Today’s horror scene that I love comes from one of my favorite films, 1953’s Creature From The Black Lagoon. In this scene, Julie Adams goes for a swim. Little does she realize that, under the water, the Creature is following her every move. Wonderfully directed by Jack Arnold, this creepy yet oddly lovely scene is one of the best of the 50s.
(Today also would have been the 100th birthday of Julie Adams, one of the best — and in my mind, most underrated — actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age.)
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 lets the visuals do the talking!
4 Shots From 4 Films
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972, dir by Bob Clark, DP: Jack McGowan)
The Last House On The Left (1972, dir by Wes Craven, DP: Victor Hurwitz)
The Killing Kind (1973, dir by Curtis Harrington, DP: Mario Tosi)
The Brood (1979, dir by David Cronenberg, DP: Mark Irwin)
Coward has A LOT going on, but it’s fun! The protagonist is reading the woods next to Baby Yoda (yes, really), Baby Yoda flees, and our protagonist dies.
Hear me out, this story has a beginning, middle, and end. Also, it made me laugh. Kerron Andrews has skills to make a quick compelling story – FOR CHEAP! Industry people – Take Note- If I were looking for a man to make my low budget horror film, I’d DM him right away.
I couldn’t find Kerron Andrews on X, but I left him a kind comment on his YT.
by Frank R. Paul
This cover is from 1953.
It’s just a normal night as Danzig’s house in the video for Braineaters. Everyone comes for dinner and the chef comes out with a pot full of brains. If nothing else, this video is about as literal an adaptation of a song’s title as you are ever likely to see.
Enjoy!
What was the Siberian fireball?
One of the more intriguing mysteries of history is investigated in this episode of In Search Of…. Leonard Nimoy narrates!
(It’s always strange to me that there hasn’t been hundreds of movies made about the Tunguska event. I know that the current popular theory is that it was a comet or, at the very least, a really big asteroid. Personally, I like the theory that it was Nikolai Tesla testing out a death ray.)
On tonight’s episode of FreakyLinks, Derek and the team head down to New Mexico to investigate reports of a tentacle-bearing desert creature! If not for the tentacles, I would say it was probably a chupacabra. Seriously, if you ever see a chupacabra coming at you, run!
This episode originally aired on November 3rd, 2000!
Enjoy!
After Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) causes a national security crisis by teleporting into the White House, Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox) is given the authority to invade Professor Xavier’s School and investigate its connection to the mutants. Stryker, who not only wants to investigate the mutants but also destroy them by manipulating the same technology that Xavier uses to find them, just happens to be an old enemy of Logan’s (Hugh Jackman). In fact, Stryker is responsible for Logan fusing the adamantium to his bones. That’s a hell of a coincidence.
A sequel to X-Men, X2 tells a bigger and more complex story than the first film. Professor Xavier’s students are spread out by the chaos. Rogue (Anna Paquin) sees prejudice firsthand when Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore) is betrayed by his own family. Pyro (Aaron Stanford) is tempted to reject the X-Men’s philosophy of coexistence. After being underused in the first film, both Scott (James Marsden) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) are key players here. Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) return, this time temporarily allying with Professor X (Patrick Stewart) to stop Stryker. Logan has his own reasons to go after Stryker. Surprisingly, X2 is not only bigger than the first film but it’s also better. The actors are more convincing in their roles, the action is more exciting, and director Bryan Singer capably juggles all of the different parts without losing the plot. He even manages to ably set up the Dark Phoenix Saga. In the first film, the X-Men had it almost too easy when it came to battling opponents like Toad and Sabretooth. This film has not only Brian Cox’s William Stryker but also Kelly Hu’s Deathstrike.
Those of us who were shocked when X-Men turned out to be good were even more shocked when X2 turned out to be even better. For a little while, it seemed like there would never be a bad X-Men movie! Later, that’s the way a lot of us would also feel about the Marvel movies. Those were good days.
DEAD TONE (2007), also known as 7EVENTY 5IVE, opens with a group of kids playing a prank-calling game called “Seventy-Five,” where the goal is to place a random phone call and tell such a believable story that the person who answers will stay on the line at least 75 seconds. One guy seems upset when they call him. Later that night, while everyone is sleeping, a psycho with an axe comes in and brutally murders all the parents while the kids hide and watch in terror. Jump forward ten years and most of the kids who survived the night of terror are now college students. Invited to a weekend party at a wealthy classmate’s mansion, the group resumes their prank-calling game. Needless to say, when the maniac from ten years earlier answers the phone, the members of the group find themselves being stalked and murdered again. Hopefully Detective John Criton (Rutger Hauer), who worked the original murders 10 years earlier, will figure out who the killer is and stop him before everyone dies!
DEAD TONE is directed by Brian Hooks and Deon Taylor, who also star in the film. They’ve created a gory, low-budget slasher that blends elements of ‘80s and ‘90s horror films with an urban twist. For a guy who did his share of prank calls as a kid, I think the “psycho on the receiving end of a prank call” storyline is pretty cool. And the opening scene where the kids watch as their parents are killed because of their phone calls is horrific and pulls you right into the story. Unfortunately, once we get past the interesting open, there’s nothing that special about the rest of the movie. The characters aren’t particularly memorable or likable, and they sure as hell aren’t very smart. Call me crazy, but I’m thinking that I would never make another prank call again if I survived a mass murder event that was brought on by prank phone calls. These folks have no such qualms, which may not make any sense in the real world, but I guess is necessary if you need more axe murders for your plot. I will admit that there are a few awesome kills in the film, especially if you enjoy a good beheading. I won’t spoil the scenes, but the ones I’m specifically thinking of are both surprising and jarring at the same time. I’m also the kind of guy who will watch anything featuring Rutger Hauer. DEAD TONE’s Detective John Criton isn’t a character highlight of his career, but I still enjoy watching him go through the motions of investigating the crimes both in the present and in the past. It’s a part that he could have completed in his sleep, but this movie would have benefited from more “Hauer time.”
Overall, DEAD TONE is the kind of movie to watch with little to no expectations. It’s not great, but if you’re in the mood for a slasher movie with jump scares, silly characters, some decent gore, and even an acting legend thrown in for good measure, you could do a lot worse than DEAD TONE!
Crystal Lake is a thousand times better than Carrie.
Whoops. Did I say a thousand? I meant to say a million.
I say this despite the fact that Crystal Lake pretty much falls apart during its final two episodes. If the first six episodes constitute an enjoyable and, at times, even loving homage to the Friday the 13th films, the final two episodes go off the rails by giving Jason Voorhees, the epitome of an old-school slasher villain and the symbol of unelevated horror, a very 21st-century, American Horror Story-style origin story. It’s a thoroughly unnecessary addition to the Jason saga, one that exists to plug the plot holes that most Friday the 13th fans have always been happy to ignore. It’s just as bad as Jason Goes to Hell’s insistence that Jason was actually a space slug who could possess people. Personally, I think that we should do what true Friday the 13th fans always do whenever we come across something that doesn’t work and just ignore it.
Even taking that into account, Crystal Lake is still infinitely better than Carrie.
The difference between Crystal Lake and Carrie is that Crystal Lake isn’t trying to be something that it isn’t. Crystal Lake isn’t ashamed of being a pulpy, sordid, and rather bloody horror miniseries. Carrie was made to win Emmys and critical plaudits. Crystal Lake was made to make you put your hands over your eyes whenever Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) hacks someone’s face off. Crystal Lake fully embraces the horror. Crystal Lake obviously loves the Friday the 13th films, with all of their flaws. Carrie is a series made by and for people who think that they’re better than the horror genre. Crystal Lake is not.
Crystal Lake serves as a prequel to the first Friday the 13th film. Pamela Voorhees is the cook at Camp Crystal Lake and, in the first episode, her son, Jason, disappears while swimming. The camp counselors who were supposed to be watching him were making love. Pamela snaps. She refuses to accept that her son has drowned. She watches angrily as the town moves on. When she hears that the Christys are going to reopen the camp, she is not pleased. That said, she’s snapped long before that. Unlike Carrie, which went out of its way to absolve the character of any sort of responsibility, Crystal Lake does not shy away from presenting Pamela as an unhinged killer. She kills two mysterious men who show up at her house. She kills the abusive mother of Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom), who was Jason’s only friend at camp. When a group of Marxist hippies show up and try to convince the now-orphaned Grace to run away with them, Pamela goes after them as well. Pamela kills a lot of people in this miniseries, but she remains a compelling character because of Linda Cardellini’s wonderful performance in the lead role. Her love for Jason is real, and it’s easy to understand why she would feel such rage at a town that is pretending he didn’t exist or why she would have no sympathy for a mother who abuses her child. Cardellini gives such a strong performance that it’s disappointing that the final two episodes let the series down.
As someone who has seen all of the Friday the 13th films, I appreciated how carefully and exactly Crystal Lake recreated the feel and the visuals of the first two entries. Its version of Crystal Lake looks identical to the one that poor Annie discovered during the first film. Even the minor characters are made up to almost exactly resemble the actors who played them in the first film. I immediately knew who was supposed to be Enos. I knew who was supposed to be the waitress with whom Steve Christy would eventually share one of his final conversations. (Steve Christy is seen a few times in Crystal Lake, as a very ’70s teenager.) A wonderful actor named Nick Cordileone played the role of “Crazy” Ralph and, whenever he was on screen, I could immediately see him becoming the character that Walt Gorney played in the first two films. A lot of love and care went into recreating the town of Crystal Lake and the camp. The series does, admittedly, move things up chronologically. In the first film, Jason disappeared in the ’50s. In the series, it happens in the ’70s. That’s no big deal, though. The show has a lot of fun both recreating the ’70s and poking fun at the decade’s unique culture. One need only watch the scene where Pam is dragged to a seminar given by a self-consciously hip self-help guru to understand why the decade gave rise to the unapologetically cynical slasher boom of the ’80s.
Now again, the Jason origin story that is presented in the seventh episode is a problem. And if Crystal Lake returns for a second season, I sincerely hope that it will be ignored in much the same way that the franchise has traditionally ignored its mistakes. If it doesn’t, it’s not going to bode will for the future of this series. Still, flaws and all, Crystal Lake is an enjoyably sordid and bloody show. It makes no apologies for being what it is. Other horror shows could stand to learn from it.
