The TSL Horror Grindhouse: DNA (dir by William Messa)

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1996’s DNA, Mark Dacascos plays Dr. Ash Matteley, an American doctor who works to bring healthcare to the residents of Borneo. When Ash’s former boss, Dr. Carl Wessinger (Jürgen Prochnow), approaches Ash and invites him to take part in a jungle expedition to track down some beetles whose genetic material can cure all known diseases, Ash agrees. However, once Wessinger, Ash, and their native helpers find the beetles in an ancient tomb, it turns out that Wessinger has plans of his own. He shoots Ash in the shoulder and then makes his escape.

Two years later, Ash has long hair and he’s taken to wearing a Hawaiian shirt, but he’s still dedicated to taking care of the poor of Borneo. When CIA agent Claire Sommers (Robin McKee) approaches him and asks him to help lead her through the jungle, Ash says that he’s not interested. But when Sommers reveals that she’s looking for Wessinger, Ash realizes that he has no choice but to help her. For some reason, they take a child named Matzu with them. Why you would recruit a child for a dangerous mission that involves going upriver in a canoe, I’m not sure. Then again, I’m also not sure why Claire would wear a dress while exploring the jungle either, other than the fact that the film needed an excuse to have Ash look away and then sneak a peek while Claire undresses and changes into something more jungle-appropriate.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Dr. Wessinger has not been spending his time trying to cure all known diseases. Instead, he’s been splicing genetic material to try to bring an ancient creature back to life. Now, before you say that this sounds like a Jurassic Park rip-off, allow me to point out that Wessinger is not bringing back a dinosaur. Instead, he’s bringing back a big alien creature, one that perhaps crashed on Earth during the prehistoric age. This is not Jurassic Park. At most, it’s Jurassic Alien.

Or maybe it’s just Alien. Once Ash and Claire and the little kid make it inside Dr. Wessinger’s headquarters, there are a lot of scenes of people hiding in offices and nervously walking down hallways and hoping that the monster won’t jump out of nowhere and kill them.

Then again, maybe we should just call this movie Predator because eventually, the action moves back into the jungle and Ash finds himself being stalked by the alien, who is apparently a very good hunter and who lives for the hunt. Ash goes from being a hippie doctor to being a full-blown action hero. There’s even a scene where he and Claire and the kid have to run away from a crashing helicopter. Of course, the helicopter was obviously a model. Still, it was hard not to imagine Mark Dacascos saying, “Get away from da choppah!”

My point is that a lot of different DNA was spliced together to create this movie. Take a little from Indiana Jones and a little from Apocalypse Now and then toss in Alien, Predator, and Jurassic Park and you’ve got DNA. Unfortunately, the film still isn’t as entertaining as it should have been. Mark Dacascos barely gets to show off his martial arts skills while the film can’t even give us one good Jürgen Prochnow freak-out. Even with all of the shameless plagiarism, the film still feels like it’s just going through the motions. Sadly, DNA is never as much fun as it should have been.

Retro Television Review: Saved By The Bell: The New Class 2.23 “The D Stands For Dropout”

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to 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 Saved By The Bell: The New Class, which ran on NBC from 1993 to 2o00. The show is currently on Prime.

This week, the Gang learns a lesson about not dropping out of school.

Episode 2.23 “The D Stands For Dropout”

(Dir by Don Barnhart, originally aired on December 10th, 1994)

Oh no! Tommy wants to drop out of high school and work full time as an auto mechanic!

Actually …. that might be for the best.

Since the very first episode, Saved By The Bell: The New Class has portrayed Tommy as being an amiable but dumb guy who just happens to have a savant-like ability for fixing cars. It’s been established, in several episodes, that there’s nothing Tommy can’t do with a car. Since Tommy apparently know everything that there is to know about cars and cars are literally the only thing that he cares about and he always seems to be flunking every class that he takes, why shouldn’t Tommy drop out? What’s he going to do in high school or college? He’s already learned everything that there is no to know about how to fix a car and a good auto mechanic will always be in demand. Plus, Tommy’s cute enough that, if he needs to, he can probably find a rich widow in Beverly Hills to pay his bills.

Drop out, Tommy! Drop out!

Still, Mr. Belding and everyone else insists that Tommy is making a mistake when he drops out of school. Belding tells Tommy’s father (Nick Angotti) that he needs to show some tough love so Tommy realizes how difficult it is in the real world. Tommy is kicked out of his house and has to move in with Screech. Tommy is no longer allowed to help his friends with their science project. Tommy has one of those Saved By The Bell fantasy sequences where Screech refuses to hire him because he doesn’t have a high school diploma….

And really, this is when Tommy should say, “But I’m actually already getting paid good money to do the only thing that I care about and the only thing that I’m actually good at so who cares?”

Instead, Tommy reenrolls in high school and helps the Gang win the science fair by building a remote control car. The competition must have been really weak that year.

Poor Tommy. When he’s an adult, he’s going to look and realize he should have just dropped out when he had the chance.

The Films of Dario Argento: Sleepless

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In Italy, a young boy named Giacomo Gallo can only hide under a bed as he witnesses his mother being stabbed to death by an English horn. He doesn’t see the murderer, who is believed to be a serial killer known as The Dwarf Killer due to his short stature. All he can remember for sure is the blood and a strange hissing sound. Detective Ulisse Moretti (Max von Sydow) promises Giacomo that he will capture the Dwarf Killer.

Twenty years later, Moretti is retired. He never caught the Dwarf Killer, whose killing spree ended just as abruptly as it began. However, when a sex worker named Angela (Barbara Lerici) is brutally murdered on a train, there is evidence that indicates the Dwarf Killer has returned. Moretti comes out of retirement, determined to close the one case that he never solved. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult because Moretti’s memory is failing. As he puts it at one point, there are times when he can’t even remember his late wife’s face. Moretti has forgotten much about the case, though as he investigates, it all starts to come back to him. Moretti finds himself working with the now grown-up Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), who hopes to finally capture the man who killed his mother. And while Moretti may be struggling to remember the past and Giacomo still isn’t quite sure what he saw while hiding under the bed, it soon becomes clear that the killer remembers both of them.

After the disappointingly mean-spirited Phantom of the Opera, Sleepless was a return to form for Dario Argento. The film is a giallo and, in typical Argento fashion, the mystery involves not just the physical clues but also how people interpret and edit their own memories. The hiss that Giacomo heard turns out to be not what he originally believed. The killer also turns out to be something even more disturbing than what the police originally assumed. At the heart of the mystery is a rather morbid nursery verse, the sort of thing that can be either innocent or dangerous depending on how one interprets the words. Sleepless is a throwback to the type of films that made Mario Bava famous and also the type of films with which Argento started his directorial career. Max von Sydow’s Moretti is not just a detective. He’s also a symbol of an aging genre, a reminder of the clever mysteries that shed blood with style without ever losing their essential humanity.

Argento has often been criticized for not getting particularly complex performances from his actors. I don’t think that criticism is always fair. One need only see David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red or Jessica Harper in Suspiria to see what Argento can do with the right cast. In Sleepless, Max von Sydow gives a strong performance as Moretti. In fact, it’s probably one of the best performances to have ever appeared in an Argento film. He plays Moretti as being a kindly man on a mission, someone who has seen the worst that the world has to offer but who hasn’t given up his soul. Von Sydow gives us someone who we truly care about, which makes the film’s set pieces (which are bloody even by Argento standards) all the more effective.

It’s become a bit of a cliché to claim that Argento went into a decline after Tenebrae. While it’s true that Argento’s post-Opera films have been uneven, Sleepless shows what he was still capable of producing.

The (Reviewed) Films of Dario Argento:

Horror Film Review: One Body Too Many (dir by Frank MacDonald)

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1944’s One Body Too Many, Jack Haley stars as Albert L. Tuttle. Tuttle is an insurance agent. He’s a rather mild-mannered one. In fact, people often have a hard time remembering his name. He’s called “Mr. Turtle.” He’s called “Mr. Title.” Patiently, he explains over and over again that his name is Tuttle. Looking to secure his job, Tuttle hopes to sell $200,000 in life insurance to an eccentric millionaire named Cyrus J. Rutherford.

What Tuttle doesn’t know is that Cyrus J. Rutherford has recently died. His entire greedy family and all of his servants have gathered at the Rutherford Mansion so that they can hear the reading of the will. In his will, Rutherford lays out all the reasons why he didn’t like his family or anyone who worked for him. He accuses the butler, Merkil (Bela Lugosi), of padding his expense account. He accuses his lawyer (Bernard Nedell) of always trying to take advantage of him. Rutherford writes that his last request is that his body be placed in a glass-domed vault so that the stars can forever shine down upon his face. He says that anyone who leaves the house before the glass vault is built will lose their inheritance. If the body is buried instead of in the vault, then Rutherford’s largest beneficiaries will instead become his smallest beneficiaries and vice versa. It’s a bit of an odd will, to be honest. I’m not particularly sure that it would stand up in court today, but in 1944, eccentric millionaires could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Myself, I have to applaud Rutherford for messing with everyone even after death. That takes determination.

When Tuttle shows up, the family mistakes him for a detective that has been sent to make sure that Rutherford’s body isn’t stolen before the glass dome is constructed. Tuttle, not picking up on how weird this all is, assumes that the family is just really excited about insurance. When Tuttle finds himself locked in with the dead body, he immediately demands to leave. However, since the real detective has failed to show up, Rutherford’s niece, Carol (Jean Parker), asks him to stay and guard the body. A good Tuttle appears on one of Tuttle’s shoulders while a bad Tuttle appears on the other. After listening to the debate, Tuttle decides to stay if only because Carol is attractive.

It’s going to be a long night, though. Not only does the body disappear, but it appears that there is a murderer in the house!

One Body Too Many is an amiable comedy, one that features a very 1940s mix of absurd dialogue and slapstick humor. Though Jack Haley, who is best-remembered for playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, is the lead and a very likable one at that, the movie is pretty much stolen by Bela Lugosi. Lugosi’s later films tend to be a mixed bag, but One Body Too Many allows Lugosi to give a good and genuinely funny performance as a butler who is far more clever than anyone realizes. Lugosi’s snarky reactions make the film, and they’re a nice reminder that Lugosi was a far more talented actor than he’s often given credit for.

Bonus Horror on the Lens: Phantom Ship (dir by Denison Clift)

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In December of 1872, a sailing ship called the Mary Celeste was found adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean. When the ship left New York in October, it had a captain and a full crew. The captain’s wife was among the passengers sailing on the ship. When the Mary Celeste was discovered, not only was no one on board but there was no evidence as to where everyone had gone or what caused them to abandon the ship in the first place. The crew of the Mary Celeste appeared to have vanished into thin air and none of them were ever seen again.

As you might guess, this led to years of speculation about what happened. Some people blamed pirates. Some blamed food poisoning. Some blamed ghosts and sea monsters. More modern theorists have blamed UFOs.

First released in 1935 and originally entitled The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, Phantom Ship offers up a theory of its own. It speculates about what happened during the final voyage of the Mary Celeste and why its crew vanished. One of the members of the crew is played by Bela Lugosi. Lugosi was still riding high from his starring role in Dracula when he starred in Phantom Ship and, playing a veteran sailor who appears to be a bit unstable, Lugosi gives an enjoyably over the top performance. Admittedly, Phantom Ship has its slow spots and, at times, it threatens to get bogged down in a subplot about the love triangle involving the Captain, his wife, and the Captain’s best friend. But Lugosi makes the film worth watching and, towards the end, there are some wonderfully atmospheric shots of the nearly deserted ship.

Along with being one Lugosi’s non-Dracula horror films, Phantom Ship is also well-known for being one of the first films to be produced by the British film company that would eventually become known as Hammer Pictures.

Enjoy!

Horror On The Lens: The Devil Bat (dir by Jean Yarborough)

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1940 film, The Devil Bat, the owners of a company in the small town of Heathville are super-excited because they’re going to be given their head chemist, Dr. Paul Carruthers (Bela Lugosi), a bonus check of $5,000. However, since Carruthers’s inventions have made millions for the company, he is offended by the small check and decides that the best way to handle this would be to sue in court and demand fair compensation …. just kidding! Instead, Dr. Carruthers sends his army of giant bats to kill the families of his employers.

The Devil Bat was produced by Production Releasing Corporation, a poverty row studio that specialized in shooting quickly and cheaply. Going from Universal to PRC was technically a step down for Lugosi but The Devil Bat is actually an excellent showcase for Lugosi and he gives one of his better non-Dracula performances as the embittered Dr. Carruthers. Indeed, one can imagine that Lugosi, who played such a big role in putting Universal on the map, could relate to Carruthers and his bitterness over not being fairly rewarded for the work he did to make others wealthy.

Enjoy The Devil Bat, starring the great Bela Lugosi!

Horror Song Of The Day: Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In memory of Bela Lugosi on his birthday, here is today’s song of the day.

Horror Scenes That I Love: Bela Lugosi in Dracula

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dracula (1931, starring Bela Lugosi as the Count, Dir by Tod Browning, DP: Karl Freund)

On this day, 144 years ago, Bela Lugosi was born in what is now Romania. Lugosi began his career in his native country, appearing on stage. After serving as an infantryman in World War I, Lugosi moved into the movie industry and appeared in silent Hungarian films. The young Lugosi was an activist, involved in labor issues and trying to unionize the Hungarian film industry. When a new government came to power in Hungary in 1920, the politically-active Lugosi moved first to Germany and then eventually ended up in the United States. After a period of working as a merchant seaman, Lugosi returned to acting.

He first played Dracula on stage in New York City. In 1928, while touring in the role of Dracula, he moved out to California and quickly became a part of the Hollywood community. When Universal produced a film adaptation of Dracula in 1931, Lugosi was the obvious choice for the lead role. The film made Lugosi a star and it also typecast him. Lugosi never stopped acting, though the films varied widely in quality. By the end of his career, Lugosi was a member of the Ed Wood stock company. Even appearing in something like Bride of the Monster, Lugosi still made an impression.

In the scene below, from 1931’s Dracula, Lugosi suggests that Edward van Sloan’s Van Helsing should perhaps leave the country.

4 Shots From 4 Bela Lugosi Films

Posted on October 20, 2026 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 lets the visuals do the talking.

144 years ago on this date, Bela Lugosi was born in Hungary. Today, we honor his memory with….

4 Shots From 4 Bela Lugosi Films

Dracula (1931, dir by Tod Browning, DP; Karl Freund)

White Zombie (1932, dir by Vincent Halperin, DP: Arthur Martinelli)

Ninotchka (1939, dir by Ernst Lubitsch, DP: William H. Daniels)

Bride of The Monster (1955, dir by Ed Wood, DP: Ted Allan and William H. Thompson)

October Positivity: Old Rugged Cross (dir by Donald James Parker)

Posted on October 19, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2016’s Old Rugged Cross, Pastor Evan Shepherd (played by the film’s director, Donald James Parker) is looking for a new church. He feels that he lost his way at his old church, becoming more concerned with money and prestige than with leading the people to God. He was also accused of “sexual improprieties” with a member of the congregation but he’s quick to point that none of the accusations were actually proven. Evan was set up and he left town because he was feeling burned out.

But now, he’s ready to return to preaching. He rents out and reopens a previously abandoned church called the Old Rugged Cross. He worships on Saturday morning. He delivers messages from God to those who attend. He only occasionally preaches a sermon and he doesn’t make a big deal out of tithing. He’s not in it for the money or the prestige anymore. And, if you have any doubts, he’ll talk to you about them. And by talk, I mean that he will just ramble on and on and on. This film will seriously test how much patience you have for an old man who never makes a point twice when he can make it three times instead.

Pastor Luke Wolfe (David Vanergriff) views Evan and the Old Rugged Cross as a threat. Wolfe is the pastor at Victory Church and all he cares about is bringing in enough money so that he can redesign the church and have the biggest sanctuary in town. He’s cold and distant from the people who attend his church and his little time to listen to their problems. He’s also single. He wants to marry Anita (Kelly Nelon Clark), Victory’s pianist, but she starts attending the Old Rugged Cross. In fact, all sorts of people are abandoning Victory Church for the Old Rugged Cross.

At a meeting of all the local protestant pastors, Wolfe challenged Evan on his style of worship. Evan responds by talking about W.C. Fields searching the bible on his deathbed because he was looking for a loophole….

Yes, this is another Donald James Parker film and it has all of the things that one typically associates with his productions. The scenes drag out interminably. The acting is abysmal. There’s a strange obsession with filming characters sitting in restaurants and debating religion. Early on in the film, there’s a scene of Evan and Anita talking in a restaurant. It goes on for what feels like 15 minutes. Before you can even breathe a sigh of relief that the scene is over, we then suddenly cut to the next night and Anita having a conversation with Luke Wolfe while sitting at the exact same table in the exact same restaurant. Just when you think you’ve escaped, the films drags you back in! It would perhaps have helped if Parker had occasionally moved the camera during these lengthy scenes but that sort of thing just isn’t a part of his directorial aesthetic.

As with many of Parker’s films, Old Rugged Cross is, at times, a rather angry film. Evan may be an old man but he still often comes across as if he’s about to hit someone. His dislike of Luke Wolfe feels as much personal as theological which is really not a good look for a pastor. Seriously, you don’t want to get on Evan Shepherd’s bad side!