Horror Film Review: It! The Terror From Beyond Space (dir by Edward L. Cahn)

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Another name for Mars is …. DEATH!”

The 1958 sci-fi/horror hybrid, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, opens with a NASA press conference. The assembled reporters are reminded that, earlier in the year, America’s first manned mission to Mars was presumed to have been lost. However, a second mission was sent to Mars and they discovered that the commander of the first mission, Edward L. Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), was still alive.

Unfortunately, all of Carruthers’s crewmates were dead. Carruthers claimed that the murders were committed by a monster. The commander of the second mission, Col. Van Heusen (Kim Spalding), instead suspected that Carruthers killed his crewmates when he realized they were stranded on Mars. The ship had enough provisions to last the entire crew for one year or ten years for just one man.

The second mission is now on their way back to Earth, with Carruthers under house arrest. While one crewman does believe that Carruthers’s story could be true, the others are convinced that Carruthers is a murderer. What they don’t know is that the monster from Carruthers’s story is not only real but that it also snuck onto their ship during lift-off. Tall and scaly with huge claws and a permanently angry face, the Monster — It, for lack of a more formal name — is lurking in the lower levels of the ship and hunting for food.

To state what is probably already obvious, It! is not a film that worries much about being scientifically accurate. While it does explain how living on the surface of Mars caused It to develop into the predator that it is, this is also a science fiction film from 1958. It’s a film where, instead of going to the Moon, the first manned spaceflight is to Mars. It’s also a film where there’s no weightlessness in space, the two women on the ship serve everyone coffee, and a nuclear reactor is casually unshielded at one point in an attempt to destroy It. Bullets are fired on the spaceship. Grenades are tossed. Airlocks are rather casually opened.

Fortunately, none of that matters. Clocking in at a mere 69 minutes, It! is a surprisingly suspenseful horror film, one that makes good use of its claustrophobic locations (a lot of the action takes place in an air duct) and which features a surprisingly convincing and, at times, even scary monster. It may be a man in a rubber suit but that doesn’t make it any less shocking when its claw bursts out of an an open hatch and starts trying to grab everything nearby. The cast of It! are all convincing in their roles. Watching them, you really do believe that they are a crew who have seen a lot together and it makes the subsequent deaths all the more effective,

It! was a troubled production, The monster was played by veteran stuntman Ray Corrigan, who reportedly showed up drunk a few times and also managed to damage the monster suit. Many members of the cast were not happy about being cast in a B-movie. (Fortunately, their resentment probably helped their performances as the similarly resentful crew of the second mission to Mars.) Marshall Thompson, who played Carruthers, was one of the few cast members who enjoyed making It! and, perhaps not surprisingly, he also gives the best performance in the film.

Troubled production or not, It! was not only a box office success but, along with Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, it was later cited as one of the inspiration for Alien. At its best, It! has the same sort of claustrophobic feel as Alien. The scene where one of the crewman is found in an air duct brings to mind the fate of Tom Skerritt’s character in Alien.

It! is still a very effective work of sci-fi horror. Remember, another name for Mars is …. DEATH!

Horror On The Lens: The Clones (dir by Lamar Card and Paul Hunt)

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Today it is science fiction, tomorrow it will be science fact….”

So declared the trailer from 1973’s The Clones.

One of the first films to be made about cloning, this movie tells the story of Dr. Gerald Appleby (Michael Greene), who discovers that there’s another version of him living his life. Dr. Appleby and his clone both find themselves being pursued by two government agents (Gregory Sierra and Otis Brown) and a mad scientist (Stanley Adams).

The Clones requires some patience. It moves at its own deliberate pace and there’s quite a few scenes of Dr. Appleby running through the desert. That said, the film builds up to wonderfully twisted conclusion and the final roller coaster shoot-out makes everything more than worth it.

Ever since I first saw this ennui-drenched film in 2012, I’ve been recommending it to people. I’m happy to share it with you today!

Music Film Review: Tommy (dir by Ken Russell)

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Tommy, can you hear me?”

That’s a question that’s asked frequently in the 1975 film, Tommy. An adaptation of the famous rock opera by the Who (though Pete Townshend apparently felt that the film’s vision was more director Ken Russell’s than anything that he had meant to say), Tommy tells the story of a “deaf, dumb, and blind kid” who grows up to play a mean pinball and then become a cult leader. Why pinball? Who knows? Townshend’s the one who wrote Pinball Wizard but Ken Russell is the one who decided to have Elton John sing it while wearing giant platform shoes.

Tommy opens, like so many British films of the 70s, with the blitz. With London in ruins, Captain Walker (the almost beatifically handsome Robert Powell) leaves his wife behind as he fights for his country. When Walker is believed to be dead, Nora (Ann-Margaret) takes Tommy to a holiday camp run by Frank (Oliver Reed). Oliver Reed might not be the first person you would expect to see in a musical and it is true that he wasn’t much of a singer. However, it’s also true that he was Oliver Reed and, as such, he was impossible to look away from. Even his tuneless warbling is somehow charmingly dangerous. Nora falls for Frank but — uh oh! — Captain Walker’s not dead. When the scarred captain surprises Frank in bed with Nora, Frank hits him over the head and kills him. Young Tommy witnesses the crime and is told that he didn’t see anything and he didn’t hear anything and that he’s not going to say anything.

And so, as played by Roger Daltrey, Tommy grows up to be “deaf, dumb, and blind.” Various cures — from drugs to religion to therapy — are pursued to no avail. As the Acid Queen, Tina Turner sings and dances as if she’s stealing Tommy’s soul. As the Therapist, Jack Nicholson is all smarmy charm as he gently croons to Ann-Margaret. Eric Clapton performs in front of a statue of Marilyn Monroe. Ann-Margaret dances in a pool of beans and chocolate and rides a phallic shaped pillow. As for Tommy, he eventually becomes the Pinball Wizard and also a new age messiah. But it turns out that his new followers are just as destructive as the people who exploited him when he was younger. It’s very much a Ken Russell film, full of imagery that is shocking and occasionally campy but always memorable.

I love Tommy. It’s just so over-the-top and absurd that there’s no way you can ignore it. Ann-Margaret sings and dances as if the fate of the world depends upon it while Oliver Reed drinks and glowers with the type of dangerous charisma that makes it clear why he was apparently seriously considered as Sean Connery’s replacement in the roles of James Bond. As every scene is surreal and every line of dialogue is sung, it’s probably easy to read too much into the film. It could very well be Ken Russell’s commentary on the New Age movement and the dangers of false messiahs. It could also just be that Ken Russell enjoyed confusing people and 1975 was a year when directors could still get away with doing that. With each subsequent viewing of Tommy, I become more convinced that some of the film’s most enigmatic moments are just Russell having a bit of fun. The scenes of Tommy running underwater are so crudely put together that you can’t help but feel that Russell was having a laugh at the expense of people looking for some sort of deeper meaning in Tommy’s journey. In the end, Tommy is a true masterpiece of pop art, an explosion of style and mystery.

Tommy may seem like a strange film for me to review in October. It’s not a horror film, though it does contain elements of the genre, from the scarred face of the returned to Captain Walker to the Acid Queen sequence to a memorable side story that features a singer who looks like a junior Frankenstein. To me, though, Tommy is a great Halloween film. Halloween is about costumes and Tommy is ultimately about the costumes that people wear and the personas that they assume as they go through their lives. Oliver Reed goes from wearing the polo shirt of a holiday camp owner to the monocle of a tycoon to the drab jumpsuits of a communist cult leader. Ann-Margaret’s wardrobe is literally a character of its own. Everyone in the film is looking for meaning and identity and the ultimate message (if there is one) appears to be that the search never ends.

October Positivity: I’m In Love With A Church Girl (dir by Steve Race)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2013’s I’m In Love With A Church Girl, future Fyre Festival promoter Ja Rule stars as Miles Montego.

Miles is wealthy and powerful and glamorous and he owes it all to his career as a drug dealer. However, at heart, he’s still a good son who loves his mother and who worries about disappointing her with his criminal lifestyle. His mother is big into church and she wants Miles to settle down with a good Christian girl. Miles is like, “It’ll never happen.” But then, at a party thrown by his accountant (Vincent Pastore), Miles meets and falls for Vanessa Leon (Adrienne Bailon). Vanessa is a …. wait for it …. church girl!

Falling in love with Vanessa changes Miles. He realizes that there’s more to life than just making money and hanging out with the members of his drug-dealing crew. He goes to church with Vanessa and is shocked to discover that the preacher owns a nice suit and drives a fancy car. The preacher explains that it’s not a sin to by stylish. Tell that to the Amish, preach.

Anyway, Miles may be finding God but the DEA still wants to take down Miles and his crew. Martin Kove appears in one scene as the DEA supervisor who orders Stephen Baldwin and Michael Madsen to make Miles their number one priority. Madsen isn’t in much of the film but Baldwin makes many appearances, popping up regularly to remind us that Miles is still under surveillance.

Miles’s new-found faith is tested when his mother dies. Then, when Vanessa ends up in the hospital, Miles really struggles. If you’ve ever wanted to see Ja Rule deliver an angry and impassioned monologue about faith, I’m In Love With A Church Girl is the film for you!

To give credit where credit is due, I’m In Love With A Church Girl was clearly made with the best of intentions. The film was written by Galley Molina, a real life former drug dealer who later became a preacher. Molina reportedly based the film on his own life story and the end result is an very earnest film that does seem to believe it’s own message. That’s a good thing.

The bad thing is that the film, with its 2-hour running time, is almost painfully slow and the rather simple story is stretched so thin that the film itself becomes a bit of an endurance test. The other problem is that Ja Rule is, to put it charitably, not a very good actor. He sleepwalks through the film with a somewhat dazed expression on his face, projecting little of the charisma that you would probably need to get an otherwise sensible person like Vanessa to overlook your drug dealing career. He certainly doesn’t have the screen presence to carry a two-hour film and he big dramatic monologue is more likely to inspire laughter than tears.

(It doesn’t help that it’s hard to look at him without thinking about him bragging about how great the Fyre Festival was going to be.)

The film is so well-intentioned that I kind of hate to be critical of it but I’m In Love With A Church Girl doesn’t really work.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Pacific Blue 3.1 “Inside Straight”

Posted on October 7, 2025 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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.

Everyone’s book for another season of bicycles and law-breaking.

Episode 3.1 “Inside Straight”

(Dir by Michael Levine, originally aired on August 3rd, 19997)

One night, while on a date with Chris, TC spots a man holding a gun. TC draws his own gun and yells at the man to drop his weapon. The man turns around. He fires so TC shoots and the man goes down. It turns out that the man was an undercover narcotics detective with a spotless record.

TC is suspended and the bike patrol basically stops doing their job and instead proceed to harass the dead man’s wife and his partner until they discover that the wife and the partner were having an affair and, conveniently, the cop was actually shot by someone who happened to be standing behind TC. It seems like simple forensic evidence (like the amount of bullets on the scene) should have proven that without the bike patrol even getting involved but I guess the cops in Malibu or wherever this show takes place are extremely incompetent.

Meanwhile, the poker game of mobster Joseph Tataglia (Joseph Campanella) gets held up, The thief is a degenerate gambler who tries to frame TC’s older brother, Teddy (Andy Buckley — how, it’s David Wallace from The Office!). The real thief is easily exposed and captured. I’m not really sure what the point of this story was. Tataglia last appeared during the first season but this episode acts as if he’s been a continual presence in the show for the past two seasons. I imagine viewers were confused as to who he was or why he had so much pull with Palermo.

There’s a scene where TC is subjected to an intense interrogation from Internal Affairs and I have to admit that it made me laugh because TC and Palermo were wearing their dorky bicycle cop uniforms while being yelled at by someone in a suit.

Another scene features Victor and Cory telling Chris and TC that there’s a huge crowd waiting to see the movie that they want to see. Victor says TC might have to flash his badge to get tickets. Police arrogance is annoying in general but it’s even worse coming from people who ride bicycles.

It appears that nothing had changed with the start of a new season.

Horror On TV: Hammer House of Horror #7 “The Silent Scream” (dir by Alan Gibson)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s episode of televised horror is The Silent Scream, the seventh episode of Hammer House of Horror. It was originally broadcast in the UK on October 25th, 1980.

A quick content warning for everyone: This episode features some scenes of animals in distress so I personally would advise viewer discretion. That said, I simply had to share this episode because it features Peter Cushing’s final performance for Hammer Studios. He plays a seemingly kindly old man who has a very dark secret. A youngish Brian Cox plays the ex-con who gets a job working for Cushing. This is a very unnerving episode with an ending that truly sticks with you.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The Beast Must Die (dir by Paul Annett)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

You have 30 seconds to decide who is the werewolf. Is it the professor? Is it the wife of the big game hunter? Is it the long-haired hippie who has a history of cannibalism? Is it the concert pianist? Is it the diplomat? Make your guess and then….

This is the challenge that is presented to the viewers of the 1974 film, The Beast Must Die. The Beast Must Die is a werewolf film. Calvin Lockhart stars as millionaire big game hunter Tom Newcliffe. Tom has invited a group of people to his English mansion because, according to him, one of them is a werewolf and he plans to hunt down whoever it is. It’s not a terrible premise and I imagine that, in 1974, it was probably quite revolutionary to cast a black actor as a millionaire with a large British estate. (In America, the film was marketed as being a blaxploitation film under the title Black Werewolf.)

That said, The Beast Must Die is still best-known for its “Werewolf Breaks.” At certain points in the film, a stopwatch appears on the screen and a narrator asks us if we’ve figured out who the werewolf is yet. The viewer is given 30 seconds to make a guess before the film continues. The “Werewolf Breaks” were apparently added to the film after production was completed and director Paul Annett was not happy about them. The Beast Must Die is, in many ways, a pretty grim film or, at least, it would be if not for the campy narrator telling us that it’s up to us to solve the mystery.

But you know what? I like the Werewolf Breaks. They’re fun and, without them, The Beast Must Die would come across as being a film that takes itself way too seriously. Calvin Lockhart, who was so good in Melinda, overacts to a tremendous degree as Tom Newcliffe and, as the film progresses, he goes from being merely eccentric to actually coming across as being rather unhinged in his attempts to discover who is the werewolf. It’s never really clear how he settled on his suspects. (All of them are described as being in the area of several unexplained deaths but it seems like the same could be said of probably hundreds of other people as well.) But once he has them at the mansion, he’s determined to keep them there until he figures out which is infected with lycanthropy. (In this film, the werewolf curse is described as basically being a virus.)

Fortunately, the suspects are played by an interesting gallery of British and American character actors. Charles Gray plays the shady diplomat. Malene Clark is Tom’s wife. Michael Gambon is the pianist while Ciaran Madden plays his wife. Tom Chadbon plays the hippie cannibal while Anton Diffring shows up as the head of security for the mansion. Best of all, Peter Cushing plays the professor who is an expert on werewolves. It’s always a joy to see Peter Cushing in any film. He’s particularly good here, handling his often overwritten dialogue like the pro that he was.

The Beast Must Die is an uneven film. The opening sequence, which features Tom testing the mansion’s security systems, seems to go on forever and the plot is full of twists that fall apart if you give them too much thought, But the Werewolf Breaks made me smile and the supporting cast is a delight. It’s a fun film to watch during the Halloween season.

October Hacks: L.A. Slasher (dir by Martin Owen)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2016’s L.A. Slasher, an androgynous killer wearing a white suit and a mask decides that reality stars are the worst people in the world so he starts kidnapping them and torturing them and live-streaming their murders. Even worse, he talks to them and talks to us about how he feels about them. I say “even worse” because the voice of the Slasher is provided by Andy Dick. Andy Dick’s nasal voice is even more whiny than usual in this film and it left me wondering what if perhaps death would preferable to listening to Dick speak.

L.A. Slasher is meant to be a satire and I will give it some credit. It hits its targets and there’s even some bite to the scenes in which people on social media start talking about how much they love the slasher. In many ways, this film predicted the Cult of Luigi. Unfortunately, the film itself is so overdirected and cartoonishly-staged that it’s never quite as effective as it wants to be. It’s essentially a live action cartoon and a fairly exhausting one of that. The flashing lights, the constantly prowling camera, the jump cuts, the neon, it’s meant to be overwhelming but instead it’s just annoying.

There are a lot of familiar faces in the cast. Dave Bautista and Danny Trejo shows up as drug dealers. Mischa Barton is the Actress. Drake Bell is the Popstar. Brooke Hogan is the Reality Star. And, of course, Eric Roberts shows up very briefly as The Mayor. Personally, I think the film would have worked better if Andy Dick had played the Mayor and if Roberts had been the voice of the Slasher. Roberts has a much better voice and, with Dick playing the Mayor, it would be easy to just leave his scenes on the cutting room floor.

In the end, I think the main problem is that L.A. Slasher is a film from 2016 that acts as if it’s the first film to ever criticize reality television and the people who populate it. Even in 2016, that argument was hardly new or original. It certainly didn’t need to be made in the voice of Andy Dick.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

On-Stage With The Lens: MacBeth (dir by Phillip Casson and Trevor Nunn)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1978, Trevor Nunn staged what would become a legendary production of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The play was produced in a small studio theatre, with the actors working in the round were minimum sets and costuming. Shifts in location or mood were indicated are by lighting changes. It was a production that captured both the intensity of the play but also the horror of Shakespeare’s play about ambition, guilt, fate, and multiple murders. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were played by Ian McKellen and Judi Dench.

This production was filmed and, in 1979, broadcast on Thames Television in the UK. Here, for today’s staged horror, is the Trevor Nunn production of MacBeth, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench.

The Eric Roberts Horror Collection: Insane Like Me? (dir by Chip Joslin)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After his girlfriend and his brother are killed while throwing a party at the local abandoned insane asylum (every town has one!), veteran Jake Morgan (Britt Bankhead) finds himself tossed into a not-abandoned insane asylum. Jake swears that everyone was killed by vampires. The local sheriff (Eric Roberts) swears that Jake is the murderer. The sheriff also happens to be the father of Jake’s dead girlfriend.

Jump forward a few years and Jake has been released from the asylum. He returns to the town to take out the vampires. The sheriff still claims that Jake is crazy but it soon becomes apparent that the sheriff has got a secret or two of his own….

This 2024 movie got off to a good start and it had an effective ending. I appreciated that Eric Roberts got to do a bit more than he usually does in these type of films. Sheriff Eric Roberts gets to beat someone up and I nearly cheered, even when I wasn’t supposed to. Considering the amount of movies that I’ve watched that have just featured Roberts delivering his lines from behind a desk, it was nice to see him moving around and actually playing a character.

Unfortunately, the middle part of the film drags. When is say drag, I don’t just mean that it moved slowly. I mean that it was so incredibly boring that I found myself checking the time every few minutes. We meet a group of teenage victims and let’s just say that some of them were better actors than others. This is a movie that should have been nonstop vampire mayhem. Instead, it got bogged down with not-very interesting characters delivering flat dialogue.

One final note: the movie features a doctor named Stoker. It’s amazing to think that the entire town is full of vampires and yet no one ever points out that oddness of the doctor being named Stoker. I guess today’s vampires just aren’t that well-read.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed: