfully enticed Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper to stay at the commune.

As for Francis Ford Coppola, well, he’s gone on to have quite a career, hasn’t he?  It’s been quite a journey from Dementia 13 to Megalopolis!

Music Video of the Day: People Are Still Having Sex by LaTour (1991, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You can probably already guess that this video and song were both controversial back in the day.  Not only was the video’s symbolism blatant but the song was released at a time when the AIDS epidemic was very much on everyone’s mind.  This was the type of video that MTV would have banned in its early days but, by the time the 90s rolled around, the video was considered safe for viewing by none other than Beavis and Butthead, neither one of whom was ever having sex.

This video was produced by H-Guns Labs, the same studio that was responsible for many of Nine Inch Nails’s early videos.

LaTour was a disc jockey from Jack Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.  Despite the urban legend to the contrary, he never recorded a follow-up called People Are Still Having Lunch.

Enjoy!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.16 “Perchance to Dream”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, it’s all about dreams!

Episode 2.16 “Perchance to Dream”

(Dir by Paul Boyington, originally aired on February 4th, 1990)

Alex (Raphael Sbarge) is a college student whose dorm room has become one wild place.  Blood continually drips from a chair.  A subway train occasionally roars past the window.  A giant nun peeks in on him and tries to swat him with a ruler.  These are all images that Alex used to see in his dreams but now, they’re entering his waking world and what’s really strange is that everyone else can see them too.  His subconscious has become reality.

Thinking that it might have something to do with a recent mugging in which Alex struck his head and apparently lost the ability to sleep, Alex’s girlfriend, Megan (Sarah Buxton), asks Kyle (Kenneth Danziger), an expert on dreams, for help.  Arriving at Alex’s dorm room just in time to save Alex from the nun and her ruler, Kyle theorizes that, because Alex isn’t sleeping, he’s projecting his dreams into the real world.  The only solution is for Alex and Megan to enter a portal that leads them straight into Alex’s subconscious.  If Alex can find his dream self, he can finally get some rest.  Of course, Alex and Megan will have to avoid and defeat a series of trains, muggers, and nuns to accomplish their task.

This episode is entertainingly goofy.  It was obviously inspired by the popularity of the Nightmare on Elm Street films but the monster here is not a wisecracking killer like Freddy Krueger but instead, it’s just Alex’s bad childhood memories and the trauma of having been mugged.  As I watched this episode, I was impressed that Monsters tried to do something different than usual but I was also very aware that 20 minutes was not enough time to tell the story that this episode wanted to tell.  For this episode to really work, the viewer would have to feel a deep connection to Alex.  Raphael Sbarge gives a likable performance as Alex and he has a really cute chemistry with Sarah Buxton but 20 minutes still isn’t enough time to really get to know the guy.

When seen today, the special effects are undeniably primitive but there’s something kind of charming about that.  The scene where the giant nun tries to swat Alex with a ruler looks silly today and I imagine it probably looked silly in 1990 as well but it’s a fun kind of silly.  The same can be said of the scene where Alex and Megan plunge into his subconscious.  CGI has come a long way but today’s realistic CGI just doesn’t have the do-it-yourself charm of early chroma keying and matte shots.  I liked that Alex’s subconscious was not only goofy but cheap as well.

Horror on TV: One Step Beyond 1.2 “Night of April 14th” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s televised horror, we have the second episode of the 1960s anthology series, One Step Beyond.

In this episode, a young Englishwoman is haunted by dreams of drowning.  Try as she might, she can’t get the feeling of doom out of her mind.  Perhaps her upcoming trip to New York will help to relax her.  Her fiancee even tells her that they’ll be traveling to New York on the most luxurious ship ever built.  The name of that ship?  Why, the Titanic, of course.

For the record, there actually were quite a few people who apparently did have psychic premonitions of doom when it came to the Titanic.  Perhaps the most infamous example was the author Morgan Robertson, who wrote a novel in 1898 that was called The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility.  That book managed to perfectly predict that sinking of the Titanic, right down to the iceberg and the number of lives lost.

This episode originally aired on January 27th, 1959.

Enjoy!

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Spookies (dir by Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran, and Eugenie Joseph)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1986 film Spookies is not exactly the easiest film to describe.

A 13 year-old boy named Billy (Alec Nemser) runs away from home after his parents forget his birthday.  After a conversation with a random drifter, Billy ends up entering a spooky and apparently abandoned mansion.  The inside of the house is decorated for a birthday party.  “They didn’t forget!” Billy says, assuming the party is for him even though neither he nor his parents live at the house.  Needless to say, the party is not for Billy, who soon ends up getting buried alive by a werecat (Dan Scott).

The werecat is the pet of Kreon (Felix Ward), an elderly warlock who lives in the abandoned house and spends his time playing chess and trying to convince his wife, Isabelle (Maria Pechukas), to fall in love with him.  He’s been trying to convince Isabelle for 70 years.  Kreon is very old but Isabelle is still very young because Kreon has been sacrificing people to keep her young.  Isabelle is not particularly happy about that.

Meanwhile, a group of four couples and one friend come across the house on the same night of Billy.  Having gotten kicked out of a previous party, they decide to have a new party in the house.  The main thing that most viewers will notice about the nine friends is that none of them seem to have much in common.  Duke (Pat Wesley Bryan) and Linda (Joan Ellen Delaney) are apparently supposed to be rebellious teenagers, despite appearing to be in their 30s.  Adrienne (Charlotte Alexandra) appears to be wealthy and spoiled and is married to wimpy Dave (Anthony Valbrio).  Peter (Peter Dain) and Meegan (Kim Merril) both appear to be in their 40s and seem to be way too straight-laced and intelligent to be hanging out with Duke.  Rich (Peter Iasillo, Jr.) is the practical joker of the group and carries a puppet around with him.  Finally, Carol (Lisa Friede) and Lewis (Al Magliochetti) don’t get much character development as it only takes a few minutes for Carol to get possessed by a demon and for Lewis to die while trying to flee the mansion.

It turns out that the entire mansion is crawling with demons.  There’s zombies in both the wine cellar and the nearby cemetery.  There’s a spiderwoman who has spun quite an impressive web.  There are little green lizard things that chew off people’s faces.  There’s a hooded figure who can shoot out electrified tendrils.  While the monsters track down and kill the party-goers one-by-one, the Werecat watches from a distance and purrs.  Occasionally, he goes and visits with Kreon, who says that everything is going as he planned it.  Personally, I think Kreon is just saying that because it’s obvious that next to no planning went into any of this.

To say that Spookies is a bit disjointed would be an understatement.  The fact that there are three credited directors provides a clue as to how that came to be.  The footage with the partygoers and all the house monsters was filmed first and directed by Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran.  Creative differences between the film’s producers and financial backers led to the film being temporarily abandoned during the editing process.  A year later, Eugene Joseph was hired to shoot the scenes of Billy, Kreon, the Werecat, and Isabelle and those scenes were rather clumsily inserted into the original footage.  The end result was Spookies.

But, oddly enough, as confusing and disjointed and nonsensical as it all is, it kind of works.  The old mansion is creepy.  (Interestingly enough, the mansion is actually the Jay Estate, the home of founding father John Jay.)  Some of the monster makeup is effectively grotesque.  The story’s incoherence and even the all-around bad acting on the part of the actors playing the victims all come together to create a nightmarish atmosphere.  (And, in defense of the scenes that were shot by Eugenie Joseph, the performances of Felix Ward, Dan Scott, and Maria Pechukas are all actually quite good.)  The film’s frenzied ending actually works surprisingly well.

At its worst, Spookies is an Evil Dead rip-off that lacks the enthusiasm that Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell brought to that film.  At its best, Spookies feels like a filmed nightmare.

Night Explorers: The Asylum (2023, directed by John K. Webster)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Eight “urban explorers,” who have the own streaming show where they film themselves in haunted locations across Britain, try to spend the night at the long abandoned Pelosi Asylum.  Pelosi Asylum (and it’s a British film so don’t read too much into the name, as tempting as it may be to do so) is supposed to be one of the most haunted locations in the UK.  It’s scheduled to be demolished and the explorers plan to be the last people to spend the night at the Asylum.

None of the supernatural explorers actually believe in the supernatural.  Before entering the Asylum, they joke about how everything that they do is just for show and how all of the “supernatural” things that they’ve filmed have actually been created through clever editing.  They don’t even plan to actually spend the entire night at the Asylum.  Once they do enter the Asylum, they decide to split up to explore and get as much footage as they need to edit something together.  That’s when they discover that they are not alone.  The Asylum is full of former patients who consider the building to be their home and who did not welcome uninvited guests.

Night Explorers: The Asylum starts out as a found footage film but it quickly abandons that and instead becomes a standard slasher film where people split up for no good reason and get picked off one-by-one.  There’s nothing new or surprising about Night Explorers but there are some effective jump scares and fans of gore will find a lot to look at here.  The film’s killers are frighteningly ruthless and the violence is not for the squeamish.  For the most part, the cast is hampered by undeveloped characters but everyone is convincing enough as the type of moron who would think breaking into an abandoned asylum was a good idea.  I’ve definitely seen better than this film but I’ve also seen much worse movies that cost considerably more money to make.  What Night Explorers lack in originality, it makes up for in blood and atmosphere.

Horror Scenes That I Love: The Return of Joe from Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s horror scene that I love comes from Lucio Fulci’s 1981 masterpiece, The Beyond.

In this memorably gruesome scene, Joe the Plumber (Tonino Pulci) comes back to life.  Having previously lost an eye in the basement of the film’s haunted hotel, he proceeds to claim an eye for himself.  I’ll tell you right now that if I ever stepped into a house or a hotel or anywhere that had a sink that looked like that, I would quickly leave and never come back.

 

Horror Book Review: Bats Out Of Hell by Guy N. Smith

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“You think those are bats?” someone said as we all stood out on the balcony of a hotel in the mountains of Switzerland.

I was 18 years old, a recent high school graduate who was spending my summer in Europe with my sisters.  We were in Switzerland and had just eaten dinner at our hotel.  I had stepped out onto hotel’s balcony, joining several other tourists who were looking up at the evening sky.  The sky was was full of shadowy, winged creatures that seemed to be circling the hotel.  As I stared up at the creatures and listened to the people around me wonder what they could be, I thought to myself that they very well could be bats.  That freaked me out a little.  Growing up in the Southwest, I had seen my share of bats.  I’ve seen bats get trapped in garages.  I’ve seen bats come flying out of tunnels.  I’ve never been attacked by a bat.  In fact, you have to be pretty obnoxious to attract the attention of a non-rabid bat.  But that doesn’t make the sight of them any less frightening or the thought of them sucking your blood any less alarming.

We all stood out on the balcony, staring up at the bats and wondering if we were about to be attacked.

“Those are definitely bats,” someone else said, “Is it safe to be out here?”

By this point, my sister Megan had come out onto the balcony in order to make sure that I hadn’t fallen off.

“What’s everyone looking at?” she asked.

“Those are bats!” an old woman exclaimed, pointing at the sky.

“Those are birds,” Megan replied.

The “bats” chirped in agreement.

I found myself thinking about that Swiss evening as I read the 1978 horror paperback, Bats Out Of Hell.  This novel opens with Professor Brian Newman developing a new virus as part of an attempt to find a cure for Meningitis.  Unfortunately, he has tested his virus on a bunch of bats at the laboratory and now, they’ve all become increasingly aggressive.  Since the virus also appears to ultimately be fatal to the bats, Newman can’t help but feel guilty about what he’s putting the bats through.  Even though he’s told he just be happy that the bats are going to die eventually, he can’t stop thinking about their accusatory stare.  He knows that the bats blame him and well they should!

An argument with his girlfriend leads to Brian falling and accidentally setting free all of the infected bats.  The bats swarm across the British countryside, attacking everyone that they see and spreading the virus.  The government reacts by declaring martial law and trying to isolate the bats to one city.  Soon, rioters are taking to the streets and vigilantes are enforcing their own violent interpretation of the law.

That’ll teach humanity to try to cure Meningitis!

Bats Out Of Hell is a pulpy read, one that works because bats are scary and author Guy N. Smith keeps the action moving quickly.  The novel is at its best when envisioning a world where fear of disease has led to mass panic and a suspension of civil rights.  Hmmm …. why does that seem so familiar?  It’s amazing how science fiction can eventually become science fact.