Lisa Marie’s Week In Review: 10/23/23 — 10/29/23

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Halloween is almost here! The weather has turned cold and it’s been raining for the past few days. It’s totally possible that it could be storming on Halloween night. This is my favorite time of year!

I can’t believe that our annual Horrorthon is almost over. I’m very proud of everyone who contributed this year! This has been our biggest horrorthon ever! Of course, I’m also looking forward to getting a little rest in November.

Here’s what I watched, read, and listened to this week!

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (dir by Tommy Lee Wallace)

Films I Watched:

Beginning of the End (1957)
Blood Sucking Freaks (1976)
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
Cannonball (1976)
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972)
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Empire of the Ants (1977)
Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967)
House of Dark Shadows (1970)
The Neighbors Are Watching (2023)
Once Upon A Midnight Scary (1979)
Popcorn (1991)
Return to the Cabin By The Lake (2000)
A Shock to the System (1991)
Sweet Sixteen (1983)
The Tingler (1959)
Trauma (1993)
Two Evil Eyes (1990)
White Zombie (1932)
The Wolf Man (1940)

Television Shows I Watched:

Books I Read:

Music To Which I Listened:

Adi Ulmansky
Annie Lennox
Bauhaus
Big Data
Britney Spears
The Chemical Brothers
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Dillon Francis
Duran Duran
Golbin
John Carpenter
Katy Perry
Lynard Skynard
Saint Motel
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Taylor Swift
Warren Zevon

Live Tweets:

Horror on the Lens:

Horror on TV:

News From Last Week:

Links From Last Week:

Links From The Site:

Leonard reviewed Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, and V/H/S/85!
Erin wrote about the Halloween that nearly wasn’t!
Erin counted down the days to Halloween: 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2!
Erin shared The Five Covers of Amazing Detective Tales!
Erin shared Ghost Stories, Burn Witch Burn, Terror Tales, Tales of the Zombie, Unhinged, The Pit and the Pendulum, and Cemetery!
Erin shared: The Diamondbacks Tie Up The NLCS, The Rangers Are Going To The World Series, The Rangers Will be Playing The Diamondbacks In The World Series, The Rangers Win Game One of the World Series, and The Rangers Do Not Win Game Two of the World Series!
Jeff reviewed Maniac Cop, Maniac Cop II, Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, The Demolitionist, Evil Obsession, Bunni, and Big Freakin’ Snake!
Jeff shared videos from Duran Duran, Kim Carnes, Dead Can Dance, Tool, Metallica, Iron Maiden, and The Fat Boys!
I read and reviewed The Stepsister, Stepsister 2, Rich Girl, Best Friend, and Best Friend 2!
I shared my October Oscar predictions!
I shared my week in television and an AMV! I also shared six horror-filled trailers from John Carpenter!
I paid tribute to Herschell Gordon Lewis, Sam Raimi, Richard Roundtree, Jean Rollin, George Romero, Michele Soavi, Jacques Tourneur, and James Whale!
I shared scene from Deep Red, Psycho, Masque of the Red Death, Halloween 4, Return of the Living Dead, The House on the Edge of the Park, and Carrie!
I reviewed Degrassi Junior High, Miami Vice, Nightmare Café, Fantasy Island, Gun, The Love Boat, Monsters, Jennifer Slept Here, Highway to Heaven, T and T, Friday the 13th, Welcome Back Kotter, and Check It Out!
I reviewed Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Popcorn, Survival, The Monster of the Piedras Blancas, Silent Rage, Blood Harvest, The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism, Party Monster, Blood Thirst, Sweet Sixteen, Patmos, The Giant Claw, Army of Darkness, Opera, Goodnight Sweet Wife, I Drink Your Blood, Sleepaway Camp, A Distant Thunder, Image of the Beast, The Prodigal Planet, The Tingler, The Return of Swamp Thing, Two Evil Eyes, Trauma, The Return to Cabin By The Lake, The Perfect Husband, The Wave, Blood Sucking Freaks, Valentine, Jack The Ripper, The Black Phone, White Zombie, Hillbillys in a Haunted House, The Neighbors Are Watching, The Mark, The Mark: Redemption, The Case Of The Hillside Stranglers, The Hillside Strangler, Black Wake, Old, The Raven, Judgment Day, Empire of the Ants, and Beginning of the End!

More From Us:

At Days Without Incident, Leonard shared Team Assembly!
At her photography site, Erin shared In A Very Odd House, Very Odd Things Will Happen, The Girl With No Shadow, Dracula’s Pub, Branches, Snowy Night, Snowy Night 2, and Snowy Night 3!

Want to see what did last week? Click here!

Horror on TV: Baywatch Nights 2.11 “Frozen Out Of Time” (dir by Rick Jacobson)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight, with Halloween only a few days away, The Shattered Lens is proud to present a bonus episode of televised horror! In this beloved episode of Baywatch Nights, two 900 year-old Vikings are causing chaos in Los Angeles! Who can stop them?

David Hasselhoff, of course!

This episode originally aired on February 9th, 1997!

Horror on TV: The Hitchhiker 6.16 “Made in Paris” (dir by Rene Mazor)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

On tonight’s episode of The Hitchhiker, a factory owner finds himself cursed after an undocumented worker dies in his factory. This is a Hitchhiker morality play. If you’re a businessperson who doesn’t take of your employees, the Hitchhiker is going to show up outside your factory and tell everyone what a terrible person you are.

The episode originally aired on January 25th, 1991.

October Hacks: Popcorn (dir by Mark Herrier and Alan Ormsby)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1991 film, Popcorn, tells the story of what happens when an experimental film goes wrong.

In the late 60s, a freaked-out hippie named Lanyard Gates directed a short film called Possessor. Possessor featured footage of him apparently preparing to sacrifice a woman on an altar. Gates declined to film a third act conclusion to the film. Instead, he murdered his family on stage and in front of a terrified audience. The resulting panic caused a fire to break out, killing almost everyone at the Dreamland Theater. As a result, Possessor has become a legendary film, one that is believed lost. Of course, it’s not lost, as a group of film students and their professor find out over the course of Popcorn.

Years later, one of those film students, an aspiring screenwriter named Maggie (Jill Schoelen), has been having disturbing nightmares about being caught in a fire and being pursued by a madman. When she sees Possessor, she realizes that much of the imagery in her dreams comes from the film. When Maggie attempts to talk to her mother about all of this, Suzanne (Dee Wallace) denies knowing anything about Possessor or Lanyard Gates but it’s not hard to tell that she’s lying.

Still, Maggie does have other things to worry about. Her school’s film department has been hit by budget cuts and neither she nor her classmates will be able to make their student films unless they raise some money. One of the students, Toby (Tom Villard), suggests holding a fundraiser at the Dreamland Theater, where they could show old movies and even recreate some of the old gimmicks that were used to promote those movies. Professor Davis (Tony Roberts) thinks that is a great idea! Why, he could even control the giant, remote-controlled bug that was used to promote Mosquito!

Filmed in Jamaica (and featuring a somewhat random performance by a reggae band), Popcorn was originally offered to director Bob Clark. However, Clark didn’t want to return to the horror genre so, instead, it was Clark’s frequent collaborator, Alan Ormsby, who was hired to direct the film. Reportedly, Ormsby was replaced a few weeks into filming by Mark Herrier, with the assumption being that the producers felt that Ormsby was spending too much time on filming the three fake movies that are screened during the fund raiser. Those films are Mosquito, The Attack of the Electrified Man, and a dubbed Japanese film called The Stench. In the film’s credits, Ormsby is credited with directing the three fake film while Mark Herrier is credited with directing the “modern” scenes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the three fake film are actually the best thing about Popcorn. If Alan Ormsby was taking a lot of time to shoot the fake films, it obviously paid off because all three of them perfectly capture the feel of the era when they were supposedly shot and all of them are filled with the type of details that only a true fan of old horror movies would think to include. Mosquito is a giant bug film that feels as if it could have come straight from 1957. The Amazing Electrified Man feels like one of the films that poor Lon Chaney Jr. would have found himself starring in after leaving Universal. And The Stench is the perfect import — slow-moving, a bit pompous, and terribly dubbed.

As for the rest of Popcorn, it’s a well-made slasher film. Mark Herrier did a good job directing the “modern” scenes, with a scene in which the killer’s face seems to literally melt after he kisses one of his victims being a definite creepy highlight. The kills are reasonably creative and, in one case involving electrocution, rather disturbing. Jill Schoelen is a likable heroine, Derek Rydall is cute as her hapless boyfriend, and Tom Villard’s uninhibited performance gives the film a much-needed jolt of energy. Though the old films may be the highlight of Popcorn, the “modern” scenes hold up as well.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (dir by Bob Clark)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The title of this 1972 film is definitely a case of truth in advertising.

Children definitely should not play with dead things! I don’t care how mature they are or how lenient of a parent you’re trying to be. When you see your child playing with a dead thing, it is on you to step forward and say, “Child, leave that dead thing alone unless you want to forever burn in Hell.” I know that type of language might be traumatic for some children but you’ll be glad you did it. You know who played with dead things when he was a child? Jeffrey Dahmer! And look how that turned out. He got a miniseries made about him and became an internet meme.

Now, it should be pointed out that they’re aren’t any children to be found in Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. The children of the title are actually a group of wannabe actors who are led by a pretentious douchebag named Alan (played by the film’s writer, Alan Ormsby). With his mustache and his long hair and his hip clothes and his vocabulary of psychobabble and buzzwords, Alan considers himself to be quite the chic 70s gentleman. He refers the other actors as being his “children,” and they let him get away with it. Personally, I would be kind of insulted but whatever.

One night, Alan and his theatrical troupe ride a boat off to an island that is sitting off the coast of Miami. The island is reputed to be haunted and Alan tells the actors several rather gruesome stories about things that have supposedly happened to the inhabitants of the island. According to Alan, the island is used as a cemetery for criminals who were so vile that no one wanted to collect their bodies.

Why are the actors on the island? Along with leading his theatrical troupe, Alan considers himself to be a bit of a warlock. He wants to perform a ceremony at midnight and he expects his actors to help him out. If they don’t help, they’ll lose their jobs. If they do help, they’ll probably lose their lives. Alan and his actors dig up the body of a man named Orville (played by the wonderfully named Seth Sklarey). The ceremony that Alan performs at midnight fails to bring Orville back to life but it does cause the dead who were left in their graves to rise from the Earth as zombies. The zombies are not happy that their island has been invaded and they’re especially not happy about Alan digging up Orville.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things is a mix of comedy and horror, with Alan’s pretentious foolishness dominating the first half of the film while the second features the zombies laying siege to a cottage. It starts out slow but, once the zombies come to life, the film achieves a surreal grandeur. For an obviously low-budget film, the zombie makeup is surprisingly effective and the zombies themselves are so relentless and determined in their pursuit of the living that they help Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things survive the inevitable comparisons to Night of the Living Dead. The film’s final scene, which plays out in near silence, has an undeniable horrific power to it.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was the third film to be directed by Bob Clark. He also directed films like Deathdream, Black Christmas, Murder By Decree, and the infamous (and very financially successful) Porky’s. Of course, his most beloved film is the one that we’ll all be watching in a little less than two months, A Christmas Story.

Lisa Marie’s Oscar Predictions For October

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, it’s that time of the month again! Here are my Oscar predictions for October! To be honest, I’ve been so busy with Horrorthon that I haven’t given the Oscar race as much thought as usual. As of right now, it still appears to be a Killers Of The Flower Moon vs. Oppenheimer vs. Barbie race.

The Bikeriders, which seemed like a strong contender, seems to be in limbo right now. It was scheduled to be released on December 1st but it was taken off the schedule until the SAG-AFTRA strike is resolved. (The studio wants the actors to be able to promote the film, which is understandable given the subject matter.) So, for now, I’m moving The Bikeriders off of my list of predictions.

I’m also pretty confident that The Color Purple will not be the major Oscar contender that many expected, if just because of Alice Walker’s long history of anti-Semitic rhetoric. (Seriously, Alice Walker is a huge supporter of David Icke, the conspiracy theorist who claims that the world is controlled by a group of shape-shifting aliens and Zionists.)

Below are my predictions for October. Be sure to also check out my predictions for March and April and May and June and July and August and September!

Best Picture

Air

American Fiction

Barbie

The Holdovers

Killers of the Flower Moon

Maestro

May/December

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

The Zone of Interest

Best Director

Greta Gerwig for Barbie

Jonathan Glazer for The Zone of Interest

Cord Jefferson for American Fiction

Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer

Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Actor

Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon

Colman Domingo in Rustin

Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

Best Actress

Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon

Natalie Portman in May December

Margot Robbie in Barbie

Emma Stone in Poor Things

Kate Winslet in Lee

Best Supporting Actor

Willem DaFoe in Poor Things

Robert De Niro in Killers of the Flower Moon

Robert Downey, Jr. in Oppenheimer

Ryan Gosling in Barbie

Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers

Best Supporting Actress

Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer

Sandra Huller in Zone of Interest

Julianne Moore in May December

Cara Jade Myers in Killers of the Flower Moon

Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers

Retro Television Reviews: Return To Cabin By The Lake (dir by Po-Chih Leong)

Posted on October 29, 2023 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 Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 2001’s Return To Cabin By The Lake! It can be viewed on YouTube.

Stanley Caldwell (Judd Nelson) is back!

At the end of Cabin By The Lake, screenwriter Stanley had managed to escape from the police by faking his own drowning. Return to Cabin By The Lake finds Stanley using a variety of disguises and fake identities in his effort to once again become a part of the film industry. He is particularly interested in the fact that his previous murder spree is being turned into a movie. He’s considerably less happy about the fact that everyone involved in the movie continually disparages his work as a screenwriter. He’s even less happy when he hears them speculating that there was a sexual-motive behind Stanley’s murders or that Stanley was acting out against his mother. For someone who spent the previous movie drowning innocent women and then visiting their bodies in the lake, Stanley sure does seem to be shocked to discover that most people don’t have a high opinion of him. You’re a murderer, Stanley. People don’t like murderers.

Anyway, as a master of disguise, Stanley is able to work his way into the production of the film. Even though everyone on the set is spending 24 hours a day obsessing on and recreating the crimes of Stanley, no one is suspicious of the guy who looks just like Stanley and who keeps saying stuff like, “Stanley would never do that!” Stanley becomes obsessed with script writer Andrea (Dahlia Salem). He also comes to resent the film’s shallow director, Mike Helton (Brian Krause, giving the film’s best performance). Stanley decides that he would be a better director of the film so he buries Mike alive and then takes over direction.

Return To Cabin By The Lake is a bit more deliberately humorous than the first film. If Cabin By The Lake was full of pleasant townspeople and earnest police officers, Return To Cabin By The Lake is populated with caricatures of various Hollywood phonies. Everyone involved in Return To Cabin By The Lake‘s film-within-a-film is blithely unconcerned with the feelings of the the victim’s loved ones nor do they really care about telling the story accurately. Helton’s only concern is that the script have enough sex. That Stanley not only takes over as director but turns out to be a pretty good at it would appear to be Return To Cabin By The Lake’s ultimate statement on the film industry.

Judd Nelson is a bit more energetic in the sequel than he was in the first film. That said, Return To Cabin The By The Lake makes the mistake of asking us to buy the idea of Stanley being a master of disguise. Judd Nelson is always going to look and sound like Judd Nelson, regardless of whether he’s wearing a wig or not.

Though it’s a bit constrained by being a made-for-TV movie, Return To Cabin By The Lake is a marked improvement on the first film, one that has more humor and a better performance from its lead. The film ends with an opening for another sequel but it was apparently never to be.

Horror Scenes That I Love: Sissy Spacek in Carrie

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Sissy Spacek hasn’t appeared in many horror movies but the one in which she did appear is such a classic and Spacek’s performance was so strong that she qualifies as a horror icon regardless. In 1976, Sissy Space played poor and victimized Carrie White, the shy high school student who ended up burning down the prom. Her performance became one of the few horror performances to be Oscar-nominated and Carrie launched a series of Stephen King adaptations.

In one of the best scene from the film, Carrie is forced to deal with both an insensitive principal and a brat on a bicycle.

Horror Novel Review: The Rich Girl by R.L. Stine

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1997 novel, The Rich Girl, tells the story of two teenage friends.

Emma is poor and worried about how her family is going to be able pay for her mother’s medical needs. Sydney is rich and worried that Emma is going to stop being her friend just because she doesn’t like Sydney’s boyfriend, Jason. As you can probably guess, one of these friends has much larger and far more serious concerns than the other but this book is called The Rich Girl and therefore, Sydney is our main character. Sorry, Emma. Only rich people get to star in Fear Street books.

Anyway, Sydney and Emma work at the local movie theater. One night, they come across a duffel bag that someone has been left behind. It’s full of money! In fact, there’s more than enough money to help out Emma’s mother. Sydney wants to turn the money in but Emma points out that her family needs the money and, even more importantly, Emma needs the money. Emma wants to go to college and she wants to finally buy some pretty clothes and she wants her mother to be alive to see her do both. Sydney and Emma decide not to turn in the money but to instead bury it out in Fear Woods. They’ll leave it out there for two weeks and then, it’ll all belong to them! Yay!

Sydney and Emma promise each other that they won’t tell anyone about the money but then Sydney tells Jason. Jason demands a some of the money for himself, though if he could just shut up and be patient, Sydney would eventually have half of the money and everything about their toxic relationship suggests that she would give him however much he wanted. Anyway, all of this all leads to violence and Jason’s apparent death. Sydney and Emma hide Jason’s body but Emma can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching and following her. Could Jason be back from the dead!? Does Zombie Jason want revenge!? Or could it be something else?

This book had a big twist at the end but it was pretty familiar twist and I saw it coming from miles away. I appreciated the kind of dark ending but neither Sydney nor Emma were particularly compelling characters. This one kind of felt like Stine an autopilot.

October True Crime: Jack The Ripper (dir by Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker)

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The year is 1888 and London is a city in fear.

A mysterious, cloak-wearing serial killer know as Jack The Ripper is stalking the fog-strewn streets and killing prostitutes after asking them if they know the whereabouts of Mary Clark. The newspapers are full of stories about the murders and editorials condemning the failure of Scotland Yard to capture the killer. The citizens of London’s Whitechapel district are resorting to vigilante justice and any stranger is liable to be accused of being the Ripper.

When an American policeman named Sam Lowry (Lee Patterson) shows up in Whitechapel, he is accosted by a group of suspicious citizens. Fortunately, before one of them can stab Sam, he’s saved by his old friend, Scotland Yard’s Inspector O’Neill (Eddie Byrne). Sam explains that he’s come to London to not only help his old friend O’Neill catch the killer but to also study how the city of London has responded to the horror of the Ripper’s crimes. O’Neill introduces Sam to both the world weary coroner, Sir David Rogers (Ewen Solon), and to Anne Ford (Betty MacDowell), the liberal-minded ward of Dr. Tranter (John Le Musurier). As Anne shows Sam around London and speculates about why the Ripper has managed to avoid being caught by the police, O’Neill tries to discover the Ripper’s identity before he can strike again.

As you may have guessed from the plot description, this 1959 film doesn’t exactly stick to the historical fact when it comes to the murders of Jack the Ripper. For instance, the names and the number of victims have been changed and, needless to say, the NYPD didn’t loan any of its detectives to Scotland Yard. Then again, there’s very few films about Jack the Ripper that actually stick to the facts of the case. (Murder By Decree came perhaps the closest, though it still insisted on pushing the ludicrous Royal Ripper theory.) When one watches a Jack the Ripper film, it’s with the understanding that the story is probably going to be fictionalized. Considering that there’s probably no chance of the Ripper’s identity ever being conclusively established, it’s to be expected.

As for the film itself, it actually has quite a few effective moments. The heavy fog and the black-and-white cinematography creates the properly ominous atmosphere and the murders themselves are surprisingly brutal for a film from 1959, leaving no doubt that this film’s Ripper is a cruel sadist regardless of what other motives he may have. The film itself ends with a properly macabre twist. Patterson, Byrne, and MacDowell aren’t particularly interesting in the lead roles (and Patterson’s pompadour looks a bit ludicrous on a Victorian-era policeman) but the suspects, victims, and witnesses are all well-played by a cast of very British character actors.

There are apparently several versions of Jack the Ripper out there. Though the film was a British production, it was filmed with an eye towards the international market and, as a result, there were several different edits depending on what the film could get away with in each country. Apparently, one version actually switched from black-and-white to color whenever blood was spilled and certain European countries got a version that featured a few fleeting moments of nudity. The version edited for American audiences, not surprisingly, doesn’t feature any of that but it’s still a watchable and entertaining Jack the Ripper film.

One final note: my personal opinion is that Jack the Ripper was some guy that no one has ever heard of. He was probably not a doctor. I doubt he was a Freemason. He certainly was not a part of a Royal conspiracy or any of that other nonsense. He may have been a butcher but it’s just as possible that he could have been a hatmaker or a carriage driver or a petty criminal who paid for his drinks through mugging. He was probably never suspected at the time and I imagine he died without ever telling anyone what he had done. People find comfort in conspiracies and elaborate cover-ups but often, the simplest solution is the correct one.

(That said, every time that Jeff and I go to London, we do the Jack the Ripper walking tour. It’s always interesting to hear the weird theories that people come up with.)